Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Secrets of the Civil War: The Necessity of Innovation

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

In this series, we have covered all sorts of innovations that arose out of the conflict, from deviled ham spread and spy balloons to surgical advancements. Today we are going to continue that explorat...ion with a wide range of new developments like photojournalism, a national currency, and the evolution of premade clothing. It’s a smorgasbord of inventions, y’all! Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reid Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to Episode 11 of Secrets of the Civil War. So far, we've covered all sorts of innovations that arose out of the conflict from deviled ham spread and spy balloons to surgical advancements. Today, we're going to continue that exploration with a wide range of new developments like photojournalism, a national currency, and the evolution of pre-made clothing. And of course, you can't revolutionize the food industry through canned goods without creating something to open those cans, can you? Today is a smorgasbord of inventions. Let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In July 1952, a 14-year-old budding historian named Ronald Rietveld was granted permission to view the Lincoln
Starting point is 00:01:06 archives in Springfield, Illinois. Ronald had free license to examine all the records as long as he returned everything to its proper place. Hours later, while packing up the letters, photos, and keepsakes he had poured over, Ronald discovered something that all the other state historians had missed. A photo of Lincoln's body in his open casket. The photo, along with other governmental documents, had been donated to the Illinois State Historical Library by the son of U.S. War Department head Edwin Stanton, who served with Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War era. He is a character, by the way. We are going to talk about him more next episode. Ronald immediately recognized the photo as authentic because he also had in front of him a copy of the May 1865 issue of Harper's Weekly,
Starting point is 00:02:07 in which the same scene of Abraham Lincoln's New York City funeral on April 24th, 1865, is sketched. While today presidents and other important political figures lie in state, back in the 1800s that wasn't standard procedure. Instead of mourners trekking to the Capitol to pay their respects, Lincoln's body was taken on a multi-stop trip across the country, from Washington, D.C. to Springfield, Illinois, a reverse of the trip he took prior to his inauguration. Lincoln had been embalmed, which slowed the decaying process, so Mary Todd Lincoln gave permission for the top half of Lincoln's casket to be opened at ten stops along the way to his final resting place.
Starting point is 00:02:56 Edwin Stanton, who was in charge of the funeral trip, had strict rules that prohibited the photographing of Lincoln's body, and when he found out about the existence of the photo someone took of the body in New York City, he confiscated it. In fact, a couple of generals who were in charge of the event almost lost their jobs over it. Nearly 90 years later, when Ronald rediscovered the photograph, it made national headlines. A photo of Ronald featuring his shy grin and his black-rimmed glasses appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country,
Starting point is 00:03:32 alongside the image of the man that he admired most, President Abraham Lincoln. And while Lincoln's final photograph made headlines in 1952. One of his first official photographs also garnered national attention back in 1861. On April 15, 1861, newly inaugurated President Abraham Lincoln called up 75,000 men to squelch a rising insurrection in the southern states. And photographer Matthew Brady obtained special permission from Lincoln to follow the troops in this military action. Matthew and Abraham Lincoln were not strangers. In fact, Matthew took one of Lincoln's most famous photographs, the one that made him President of the United States. In late February of 1860, Lincoln received an invitation from the Young Men's Central
Starting point is 00:04:32 Republican Union to speak at the prime venue of Cooper Union in Manhattan. On February 27th, before he made his speech, Abraham Lincoln visited Matthew Brady's studio to have his picture taken. Lincoln had just started to make a national name for himself, and as an astute politician, he realized that the proverbial picture being worth a thousand words could easily apply in politics. He would go on to sit for countless photographs during the remainder of his lifetime. But it was this first photograph taken by Brady that changed everything for his career. Matthew Brady was delighted to have the gangling Midwesterner, as he called him, pose in his studio. Brady was aware of Lincoln's growing popularity and was eager to add him to his portfolio of portraits of prominent people.
Starting point is 00:05:28 This particular Brady photograph of Lincoln was unique in many respects. Abe Lincoln was never regarded as particularly good-looking. People had to get creative with their adjectives when they described his appearance. Distinctive. Striking. Sharp-featured. But in the 1860 photo, Lincoln is standing, beardless and sporting a collar,
Starting point is 00:05:55 which was said to have been arranged by Brady himself to make his neck look shorter. Lincoln looked... handsome. After making his speech the next day, Lincoln was considered a potential presidential candidate, and he would later clinch the nomination. Many newspaper and magazine articles were written about him, with almost all of them featuring the Brady photograph. Lincoln steadfastly credited that photograph with helping to make him president. While Abraham Lincoln was just beginning to achieve his notoriety, Matthew Brady, a New Yorker by birth and photographer by talent, was already famous.
