By 1930, almost 41% of American housing units featured a telephone. But the Depression undid many of these gains. By 1933, more than 2.5 million households had cancelled their service and fewer than a third of American homes were reachable by phone. Which perhaps explains why corporations like American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and the Bell Telephone Company spent so much of the first half of the twentieth century trying to teach people how to use the things.

This 1939 photograph of women at a Demonstration Telephone Call Application desk is from the AT&T building at the New York World's Fair, which took place in Flushing Meadows, Queens from April 30, 1939 to October 31, 1940. 

We're offering a break from the snow and winter weather this week and sharing a glass lantern slide image of the gardens bordering a spillway pond at the Hill Girt farm of Harry and Elizabeth Haskell in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania.

The photograph was taken by William C. Spruance on June 30, 1923. It's distinctive coloration is the result of the autochrome process, an early technique for producing color photographs that relied on dyed grains of potato starch.

Spruance was an electrical engineer, a company executive on the board of directors of E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, and a civic leader in Wilmington, Delaware. Spruance was also an amateur photographer and used these skills to photograph his wife Alice Lea Spruance's gardens, as well as the gardens of other wealthy residents of New Castle County between 1920 and 1925. 

Hagley Library will be closed this Monday, so we can shovel out from under the snow and ice like everyone else in the region. 

If any of you need any inspiration to get your own sidewalks cleared, here's a DuPont sponsored women's snow-shoveling contest, created to promote the company's Teflon-S fluoropolymer, used here to coat snow-shovels. The contest was cross-promoted with the 1967 International Ski and Winter Sports Show in New York City.

On this day in 1825, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued its first patent for a system to "preserve animal substances in tin". Ezra Dagget and his nephew Thomas Kensett, the patent holders, had been canning salmon, oysters and lobsters out of their seafood processing factory in New York City since 1819. 

Tin cans had been put into use for preserving food since 1813, but their use had largely been limited to specialized environments and circumstances like military expeditions and arctic exploration, rather than commercial use.