JF Ptak Science Books Post 227

[Update: as of May 2015 this is still the only time I’ve seen a 100+ year-old advertisement for a trash can.]

In the many years of dealing with unusual publications and images and illustrations and such, I do not recall ever seeing an advertisement for a waste can.  And so today, here at the tail end of the summer of 2008, I stumbled upon one, tucked away in the back of the Official Catalogue and Guide of the Ohio Valley Exposition of Cincinnati, 1910.   (Actually I was browsing the ads in the pamphlet when I saw the eye-popping half-page ad for The Weir Frog Company.  It took as few moments for me to realize that they were selling railway frogs and other major-heavy hardware, but the thought of the frog farm did linger a bit…) I cannot say that trashcan tech had improved sharply between 1911 and now.  I can say that the advertisers used an awful lot of exclamatory arrows to make their point, which leads me to perhaps a wrong assumption that this trash can was cutting edge.  Or perhaps not; after all, how much can one say about it?  (Yes, there’s the patents for bomb-proof, smokeless, half-vented, lid-tethered, wheeled, semi-wheeled, clip-lidded and etc. garbage cans–actually I can count thousands of patents award to and about garbage cans.  But, basically, its pretty much the same.) See the wonderful Timeline of Garbage here.