One Hundred Years Ago...
A mechanical home refrigerator is marketed for the first time in the United States, but its $900 price discourages buyers, who can buy a good motorcar for the same money 
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The first birth control clinic outside Holland opens at 46 Amboy Street, Brooklyn. Margaret Sanger distributes circulars printed in English, Italian, and Yiddish to announce the opening
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Engineers at the 14-year-old Chicago-based U.S. Gypsum Corp. come up late in the year with drywall panels comprising a single layer of plaster and paper that can be joined flush along a wall with a relatively smooth surface 
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Lucky Strike cigarettes are introduced by American Tobacco Co. 
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The Converse basketball shoe is introduced by an 8-year-old Massachusetts company.
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The first Rose Bowl football game January 1 pits Washington State against Brown in a huge new stadium that seats 101,385.
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The first radio news is broadcast by Lee De Forest, who has established a radio station
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Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman introduces the term "I.Q." (intelligence quotient) to America and presents the first test for measuring intelligence that will be widely used.
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The first mechanically operated windshield wipers are introduced in the United States.
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The first major U.S. shopping mall opens outside Chicago at Lake Forest, Illinois. Lake Forest's Market Square marks the true beginning of a retailing phenomenon 
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1916
from The People's Chronology
by James Trager
A 900 dollar refrigerator in 1916 would be the equivalent of 20,0000 dollars today.
Value: $20,667.23
My family had an icebox, finally, rather than store things down in the well... They cut the ice in the winter from the river, and stored it in the ice house, buried in sawdust.
The Vanderbilt Estate in Hyde Park, N.Y. still has an Ice-House on premises, where they cut ice blocks from the Hudson River and hauled them in and buried them in sawdust also.
It was a common practice! Back then, there were no dams on the Ohio River, and the more shallow water would freeze solid in the winter. Remember Eliza's escape over the river ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin? That happened between Hawesville and Owensboro, KY...
My grandmother had a summer cottage with an icebox, and the ice was delivered in blocks chopped by the iceman on the back of his horse-drawn wagon. We kids would be able to suck on the ice shards that were left from the chopping. That was in the 1940s.
What fun!
I guess you could say they were free popsicles without the contamination of sugar and flavour.
Great idea to me!
Long about April or May, my grandparents met each other in 1916, to marry on July 30, 1916. My Grandpa took one look at my little Grandma, who was so small, her feet didn't touch the floor of the wagon, but dangled, and said to himself, "THAT'S the girl for me!" Grandma was a milliner and Grandpa was a telegraph operator for the L&N railway line, in Hawesville,KY. It was a church picnic. They were together until 1976, when Grandma passed away.
I'm sure the first radio was a big deal to the entire country, but there wasn't a radio in Hawesville, until Grandpa bought the first one, in about 1919-1920. I still have it, as a planter on my mother's patio.
Also, in 1916, Europe was at war, and the clouds were gathering over the US... Uncle Louie, Grandpa's brother, had met Aunt Lois, but they weren't dating, yet. Uncle Louie worked at the Carter Dry Goods, and Aunt Lois worked at an attorney's office, typing letters. They would begin to date in 1917, and marry in 1918, just before Uncle Louie went off to France for WWI.
Grandpa still had his first car, a 1915 Studebaker, (I think). Great-great grandpa Scherer, Grandpa's grandpa had passed away in 1915, and was terribly missed-- Grandpa and Uncle Louie were both playing cornet in the Hawesville band, having played Christmas carols in the courthouse tower on Christmas Eve, 1915. Great grandpa Scherer was still making shoes and farming. The shoe business was beginning to sink under the weight of manufactured shoes, primarily from Sears mail order catalogs. The whole family worked hard to rear and provide for the four girls, the daughters of Grandma Scherer's sister, who had come to live with them in 1903. Jane, my cousin, who was, therefore, reared as my aunt, was 13 years old, just about to graduate from the 8th grade, (as far as public schools went), soon to meet her first husband, who would go off to fight in WWI.
Uncle Combs, Grandma's brother, was living in Dayton, OH and had opened a pharmacy there, where he sold CocaCola that had cocaine in it. Aunt Lucille, Grandma's sister, had married Uncle Grover, and they ran a pharmacy in Nashville, TN. Cousin Irene, their child, had been born in 1906 and was 10 years old. Her hair was a gorgeous shade of red...
Grandpa had purchased an old bicycle, one with the big wheel in the front, and he rode it to work most days... Sometime, in 1916, the circus came to Hawesville, and someone left the tiger cage door ajar, aiding and abetting the escape of three tigers, who roamed Hawesville for a couple of hours, scaring the residents. Grandpa helped corral them down at the blacksmith's forge, by riding his bicycle around them... Uncle Louie came to help, and thought they were lovely kitties. (Lovely BIG kitties...)
1916 was a banner year, in my family...
Thanks for adding this interesting information!
The windshield wiper was invented by a woman but the auto industry said it would never work and rejected her idea. She patented the wiper in 1903 but never caught on 'til the '40's - after her patent expired.
Interestingly, another woman invented the motorized windshield wiper - The first automatic windshield wipers were also invented by a woman, Charlotte Bridgwood, who filed a patent for her invention in 1917. Her invention, like Mary’s, was not a commercial success.
The history of patents is full of all kinds of "unreasonable" results . For example the US Patent Office rejected the patent submission for the "weed eater" , one of the most popular consumer devices .
Well they got them back, because for several years one of the NCAA College football bowls was the Weed Eater Bowl.
Lucky Strikes were introduced in 1917 as a cigarette and filters were introduced in 1962.