Starting point is 00:06:39 He had made a name for himself early on by photographing an elderly John Quincy Adams, who I think looks like Grip Hook the Goblin from Harry Potter. The elderly Quincy does. In 1851, Brady won top honors with his photographs at the Great Exhibition in London, which established his international fame. Brady leveraged his fame for financial gain. His New York City studio became a must-see for tourists. He displayed photographs of prominent individuals in his studio window and sold copies of them by the hundreds. His notoriety encouraged other famous individuals to sit for him like Edgar Allan Poe and Presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. So when Lincoln ordered the militia to go and cool down the Southern Conflict in April 1861, a savvy Brady recognized the opportunity to capture history in what everyone expected to be a short and victorious battle.
Starting point is 00:07:49 As skilled as he was, Matthew was unprepared for what the war engagement brought. Logistically, shooting photographs of an action-packed battlefield is a very different vibe from arranging politicians' facial angles in a studio. But there, Brady made a choice that had reverberations for centuries to come. He chose not to participate in any in-person action himself, but rather to hire a team of field photographers who shot the first extended photographic coverage of a war. Photography in the 1800s has a fascinating history worthy of its own deep dive. For now, though, we're going to focus on a few key, shall we say, developments. In 1839, the French artist Louis Daguerre created a complicated process involving a copper plate, silver iodide, mercury vapor, and salt. It was the first practical process of photography, yet sitting times were long and yielded one unique image.
Starting point is 00:09:02 The creation, called a daguerreotype, was not reproducible. This limitation led to a new technology called the wet plate process, which created negatives. In turn, those negatives could be used to make engravings called woodcuts, which were mass printed in newspapers and popular publications like Harper's Weekly. This, in turn, brought photography to average Americans. As pictures became clearer and easier to reproduce, America fell in love with the possibilities of photography. By 1860, hundreds of photographers operated studios across the country using their cameras to take formal portraits of Americans from all walks of life. But photography was still in its infancy and more of a middle and upper class novelty.
Starting point is 00:10:03 It was not yet a part of the daily news cycle. The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 inspired photographers to go beyond the stationary setting of formal portraiture and start documenting events in real time. Many Civil War battles took place near major cities, so photographers would carefully pack up their heavy and fragile, by the way, equipment and travel to the front lines. This was the beginning of photojournalism. Although pictures of soldiers in the Mexican-American War and battlefields of the Crimean War exist, the Civil War was really the first major conflict to be extensively documented through photography. Photographers, northern and southern alike, visited camps, prisons, hospitals, and cities, and they captured thousands of photos. Some followed the Union
Starting point is 00:11:03 armies and recorded photos in real time. Northern newspaper audiences who were far removed from the battlefield areas were horrified by the war images, but they were also captivated and clamored for more. After the Battle of Antietam, the photographer Andrew Gardner took a record 70 shots of the fallen men in a field. It was the first time dead soldiers had been photographed on a battlefield, including close-up photos. Soon after, Gardner publicly displayed his images in New York City in the horrors of the Civil War, which before had mostly been seen in paintings or wide landscape pictures, shocked people. Those photos changed the perception of the Civil War and warfare in general, as civilians' romantic notions of war were upended by the grotesque images of the corpses of men.
Starting point is 00:12:07 Sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands laying face down in the dirt or lifeless on their backs with their faces staring at the heavens. Of all the photographers who documented the war, it was Matthew Brady who became the standout. He and his team of almost 25 men led this new photojournalism industry by documenting scores of battlefields and camps, towns, and people touched by the war. Many of the photos attributed to Matthew Brady were actually taken by one of his numerous assistants and team members. Photography historians have described him as the Steven Spielberg of the mid-19th century. He wasn't always behind the camera himself, but he directed the efforts. So, Brady got a little bit of a big head. He often took credit for work that he himself
Starting point is 00:13:10 did not do, which didn't sit well with the other photographers he employed, and several quit to branch out on their own. This split would lead to one of the most famous and shocking events that occurred after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. About a week after the battle ended, Matthew Brady and the remainder of his team arrived at the fields hoping to catch some shots of what had occurred. And even though the death toll at Gettysburg was so high that bodies from the battle were still being found as recently as 1996. That's not a joke. 1996.
