Farmer Charlie's Ideas Worth Sharing: Tennesseans' Inventive Footprints
September 13, 2017
Here in Tennessee, we might be full of Southern hospitality and sweet tea, but we're also no strangers to ingenuity. From Graceland to the Bristol Motor Speedway, plenty of Tennesseans have made their own inventive footprints on America. Here are just a few:
Cotton Candy
Sugar lovers, thank Nashville for this one. In 1897, William Morrison and John C. Wharton invented a way to spin heated sugar into what that they originally called "fairy floss:' If only it was as good for your teeth as regular floss is.
Touchscreen
If you're scrolling through this email on your smartphone or tablet right now, you can thank the Volunteer State. Believe it or not, the first touchscreen monitor came from Oak Ridge in 1977 and was first shown off to the public during the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville.
Mini-golf
The first patented miniature golf course was built in Chattanooga by Garnet Carter. Carter opened "Tom Thumb Golf," as he called it, on Lookout Mountain in 1927 in hopes of drawing traffic to a hotel he owned- a real hole-in-one idea, if you ask me.
