Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Electric Belts Booklet

Can electric currents cure disease and relieve pain? That’s a question some scientists have been asking since Ben Franklin’s kite experiment in 1752. In the late 1800s a medical fad began — the selling of electric belts. Each belt sold promised to cure a specific ailment. There were belts to cure rheumatism, sexual dysfunction, liver, stomach, nervous diseases, [...]
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Olympic Stamps & Pins

The 2010 Olympic Winter Games are underway in Vancouver. There are thousands of Olympic items (past and present) in the collectible market. Postage stamps with Olympic themes is just one genre. Another popular area for collectors of Olympic memorabilia are pins. Unfortunately, I don’t have any, but if you do, please share them with [...]
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Patches from the 1970s

Patch or badge collecting is called scutelliphily. In Latin ’scutellus’ means ‘little shield.’ ‘Phileein’ in Greek means ‘to love.’ Scutelliphily is a hobby world-wide and goes back hundreds of years. In fact, Geoffrey Chaucer mentions pilgrims and the various badges they acquired in his classic work Canterbury Tales. The patches in this posting were aquired almost 600 [...]
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The Disco Ball

As we dance into a new decade, let’s groove to the past and look into the mirrored disco ball. It’s unclear as to who invented the mirrored ball, but it dates back to at least 1897! The February issue of The Electrical Worker describes a ballroom where the highlight was “a carbon arc lamp flashing [...]
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