Innovative Tuesday: Dual Inventions - The Invention DVDs & Rubber Bands

      Hello everybody and welcome back to another edition of Global History Hub! I'll be your host, Mr. Nations, your tour guide to this massive world we all call home! On today's edition of Innovative Tuesday, we'll be taking a look at TWO inventions that deserve some recognition, but not a full post. Well, what are we waiting for? Let's dive straight into it!

     1.) DVDs.

     DVDs were not by any stretch of the imagination the first means of storing data, but at the time of their invention, they were one of the most efficient and most portable means of storage. A consumer predecessor to the DVD was called the optical disc. Optical recording equipment dates back as far as 1963 and patented in 1968. Soon, LaserDiscs were introduced to the market but weren't used very much outside of affluent Asian countries.

     Many forms of circular storage devices were proposed before Samsung finally settled on mass-producing DVDs by September of 1996. A few months late on November 1st, 1996, Japan got to experience the very first DVDs available for purchase. These DVDs usually only contained music videos and other assorted media content.

     Here is a very early advertisement for DVDs made by Toshiba. 

Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD#:~:text=Optical%20recording%20technology%20was%20invented,discs%20than%20the%20later%20formats.

     2.) Rubber Bands

     Rubber bands are known around the world as a cheap and plentiful elastic band that can be affixed to just about any solid object with a bit of stretching. But rubber bands have along history, starting at the very beginning of the invention of rubber. But, seeing as we don't need to go that far back for a shorter post, I won't. 

     Englishmen Thomas Hancock was the first person to mass-produce rubber. At first, he only invented as a way to boost his sales as a merchant, but he soon became so enamored by this material that he began to make many different products with it. He was rivaled by a man named Charles Goodyear, who took advantage of Hancock's lack of patents. He utilized the little rings of rubber than Hancock deemed useless and found a use for them - holding papers together. 

     Pretty soon, rubber bands would worm their way into nearly every American household, quickly becoming a staple in office supplies. Or in this case, a rubber band in office supplies!

     Sources: https://gizmodo.com/a-brief-history-of-the-rubber-band-1680594320