A hundred years ago, no city in Indiana, or perhaps the Midwest, experienced such in influx of industry, ingenuity and American innovation as Kokomo, Indiana. Riding off the fumes of Indiana’s brief natural gas boom, inventors and industrialists alike met in the city and together, cranked out invention-after-invention.
This parade of progress earned Kokomo the official/unofficial title of “City of Firsts”. Here is just a tiny sample of what Hoosiers contributed to our then-emerging American industry.
The First Push-Button Car Radio
Before the push-button radios, car audio had to be tuned in the old-fashioned way—by searching the squeaks and squelches of AM signals. Anyone over the age of 40 can remember how frustrating that was. The Delco Division of General Motors in Kokomo released a push-button radio in 1938, allowing drivers to “program” stations.
The World’s First Pneumatic Tire
To combat the rough terrain of America’s earliest roads, D.C. Spracker of the Kokomo Rubber Tire Company invented the pneumatic tire in 1894, inflating an amalgam of rubber and fabric around a rim.