No Home Should Be Without One! Ads from the back pages of Harper's Magazine in the late 1850s and Other Inventions. “No Home Should Be Without One,” my father used to grate sardonically whenever something useless or absurd was advertised in print or on TV. But in my latest blog entry of the same name, I look at what we take for granted today might have seemed silly then. Rubber bands advertised as "Elastic fasteners for bundling ballots" (too many or too few Russian rubber bands in the last election?!); “Paraffine Cream” for dry skin—we call Vasoline ®; ice cream freezers; “Sanitary Patented Diapers”—How’s that for a change? (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun.)  Not to mention kitchen ranges, portable heaters; steam heat installed in your home and floor vents designed to go with your wall or ceiling tiles.  Plus the “best peacock feathers to brush away flies,” and, presumably, keep them brushed away.  Notice, the ad promises eight different sizes of ranges; it can use

  The Patent Office's History of the Invention of Clothes Pins Improved Subway Train 1862 SMOKE CONSUMING LOCOMOTIVE—The Subterranean railway in London is traveled by a newly invented engine, which, while in open air, works like a common locomotive, but when in the tunnel, consumes its own smoke, or rather makes one, and by condensing its own steam, gives of not a particle of vapor. It is stated that on a trial trip, as long as this engine remained in open air it fizzed and simmered like any other locomotive; but the instant it entered the tunnel it condensed its steam, and scarcely a mark of vapor was perceptible, while from its flues into the smoke box being damped, not the least smell of smoke was given off—not even the most distant lamps down the side of the tunnel were dimmed in the slightest degree.   Life Size  Daguerreotypes   Oct 23, 1853 Weekly Placer (CA) Mr.  Mayall, in England, has succeeded, after much study, in producing daguerreotype views of life size.