Terryorisms

120 Years that changed the World March 4, 2006

Harold Warp’s parents immigrated to America from Norway and setup a homestead on the Nebraska Prairies in 1873. Harold, born in 1903, the youngest of twelve children, grew up as a barefooted farm-boy herding cattle.
As he grew up, he began inventing new and useful things himself. He noticed that chickens grew faster and laid more eggs in summer and that sunlight prevented rickets in chickens. The plastics revolution was gathering steam at that time and he spent three years developing a practical, weatherproof, translucent material that unlike glass let in the sun’s ultraviolet rays; he called it Flex-O-Glass. He took the advice given to Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate” to heart. So he moved to Chicago in 1924 with two of his brothers and a capital of $800 and started manufacturing Flex-O-Glass. Flex-O-Glass could be made so inexpensively that in addition to poultry house windows, millions of people began using it for winter protection in their homes in screen doors and window screens. By his forties he had made his fortune. He wrote:

“For thousands of years man lived quite simply. Then like a sleeping giant our world was awakened. In a mere hundred and twenty years of eternal time man progressed from open hearth, grease lamps, and ox carts to television, super sonic speed, and atomic power.

The full list is here.