4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
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In 1937, American supermarket owner, Sylvan Goldman, came up with a way to get his customers to spend more.
He introduced his 'folding basket carriers' in his Humpty Dumpty chain in Oklahoma, hiring models to push them round his stores.
They caught on, becoming known as shopping carts in the USA.
Rachel Naylor uses clips from a 1977 CBS interview of Sylvan with Charles Kuralt to tell the story.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.
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(Photo: Sylvan Goldman, with models of his shopping trolley. Credit: Don Tullous, Oklahoma Publishing Company Photography Collection, Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society)
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0:00.0 | On Radio 4, the more you listen, the more you see. |
0:04.7 | Hello, I'm Brian Cox. |
0:05.6 | And I'm Robin Ince, and this is The Infinite Monkey Cage. |
0:08.3 | In this series, we're going to have a planet off. |
0:10.8 | I feel like Jupiter wins. |
0:12.8 | And after all of that, we're just going to chill out a bit. |
0:15.9 | We're talking about your bog standard. |
0:17.8 | Ice, not the fancy one. |
0:20.1 | Science with funny bits. |
0:21.9 | The new series of The Infinite Monkey Cage. |
0:24.1 | Listen on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. |
0:33.7 | Hello and welcome to the witness issue podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Rachel Naylor. |
0:39.1 | I'm taking you to the USA and the invention of an everyday object that you've definitely used before. |
0:45.0 | It made one man from Oklahoma a multi-millionaire. |
0:47.9 | You could say he turned chrome into gold. |
0:50.7 | Sylvan N. Goldman owns land and banks and things. |
0:54.1 | But it's not what he does. It's what he did. |
0:57.3 | What he did changed everything. What he did was invent the shopping cart. You thought there'd |
1:04.4 | always been a shopping cart, didn't you? Not until Sylvan N. Goldman invented it. There wasn't. |
1:09.8 | When you talk to someone about shopping carts and they say you invented the shopping cart, |
1:16.7 | well, I thought Adam and Eve had a shopping cart. It's always been in use. |
1:21.1 | That's American supermarket mogul, Sylvan Goldman Goldman, speaking to Charles Corralt on CBS in 1977. |
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