On This Day, April 9, 1940, the patent for the first shopping cart is granted to its inventor Sylvan Goldman, the owner of a Humpty Dumpty Grocery store in Oklahoma City. It was essentially a folding chair with wheels and baskets attached. The carts were initially a flop, as shoppers were reluctant to use them--men found them effeminate and women thought them too much like a baby carriage - so he hired models to shop with them.

Eventually, folding carts became very popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.

By any measure, Goldman was an innovator. In addition to his invention of the shopping cart, early in his career as a grocer he developed many of the advertising and marketing techniques now commonly used by supermarkets.

He once said his idea for the shopping cart came from watching women carrying baskets. ''They had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,'...

Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics, and played professional football, professional baseball, and basketball, as well as boxing, wrestling, gymnastics, swimming, hockey, basketball, and track.

Thorpe’s career in sports was unparalleled. He played both professional football and professional baseball, and held records in both. He co-founded and was named the first President of the American Football League (later renamed the National Football League).

Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, and became the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States.

Jim Thorpe was generally considered to have been born on May 22, 1887, he was born in a cabin on the North Canadian River near Prague, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), but no birth certificate has ever been found.

Thorpe himself said in a note to The Shawnee News-Star in 1943 that he was born May 28, 1888, "near and south o...

The two famous physicists in their own changed the way we see the universe, share this Day, March 14th.

Today is the 142nd birthday of the great German-born theoretical physicist and mathematician, Albert Einstein.

Einstein suffered from a mild case of Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder characterized by difficulties in social interaction and nonverbal communication, as well as attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Einstein, of course, developed the theory of relativity and the mass equivalence formula: E=mc2. By the age of 26, he had published four ground-breaking papers: Photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy. He would go on to publish more than 300 scientific papers. He was visiting the U.S. when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933; being Jewish, he did not want to return to Germany, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen.

Coincidentally, March 14th also marks the day legendary scientist Stephen Hawking passed away,...

Susanna Madora Salter was born today, March 2, 1860. In 1887, Salter, a 27-year old temperance activist, became the first woman in the United States to be elected to the position of mayor. The town was Argonia, Kansas, a small Quaker village with a population of less than five hundred that had only incorporated two years previous, in 1885. She was nominated, without notification, by men intent upon embarrassing and defeating temperance. Local Republicans uncovered the plan early on election day. They asked if she would serve, if elected. Salter agreed and with the support of Republicans and Prohibitionists, she was elected with a two-thirds majority.

Salter's family was respected, and her father had served as Argonia's mayor and her husband had been selected as town clerk--so Salter knew a great deal about politics. She had four children and was pregnant at the time of her election. Even opponents of woman suffrage were won over, however, by her reputation and her commitment to te...

On this Day, February 28, 1849, the first prospectors for the Gold Rush of '49 arrive in San Francisco. Gold was discovered by James Marshall on Sutter's Mill the previous year. Over 300,000 people, known as "forty-niners" (from year 1849), would go to California to seek their fortune.

James Wilson Marshall was born to Philip Marshall and Sarah Wilson on his family’s homestead in Hopewell Township, New Jersey on October 8, 1810. The family homestead was known as the Round Mountain Farm and is still known as Marshalls Corner. He was the oldest of four children, and the only son. He followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a skilled carpenter and wheelwright.

At age eighteen, after his father died, James Marshall left New Jersey in 1834 and headed west. After spending time in Indiana and Illinois, he settled in Missouri in 1844, and began farming along the Missouri River near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, he contracted malaria, and in 1844, on the advice of his doctor, Mar...