The Toys That Made Us Tinker

Let’s kick off this article with some nuggets of knowledge and tidbits of trivia. Have you ever heard the term “flea market”? If so, have you ever wondered where this expression came from? In fact, it has several disputed origins. According to the Britannica, “The most common explanation is that the term is a translation of the French marché aux puces (literally ‘market of fleas’), so-named for the pests that were thought to infest the upholstery of second-hand furniture sold at such markets.” Bear this in mind for a moment (I’ll tell you when you can forget it again).

In the days of wired telegraphy, long before radio appeared on the scene (say between the late 1830s and the early 1900s), the term “ham” was used to describe an operator with poor Morse code sending skills. This was a common descriptor for a clumsy operator whose “fist” (sending style) was bad, hence “ham-fisted.”

The inventors of wireless radio communication (Marconi, Tesla, and others) began demonstrating practical signals in the 1890s, but radio didn’t become widespread for commercial or public use until the 1910s to 1920s.

Read more – Hackster.io: http://bit.ly/4mPzTdj