Starting point is 00:13:51 Gettysburg residents had already collected most of the corpses and moved them into areas in preparation for mass burial. Brady had planned to show up and photograph fields full of bodies. But they weren't there. Instead, he took photos of battle sites as empty landscapes, which communicated the melancholy of the situation without the shocking detail of bloody corpses. One of the pictures was printed in Harper's Weekly a few weeks later, titled Wheatfield, in which General Reynolds was shot. And it remains one of the most famous Civil War photos to this day.
Starting point is 00:14:34 But one of Brady's former photographers, Alexander Gardner, had gotten there earlier, almost immediately after the battle ended. He captured two widely distributed photographs from different areas of the battlefield entitled A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep and Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. They depicted the final sight of a just-fallen soldier. Both images were shocking, sobering, and sad. But they were also staged. Years later, a sharp-eyed observer realized that the soldier in each of the two photos was the same man. And the secret was out. including Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady, had regularly moved corpses into different places or positions so they could get the shot they wanted. These photojournalists weren't just
Starting point is 00:15:34 pointing and shooting. They were composing scenes and using their photography to elicit emotion from their audiences. By the way, that is breaking a cardinal rule of photojournalism. You do not tell people what to do. You do not alter the scene. You photograph it as it happens. And if you can get a cool shot with some cool framing, interesting light, great. But you definitely would never move a corpse. More impactful than even battlefield photography was its use to promote abolition, and it ended up playing an influential role in broadening the national debate about the enslavement of people throughout the South. A photo that made evident the horrors of enslavement was called Gordon, a Runaway Mississippi Slave. It was one of the very first widely published photos that
Starting point is 00:16:33 displayed the physical mutilation wrought by enslavement. It reveals an enslaved man's bare back, badly scarred by lacerations from multiple whippings. The horrific image made clear what many had only read about, perhaps in novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. The photograph, taken near Baton Rouge by William D. McPherson and his photographer partner Mr. Oliver, shows Gordon exposing his scourged skin to the camera while he looks off in the distance. The thick, raised welts fill the length and width of his back. In March of 1863, Gordon fled the place of his enslavement and headed towards the Mississippi River. Upon learning of his flight, his enslaver
Starting point is 00:17:26 recruited several neighbors, and together they chased after him with a pack of bloodhounds. Gordon knew that he would be pursued, and carried with him onions, which he rubbed on his body to throw the dogs off his scent. His resourcefulness worked, and Gordon, filthy and exhausted, reached the Union soldiers stationed at Baton Rouge 10 days later. He had traveled approximately 80 miles to reach safety. While at this encampment, Gordon enlisted in the Union Army. As President Lincoln had granted Black men the opportunity to serve in segregated units only months earlier, Gordon was at the front of an enlistment that would ultimately involve nearly 200,000 Black Americans. It was during his medical
Starting point is 00:18:18 examination, prior to being mustered into the Army army that military doctors discovered the extensive scars on his back. McPherson and Oliver were then in the camp, and Gordon was asked to pose for a picture. There's no question that the photographers knew that Gordon's image would come with widespread fame and fortune for them. They knew it could and was used to promote abolition. There were multiple agendas at play even before the photo was taken. What is lost to history, though, is Gordon's motivation. What agency did he, a recently escaped enslaved man, have when it came to giving consent? Was he asked permission to have his body put on public display and sold for the profit and agendas of other men?
