- Button
Buttons have been attached to clothing for around 5,000 years, but our Bronze Age ancestors used them more for ornamentation than for their potential as a fastener. In their early incarnations, buttons were simply added to clothes for decoration, while the clothes were fastened by pins and belts. The buttons were usually hand-carved from bone, wood, or horn.
It was the Greeks who first came up with the idea of using buttons to fasten clothes. The first “buttonhole" was simply a loop of thread through which a button could be passed to create a fastening. However, buttons were not adopted in Europe until the return of the Crusaders in the thirteenth century. The introduction of this new fastening coincided with a new trend for "form-fitted" clothing and its popularity soared. By 1250, the French had established the Button Makers' Guild In fact, the word “button” probably derives from the French bouton meaning “bud”, or bouter meaning “to push”.
Buttons became a status symbol, and the wealthy would wear clothing adorned with hundreds of them. By the sixteenth century the finest buttons were encrusted with precious gems and diamonds, and by the eighteenth century they were being crafted from porcelain, ivory, and glass.
The advent of London’s Pearly Kings and Queens, whose costumes are covered by mother-of- pearl buttons, coincided with a huge cargo of the buttons that arrived by ship from Japan in the 1860s.
With the dawn of mass-produced buttons, their power as a status symbol diminished and so did their popularity. Most modern buttons are made of plastic, but even today highly priced clothing is often distinguished by unusual ornamental buttons.
SEE ALSO: CLOTHING, SEWING, WOVEN CLOTH, GLASS, BUCKLE
- Canal
China’s Grand Canal, completed in the thirteenth century and stretching almost 1,200 miles (1,930 km) from northern Beijing to Hangzhou in the south, is the oldest still in use today. Although the most ancient part of this waterway dates as far back as 486 B.C.E., canals had been in use for irrigation and transportation for centuries prior to this. The earliest evidence suggests that artificial waterways were excavated and in use across Iraq and Syria by 4000 B.C.E.
The first British canal, the Fossdyke, was built by the Romans, but it was not until the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century that the construction of a canal network began in earnest, eventually totalling almost 4,000 miles (6,440 km). Canal systems also proliferated throughout Europe and the United States, with horse-drawn barges providing the principal means of cheap transportation for coal, cotton, and other commodities.
The advent of railroads in the mid-nineteenth century spelled the beginning of a decline for British canals, many of which fell into disuse formore than a hundred years until their rediscovery for boating vacations. In mainland Europe and North America, however, the distances to be travelled were much greater. Despite the arrival of the railroads, investment was warranted in wide and deep canals to admit seagoing ships into the heart of those continents; industry has reaped the benefits of canal-borne bulk transportation to this day.
Perhaps the most famous canals are those that nave drastically shortened circuitous and treacherous sea voyages, including the Suez Canal of 1869, linking
Europe and the East, and the Panama Canal of 1914, between the Pacific and the Atlantic, both remarkable testaments to engineering vision.
SEE ALSO: ENCLOSED HARBOR, CANAL LOCK, CANAL INCLINED PLANE