I suspect that not one in a thousand Americans is familiar with the work of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, and that is truly a tragedy, because the committee had an outsized effect that played a critical role in winning the Second World War, and shepherding the US into the Jet Age.
The appeal of one strange object, which achieved dizzying popularity in my lifetime, and today lives on mostly for nostalgia, is not so difficult to explain. All you need to do is turn one on and wait.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.