History
The garbage disposal was invented in 1927 by John W. Hammes, an architect working in Racine, Wisconsin. After eleven years of development, his InSinkErator company put his disposer on the market in 1940.
Hammes' claim is disputed, as General Electric introduced a garbage disposal unit in 1935.
In many cities in the United States in the 1930s and the 1940s the municipal sewage system had regulations prohibiting running food waste (garbage) into the system. InSinkErator spent considerable effort, and was highly successful in convincing many localities to rescind these prohibitions.
Many localities in North America mandated the use of disposers. For many years, garbage disposals were illegal in New York City because of a perceived threat of damage to the city's sewer system. After a 21-month study with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, the ban was rescinded in 1997 by local law 1997/071 which amended section 24-518.1, NYC Administrative Code.
In 2008, the city of Raleigh, North Carolina attempted a ban on the replacement and installation of garbage disposals which also extended to outlying towns sharing the city's municipal sewage system, but rescinded the ban one month later.
Read more about this topic: Garbage Disposal Unit
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)