by William G. Menosky Tommy gun. The name evokes different memories or thoughts in a cross section of people both in the United States and internationally. Some may think of names that wrote the violent history of the twenties and thirties in this country: Capone, Floyd or ...
Photo: Charles Ritchel c. 1840-1911 Charles Ritchel was an inventor who is credited with inventing the first dirigible. In 1878, Ritchel built a hand-powered dirigible fashioned out of rubber from the Goodyear Rubber Company in Naugatuck and the Folansbee Machine Shop in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He is ...
By Carolyn Ivanoff During the 1960s my grandmother lived on the top floor of the four- story Consumer Building at 1064 East Main Street on the corner of East Main Street and Arctic. The building was the tallest building in the area and from any window ...
Everyone knows that Bridgeport was a center of manufacturing of large machinery and other industries, but did you know that this city was also one of the largest manufacturers of toy trains and mechanical toys? Edward Ives started his toy company in Bridgeport and built some ...
By Carolyn Ivanoff The industrial powerhouse that was Bridgeport during the 19th and 20th centuries made its mark world-wide with many, many products. Bridgeport manufactured everything: sewing machines, cars, phonographs, typewriters, corsets, submarines, machine tools, munitions, every product imaginable. Many of these products were common to ...
by Andy Piascik On July1, 1979, 400 members of United Steelworkers Local 7201 employed at the Handy and Harman precious metals factory in Fairfield went on strike. There was nothing particularly unusual or exceptional about that; workers at factories in Bridgeport and the surrounding area regularly ...
by Andy Piascik It was an event that lasted less than a day and involved only 50 people directly. It was organized, led and carried out by everyday workers and thus contradicted the mainstream narrative that only big people make history. Many of the participants were ...
In 1899 the Locomobile began as a steam-powered car. With inventor and electric car manufacturer Andrew Riker’s development of a new gasoline-powered engine for the company, Locomobile was soon one of the most popular cars in the world. The “Number 16” car pictured above won the 1908 Vanderbilt ...
As doctors in the late 1800s, brothers Dr. Lucien and Ira De Ver Warner became concerned with the use of the corset in women’s fashion. The corset was a piece of underclothing meant to give women an “hourglass” figure desirable at the time. But the ...