Starting point is 00:19:15 Likely not any more than the corpses captured by Brady and his contemporaries. Gordon's image was mass-produced and sold on small, inexpensive calling cards, which were kind of like postcards, except smaller. Many Americans collected them, like we collect baseball or Pokemon cards. What it meant to collect images of brutalized, enslaved humans and battlefield scenes of a war that killed hundreds of thousands is debatable. The grotesque savagery literally embedded into Gordon's flesh showcased the unchecked violence of enslavement. But photographing and selling Gordon's image also put his black body back into circulation for another's profit. And it was profitable. Photographers in
Starting point is 00:20:07 major cities in the North and in London soon displayed and sold the image. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, you might remember him from a previous episode, repeatedly wrote about it in his newspaper. And on July 4th, 1863, Harper's Weekly reproduced the image as a wood engraving with the title A Typical Negro. Accompanying it was a picture of Gordon in his military uniform. The two images together and the accompanying article about his harrowing journey and the brutality of Southern enslavers transformed Gordon into a symbol of the courage and patriotism of Black Americans. His example also inspired many free Blacks in the North to enlist. Civil War photographers traveled with a special wagon and equipment that required both skill and time to properly use. It was a complicated and lengthy
Starting point is 00:21:07 process, about as far removed from our one-click cell phone cameras as you can get. Almost 70% of the photographs taken during the Civil War era were stereo views, three-dimensional photos. three-dimensional photos. To take a stereo view, a photographer used a twin lens camera with its lenses an eye width apart to capture the same image from very slightly different angles, much as our own eyes do. Once developed and mounted on a card, these two photos were placed into a viewer, which created the effect of seeing these pictures in 3D, creating a kind of unique and immersive experience. For all of my 90s children out there, it was the 19th century version of a Viewmaster, where you just went click and it changed the image. You know what I'm talking about? And here's something that may be surprising. One of the most well-known and photographed figures in the Civil War wasn't a person at all, but a bald eagle named Old Abe,
Starting point is 00:22:18 the mascot of the 8th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment, who was, of course, named after President Lincoln. Animal mascots actually were not unusual for soldiers. They helped raise morale and provided a much-needed distraction from the horrors of war. Old Abe was present at more than 30 battles and became a celebrity after the war, appearing in parades and rallies for years. Children were enlisted to sell paper photographs of Old Abe in much the same way that school children today sell chocolate or wrapping paper or any number of other items. Proceeds from the sale of these photographs went to benefit local veterans charities. Sadly, in 1881, a fire broke out in an area that stored paints and solvents near the aviary
Starting point is 00:23:16 in the Capitol building. And while old Abe the Eagle was rescued, He died a month later in the arms of his handler. The bald eagle was officially adopted as the emblem of the United States way back in 1787. It became our American icon, and the eagle design was added to official documents, flags, public buildings, and other government-related items, including currency. And in the 1860s, a new national paper currency began to bankroll the rapidly expanding needs of a nation at war. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends.
Starting point is 00:24:07 And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! Ah! It is my girl in the studio!
Starting point is 00:24:25 Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your
Starting point is 00:24:57 podcasts. Abraham Lincoln understood the importance of a common national currency and bank credit to support a healthy economy. As a young man in frontier Indiana and Kentucky, he saw the ways in which unreliable paper money and inadequate credit frustrated the ambitions of his neighbors. and inadequate credit frustrated the ambitions of his neighbors. These experiences shaped his political outlook. As a wartime president, Lincoln was primarily focused on his role as commander in chief, but a safe and sound national banking system and a reliable national currency were important to him too. In 1862, with the Union's expenses mounting, the government had no way to continue paying for the war. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase told Congress that immediate action was imperative, as the coffers were almost entirely depleted. Colonel Edmund D. Taylor, who would later become known as the father of the greenback, proposed a solution to the president.
