If you're feeling grateful for stretchy waistbands after the holidays, you have Dr. Joseph Shivers (1920-2014) to thank. Shivers began working for DuPont in 1946 as a researcher assigned to improving polymers.

He was soon tasked with a new project; DuPont's market research on what women consumers wanted from textile fabrics had spurred research into finding new, more comfortable materials to replace rubber for women's girdles and other foundation garments. The project initially stalled and was shelved in 1950, but found new life a few years later during an experiment into modifying Dacron, a polyester fabric invented in 1951.

The project was restarted, and the new material was completed in 1959 and released under the name Fibre K before being rebranded as Lycra, followed by Spandex. 

So long, 2025! The clock doesn't strike midnight every day, so we're celebrating this special occasion with a January 1939 issue of The Sohioan, a magazine published by the Standard Oil Company (Ohio) for its subsidiaries' and divisions' current and former employees, as well as dealers, distributors, and stockholders. 

Standard Oil Company (Ohio), or Sohio, was created out of the 1911 antitrust dissolution of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Prior to the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company, the company's Ohio operations controlled up to twenty-one of Cleveland's twenty-six refineries, while the company as a whole controlled up to 90% of the nation's refining capacity and output.

In the aftermath of the disbanding of the company, the newly formed Standard Oil Company (Ohio) became an independent corporation that managed marketing operations and service stations in Ohio, as well as a single refinery in Cleveland, but held no oil reserves or pipelines. The company continued under this model until it was acquired by British Petroleum, a merger than began in 1968 with a 25% controlling interest and was completed in 1987.

Whatever you're celebrating (or not celebrating) this week, here's to making it a safe one spent with the ones you love. Drive safe, everyone!

This 1907 postcard from the Robbins Bros. Co. of Boston, Massachusetts is part of Hagley Library's Waldron collection of Christmas and holiday postcards (Accession 2000.223).

This collection of over 500 items was donated to the Hagley Library in 1973 by Maxine Maxson Waldron (1898-1982), an artist and educator once employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its department of education, by various private schools as an art teacher, and as a ceramics specialist at the Greenwich House Pottery Shop. After her marriage to William R. Waldron, an employee at Du Pont's Chambers Works, she pursued her interests in art, fashion, and interior decoration through her activities as a collector.

You can view digitized images from this collection by visiting its page in our Digital Archive.

Here's a photograph from one of the Hagley Digital Archives' newer collections; this image, captured in August of 1921, shows workers operating guillotine shears at the Midvale Steel and Ordnance Company's Coatsville Works.