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particularly desirable taste for his product.

Bowling Alley
    A “bowling alley” has recently been discovered in Al-Fayyoum gov ernorate, south of Cairo, Egypt, dating from around 200 B.C.E. of the Ptolemaic Period. An Italian team unearthed a unique open structure in the area of Madi City (an ancient temple). Its smooth floor is composed of a single large block of limestone with a groove 4 inches deep and 8 inches wide. In the middle of the lane’s floor there’s a 5-inch-square hole. Two balls of polished limestone were found, one of which fits the groove while the other fits the square hole. This first bowling track is like no other discovered from the ancient world and was found next to the remains of a number of houses, each made of two rooms with a large hall. After considerable study, it’s been proposed that this was the first attempt at the practice of bowling down an alley.

Box Spring
    Very little is substantiated about the box springs first manufactured in France during the early to mid-1800s. On record, the first box spring to be imported to the United States from France was in 1857 by James Boyle of Chatham Square in New York City. He was a manufacturer of bedding who recognized the need for box springs to make mattresses less lumpy. These first box springs were about 12 inches deep and reversible. Their frames were made of lumber with spiral springs in eight sections joined together with strips of ticking. Twine also helped secure it all together. All-metal box springs came later, and it wasn’t until the 1930s that box springs enjoyed wide use.

Boxing World Champ
    On August 29, 1885, John L. Sullivan of Roxbury, Massachusetts, outpointed Dominic McCaffrey of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in Chester Park, Cincinnati, Ohio. The boxing bout was promoted “to decide the Marquess of Queensberry glove contest for the championship of the world,” according to press at the time, and was boxing’s first “heavyweight” title fight with 3-ounce gloves and 3-minute rounds. Sullivan weighed in at 205 pounds to McCaffrey’s 160. Sullivan was 5’10¼“ tall; McCaffrey was 5’8½”. By aggressively throwing more punches and scoring the most points, Sullivan won a six-round decision. (Some say the bout went seven rounds, as the referee had lost count.) Nicknamed the “Boston Strongboy,” Sullivan was the first American sports hero to become a national celebrity. He was also the first American athlete to earn more than $1 million.

Braille Encoding
    Approximately 500 years before Frenchman Louis Braille devised his encoding system in 1821, a Syrian Muslim created his own method of reading by touching raised letters of the alphabet, very similar to what Braille would later develop. In the fourteenth century, Zain-Din al Amidi was a blind scholar and distinguished professor at the University of Moustansiryeh in what is now Iraq. Although he went blind soon after his birth, he later improvised a method by which he identified his books and made notes to express to others. Zain-Din al Amidi was the first to utilize “touch reading,” and used it to educate himself in law and foreign languages.

Brassiere
    Around 2500 B.C.E., warrior Minoan women on the Greek isle of Crete began wearing and using a garment resembling a bra. It shoved their bare breasts upward and exposed them from their clothing. Hundreds of years later, the ancient Roman and Greek women strapped on a breast band to reduce their bust size. In 1907, the word brassiere was first reported in a copy of American Vogue magazine. The term came from the old French word for “upper arm” and appeared for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1912.
    New York City socialite Mary Phelps Jacob devised the first modern bra with two handkerchiefs and some help from her maid. She earned a patent on November 3, 1914.

Breakfast Cereal
    In 1863, Dr. James C. Jackson of Dansville, New York, a follower of Sylvester Graham (of graham cracker fame),