Starting point is 00:26:20 Non-interest-bearing treasury notes printed on the best banking paper named Greenbacks because the back of the paper money had a bold green design. In addition to printing paper money, the U.S. government also borrowed from both American citizens and foreign governments and instituted the country's first general income tax. On February 25, 1863, President Lincoln signed the National Currency Act into law. The act established the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the OCC, and charged it with the responsibility for organizing and administering a system of nationally chartered banks and a uniform national currency. In his 1864 State of the Union message, he declared to the government and the American people that in order to prevent fluctuations in the value of paper money, a national system was the key to creating reliability, permanence, a robust national credit, and protection against individual losses in the use of paper money. of paper money. In June of 1864, the legislation underwent a substantial change and became known as the National Bank Act. Although it has been modified plenty over the years, the National Bank
Starting point is 00:27:35 Act continues to provide the basic governing framework for our banking system today. When citizens understood that using national currency, these greenbacks, was essentially risk-free, public confidence soared. It was a huge improvement over the pre-Civil War money supply, which had involved thousands of different varieties of paper money issued by local banks, rampant counterfeiting, chronic uncertainty about the value of the paper money they had in their possession, and as a result, difficulty conducting private business. Through the now organized national money and banking system, Congress was able to promote economic growth and prosperity. And once the Confederate states re-entered the Union, a stronger sense of American nationalism. While our money and banking system was undergoing
Starting point is 00:28:33 a necessary overhaul, our second industrial revolution was also underway. New machines, new power sources, and new ways of organizing work began to make existing industries like the railroad industry and textiles more productive and efficient. New industries also began to prosper, like steel manufacturing. But these factory systems and mass production came at a price for workers. They required large numbers of people, including women and children, to labor for long hours, doing tedious and often dangerous work with poor pay levels. These miserable conditions gave rise to the trade union movement in the mid-19th century. Trade unions, also called labor unions, are associations of
Starting point is 00:29:27 workers who work in a particular trade or industry, and they use collective bargaining to secure things like fair pay and benefits and better working conditions. In 1866, the formation of the National Labor Union represented an early attempt to create a federation of all the smaller unions that had started to organize. Although the NLU disbanded in the 1870s, several of its member trade unions survived, representing a bunch of different occupations like spinners, coal miners, railway workers, and shoemakers. And those shoemakers were creating something new. Shoes that were for left feet and shoes that were for right feet. For hundreds of years, footwear was produced with no distinction between the left and right shoe. These straights, as they were called, were supposed to
Starting point is 00:30:27 be worn one day on your left foot and the next day on your right so that they would wear down evenly. As late as 1850, most shoes were made as straights, and there was no difference between the right shoe and the left shoe. So breaking in a new pair of shoes was not easy. The only size options were a change to the width. You could get shoes in slim or fat. That seems ridiculous now where it's like, I wear a seven and a half double N, you know, like shoe sizes are so specialized now.
Starting point is 00:31:02 But by the mid 19th century, factory mass production led to the creation of better fitting shoes. The invention of the American rolling machine in 1845 replaced handmade cobbling tools, and it was followed a year later by the invention of the sewing machine. The inventor of the right and left shoes was a Frenchman named Alexis Gaddillo. In fact, necessity was definitely the mother of his invention because Gaddillo differentiated left and right footwear to give more comfort to the soldiers who fought in the Crimean War in the 1850s. In 1858, an American shoemaker named Lyman Blake invented another machine for sewing the
Starting point is 00:31:48 soles of shoes to the uppers, and a man named Gordon McKay recognized its potential. He purchased Blake's patents and improved upon his invention. The left and right shoes made on this machine came to be called McKays. During the Civil War, many shoemakers were called to serve in the armies, which created a serious shortage of shoes for both soldiers and civilians. McKays were cranked out to relieve the shortage. I mean, come on now. Did you know that shoes used to be called straights or McKays? Nope, bet you didn't. These McKays had gone through a world of production evolution. The
Starting point is 00:32:38 first version of McKays were nicknamed 12-day shoes because that's how long it took for them to fall apart. But soon enough, the quality increased, and left and right shoes became a permanent change to mass-produced shoes in America. A similar shift happened in the clothing industry. This transformation was long in coming as initially there were no sizing standards. Clothing was sewn to a person's exact measurements. Prior to the Civil War in 1861, soldiers' uniforms, like civilian clothing, were custom made and tailored to a man's body using his individual measurements. But in order to appropriately clothe hundreds of thousands of soldiers of all shapes and sizes,
Starting point is 00:33:33 the system had to be streamlined. To achieve mass production of uniforms, garments were manufactured in ready-to-wear sizes, and so the first sizing chart of small, medium, large, and extra large was created. When the Civil War ended, the measurements used to mass-produce soldiers' uniforms carried over to the general public market and were used to create a commercial sizing system for men's clothes. It should surprise no one who has ever gleefully uttered the phrase, it has pockets. Me, it has pockets. To know that the transformation to standard size clothing was focused entirely on attire made for men on and off the battlefield. The breakthroughs in women's ready-made fashion were long in coming in part because there was just less demand. Women mostly sold their own clothes
Starting point is 00:34:32 and had been doing that for centuries. And people who could afford it just got a seamstress or a tailor to make something that custom fit their measurements. But recognizing the profit in ready-made clothing, brands and government agencies advocated for national sizing standards. like the waist slash inseam measurement works well across brands in most men's clothing, while the numerical sizing system in women's clothing varies not only from brand to brand, but also maddeningly within brands. Have you ever experienced that where you're like, I love this t-shirt. Let me get another one in a different color. And you order the exact same t-shirt in the same size. And you're like, why is it smaller? So remember that the next time you try on something that doesn't fit, those pants are too tight. It's not you. It's the pants.
