Mary

Some of us were wondering about credit card history at dinner last night. The following is an excerpt from Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card

The credit card was the successor of a variety of merchant credit schemes. It was first used in the 1920s, in the United States, specifically to sell fuel to a growing number of automobile owners. In 1938 several companies started to accept each other's cards.

The concept of using a card for purchases was invented in 1887 by Edward Bellamy and described in his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy uses the explicit term "Credit Card" 11 times in his novel (Chapters 9, 10, 11, 13, 25 and 26) and 3 times (Chapters 4, 8 and 19) in its sequel, Equality.

The concept of paying merchants using a card was invented in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank X. McNamara in order to consolidate multiple cards. The Diners Club produced the first charge card, which is similar but required the entire bill to be paid with each statement; it was followed shortly thereafter by American Express.

Bank of America created the BankAmericard in 1958, a product which eventually evolved into the Visa system ("Chargex" also became Visa). MasterCard came to being in 1966 when a group of credit-issuing banks established MasterCharge. The fractured nature of the US banking system meant that credit cards became an effective way for those who were travelling around the country to, in effect, move their credit to places where they could not directly use their banking facilities.

There are now countless variations on the basic concept of revolving credit for individuals (as issued by banks and honored by a network of financial institutions), including organization-branded credit cards, corporate-user credit cards, store cards and so on.

In contrast, although having reached very high adoption levels in the US, Canada and the UK, it is important to note that in other cultures which were much more cash-oriented in the latter half of the twentieth century such as Germany, France, Switzerland among many others, take-up of credit cards was initially much slower. It took until the 1990s to reach anything like the percentage market-penetration levels achieved in the US, Canada or UK. In many countries acceptance still remains poor as the use of a credit card system depends on the banking system being perceived as reliable.

In contrast because of the legislative framework surrounding banking system overdrafts, some countries, France in particular, were much faster to develop and adopt chip-based credit cards which are now seen as major anti-fraud credit devices.

This is just too funny...

And the priest says, "As long as you're popping out, I'm fine with it."

http://community.livejournal.com/weddingplans/6518544.html?thread=73009680

- Josh took me on an architecture boat tour of Chicago for my birthday today. It was awesome. I know a lot more about Chicago than I did when I got up this morning.

- There was a train derailment in Chicago today... not the line I get to work on, but the same commuter rail system. If anyone is interested, here is an article about it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/17/AR2005091700731.html

- Congratulations, Jess! :-)

The Making of a Modern Dad

http://articles.health.msn.com/id/100109278/site/100000000/

I thought it was interesting.

Where's the Fun Wiki living these days?

Article about unintended pregnancies in marriage, and complaining about how the government programs are designed primarily to reduce the number of out of wedlock pregnancies and births but do not address the problem of unintentional pregnancies in marriage. I thought it was interesting. Though they seemed to neglect to consider the possibility that many unintended pregnancies in marriage are not reported as such, which seems like it should be an important thing to consider when asking the question why married couples have fewer unintended pregnancies than unmarried couples even though they have more sex.

http://www.agi-usa.org/pubs/tgr/06/2/gr060210.html