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re are numerous urban fables circling the origins of the modern-day honor card, merely, favor many others, I had forever trusted the much-vaunted declaration namely the origin of the honor card arrange in the 1950s, with the advent of Diner's Club. The internet abounds with articles describing how Frank McNamara was entangled to detect, when attempting to pay his cafeteria bill, that he had left his purse at family. Luckily his wife was capable to disburse the bill for him, but he decided never to be entangled in a canteen again,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], and was influenced to originate the concept of the Diner's Club Card, the 1st widely-accepted payout card.
Then, late final night, as Better Half and I were companionably sitting up in bed reading before settling down for the night, as is our wont (I'm currently reading Bruce Chatwin's 'Songlines',[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], BH is on 'Day of the Locust', by Nathanael West), he disturbed my concentration by blurting out 'Hey, this writing talks almost a hotel observer using a credit card'. On the surface, not the most surprising corner of accidents, but calculate about it: 'Day of the Locust' was first published in 1939, course before Frank McNamara came up with the fancy for Diner's Club.
'Day of the Locust' is set in Hollywood during the Great Depression. It follows the fortunes of youth artiste Tod Hackett, working for a costume designer and set painter for the video laboratories, who falls in adore with aspiring starlet Faye Greener. In quest of the American Dream, the protagonists transform embittered and dissatisfied, and the novel ends with a rebel at a film premiere. Weirdly, one of the temperaments is shrieked Homer Simpson; Donald Sutherland played him in the 1975 movie adaptedness of the novel.
So what is the truth of the matter? Were credit cards really approximately in the 1930s,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], or even earlier? Was Nathanael West talking about a credit card as we understand it today, or did it have a different meaning? Are there any other early scholastic references to credit cards?
One daytime I hope to have peruse each interesting novel that has ever been written, but that is working to take some time. Until then, I will must depend on a medley serendipitous happenstance, consist in ... stumbling upon the reference in 'Day of the Locust', and agreeable old Wikipedia. And OKAY, I have to confess that Better Half is a veritable gold-mine of interesting (but useless) information. As far as I am conscious,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], there are indeed NO references to the use of credit cards in Dickens, Tolstoy, Hardy, Proust alternatively DH Lawrence. Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke was a female of considerable fiscal clout and affect, but I believe she favoured the agreeable old cheque-book for her important purchases.
Wikipedia cites 'Looking Backward', a utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, which emerged in 1887, This novel has no less than 11 occurrences of 'credit card',[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], but it is illegible what form these cards took. By the 1920s, although, there was a kind of magnate credit schemes in the US. Early examples included schemes to sell oil to car landlords; by 1938 several companies were beginning to adopt each other's cards. Early cards were published on paper card, and were cozy to forge.
I am beginning to think that the most promising explanation for the credit card mentioned in 'Day of the Locust' was something called the Charga-Plate. This ancestor of the modern plastic card was in use in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. It comprised a 2?" × 1?" rectangle of canvas metal, similar to a naval dog tag, and was embossed with the customer's name, city and state. According to Wikipedia:-
' It held a small paper card for a signature. In recording a buy, the panel was laid into a rest in the imprinter, with a periodical "charge slip" positioned on top of it. The log of the transaction embodied one impression of the embossed information, made by the imprinter pressing an inked bandage against the charge slip'
That naturally sounds like a form of credit card to me.
Apparently these Charga-Plates were published at the bigger merch