Starting point is 00:35:42 Abraham Lincoln was a totally modern president for his time. He was fascinated with the ways technology could transform industry and even more. Lincoln loved his balloon core, but you know what he loved even more? The telegram. Invented just a few decades earlier, Invented just a few decades earlier, the telegraph system went national in 1844. When Lincoln was president, he walked twice a day to the telegraph office inside the War Department to send orders and receive updates from Union generals on the telegraph eventually led to a wave of investment in new communication devices from the telephone, patented in 1876, and even the internet, which Al Gore claimed to invent, which was actually first invented for military use. But the written word lives on. The dispersion of the written word underwent its own revolution during the Civil War. The earliest postal carriers in American history
Starting point is 00:36:54 traveled along a system of post roads that the Constitution authorized the federal government to create. The roads connected small post offices where people would wait in long lines to collect their mail. By 1789, 75 post offices and about 2,400 miles of post roads served a population of almost 4 million. By the late 1700s, stagecoaches had begun to replace individual post riders on the roads. Stagecoach lines eventually helped link eastern communities with the expanding frontier. Those looking for a speedier delivery could, for a short time, turn to the Pony Express, a private service that began running between St. Joseph, Missouri and California in April 1860. Riders rode specially selected, super speedy horses. And not just one horse, they changed horses at relay stations
Starting point is 00:37:56 set at 10 to 15 mile intervals along the nearly 2,000 mile route. Which meant that to get from Missouri to California on the Pony Express, the average trip took 10 days with 20 riders and over 60 different horse changes. Fun fact, the fastest piece of mail in the history of the Pony Express was Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address. It was carried to California in seven days and 17 hours. But in the end, the Pony Express existed for only 18 months because on October 24th, 1861, the Transcontinental Telegraph Line was completed, and the Pony Express, already suffering from financial difficulties, fizzled out. The first statute governing general
Starting point is 00:38:55 postal delivery was enacted in 1863 when Congress passed a law that authorized the Postmaster General to make delivery with any prescribed postal district of mail matter by letter carrier as frequently as the public convenience in such district shall require and shall make all proper regulations for that purpose. According to the United States Postal Service, prior to 1863, postage payments did not include home or office delivery and included only delivery of mail from one post office to another post office. By 1888, however, mail carriers were instructed to deliver letters frequently and promptly, generally twice a day to homes and up to four times a day at businesses.
Starting point is 00:39:48 Imagine getting mail four times a day. That's like checking your email. Like, I don't want that much mail. No. The Postal Service initiated rural home delivery in October of 1896. With the advent of rural delivery, the post office department grew at a rapid pace and began to resemble what we think of as the modern-day post office. But for all of these advancements, telegraph lines and pony expresses and McKay shoes, humans still sometimes found themselves behind the curve. In 1858, in the town of Waterbury, Connecticut, Ezra Warner invented the first U.S. can opener. But the idea of storing food in cans dated back 50 years earlier. Prior to his invention, cans would be opened by cutting around the top with a literal chisel and hammer. Imagine having to get actual tools to open what was in the can. Meanwhile, everything inside is just like slashing and dripping. No, no thank you.
Starting point is 00:41:06 It took a very long time for somebody to invent an actual tool to open cans. We talked in a previous episode about canning and how it changed the ability to store food. Warner's version of the can opener was invented just in time to serve the Union Army during the Civil War. And it found a home in many grocery stores where clerks would open cans for customers to take home. It was like the equivalent of when you go to a bakery and they ask you if you want your bread sliced. It was like that. Do you want your can opened? And you would take it home open. It was like that. Do you want your can opened? And he would take it home open. After his model gained some popularity, thousands of improved can opener patents were submitted. And that spirit of invention that dominated the Civil War era has become a cornerstone of American ingenuity.
Starting point is 00:42:10 stone of American ingenuity. Join me next time for our last episode in our series, Secrets of the Civil War. You will not want to miss this one. I'll see you soon. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. This episode is written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Valerie Hoback, Amy Watkin, and Mandy Reed. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. We also benefit so much from ratings, reviews, and sharing on social media. Thanks for being here, and we'll see you again soon.

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