Seems photo retouching is nothing new and goes back to the earliest days of photography.

After Lincolnâ€s assassination, there was a dearth of “heroic-style” pictures of the president. So one portrait painter got creative. On a print of the late president, Thomas Hicks superimposed Lincolnâ€s head onto the body of John C. Calhoun—the virulent racist and slavery proponent who did not exactly see eye-to-eye with the 16th president.

“The Great Lengths Taken to Make Abraham Lincoln Look Good in Portraits,” by Michael Waters

Great article on this subject: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abraham-lincoln-photos-edited

Where I first heard this info:
https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/episode-2-deepfakes-and-the-future-of-truth/

According to Planet Money, pepperoni was actually developed in America.

Basically, pepperoni first starts to emerge in the early 20th century around the nineteen-teens, 1920s. And it was essentially Italian American immigrants who were trying to replicate the sausage that they had in Calabria and Apulia, which was known for its distinctive red color, with what they could get on the Lower East Side of New York. So it is this distinctly American thing. And the funny thing that Anthony told me is that now we actually export pepperoni back to Italy. So it is something that has become an American thing that is now going to Italy.

THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY

One reason pepperoni is popular as a pizza topping: it’s long shelf life.

THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY

Honeybees were brought to America by the early European settlers. At that time, they use skeps, upside down woven bowls to maintain the bee hives.

In the mid 1800s a Presbyterian minister named Lorenzo Langstroth, discovered that the bees built their honeycombs by precise measurements, and incorporated this into the wood frame beehive that is still in use today.

99percent Invisible podcast on Beeing

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/20/630949390/the-market-for-air

This American Life story

Retropod story

Michael Dobbs’s excellent book, Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America

CSPAN Book TV interview with Michael Dobbs

Interestingly, the original concept and first machines were intended for offices where employees could create a fresh cup of coffee instead of relying on a full pot coffee maker which often got stale. When they finally developed a less expensive home version, sales really took off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keurig

Project Cirrus

Project Cirrus was the first attempt to modify a hurricane. It was a collaboration of the General Electric Corporation, the US Army Signal Corps, the Office of Naval Research, and the US Air Force. After several preparations, and initial skepticism by government scientists,[6] the first attempt to modify a hurricane began on October 13, 1947 on a hurricane that was heading west to east and out to sea.

An airplane flew along the rainbands of the hurricane, and dropped nearly 180 pounds (82 kilograms) of crushed dry ice into the clouds. The crew reported “Pronounced modification of the cloud deck seeded”. It is not known if that was due to the seeding. Next, the hurricane changed direction and made landfall near Savannah, Georgia. The public blamed the seeding, and Irving Langmuir claimed that the reversal had been caused by human intervention.[6] Cirrus was canceled, and lawsuits were threatened. Only the fact that a system in 1906 had taken a similar path, as well as evidence showing that the storm had already begun to turn when seeding began, ended the litigation. This disaster set back the cause of seeding hurricanes for eleven years.

At first the seeding was officially denied and it took years before the government admitted it. According to the Sept. 12, 1965 edition of the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel, in 1947 a hurricane “went whacky” and “Twelve years later it was admitted the storm had in fact been seeded.”

Read more here,
Wikipedia page on Project Stormfury

From 99pi
“In 1947, Irving Langmuirâ€s research team at GE tried to break up a hurricane by dumping a lot of dry ice into it to see if it would collapse. But instead the hurricane changed trajectory, became stronger, and hit the Georgia coast. ”

99% Invisible “Making It Rain”

Here’s an explanation of why early computers had a physical lock on them.

And what that Turbo button was really for.

Polygoon – Hoe biljartballen worden gemaakt from KNBB – Biljart TV on Vimeo.

http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-post-billiards-age/