Jewish Invention Myths: The Shopping Cart
Sometimes over the course of checking the various jewish invention myths: I get things wrong. The reason this can happen is if a prior invention or innovation is rather obscure. Happily, people are around to correct such errors when they occur, and I am more happy to be corrected. One such instance is the case of the shopping cart.
In this case I am indebted to @icefire99 on X for offering a timely correction to my prior belief that the shopping cart was invented by a jew.
Let’s begin with the jewish claim.
‘MNews’ claims the following:
‘Sylvan Nathan Goldman – Shopping cart
Nathan Goldman, the owner of a supermarket in Oklahoma, patented the first shopping cart in 1936. Later he also invented a grocery sacker, a milk bottle rack, and considerably improved the modern shopping experience.’ (1)
This is supported by ‘Boulder Jewish News’. (2)
The basis of this claim is well-explained by Wikipedia when it writes that:
‘One of the first shopping carts was introduced on June 4, 1937, the invention of Sylvan Goldman, owner of the Humpty Dumpty supermarket chain in Oklahoma. One night, in 1936, Goldman sat in his office wondering how customers might move more groceries. He found a wooden folding chair and put a basket on the seat and wheels on the legs. Goldman and one of his employees, a mechanic named Fred Young, began tinkering. Their first shopping cart was a metal frame that held two wire baskets. Since they were inspired by the folding chair, Goldman called his carts "folding basket carriers". Another mechanic, Arthur Kosted, developed a method to mass-produce the carts by inventing an assembly line capable of forming and welding the wire. The cart was awarded patent number 2,196,914 on April 9, 1940 (Filing date: March 14, 1938), titled, "Folding Basket Carriage for Self-Service Stores".’ (3)
The problem with this is that while Goldman did invent a shopping trolley – and given Fred Young and Arthur Kosted seemingly did most of the actual work while Sylvan Goldman took all the credit – in 1936/1937: they were not even the first to do so in the United States.
In fact, on 4th August 1931 a patent was issued by the US Patents Office to a non-jew named J. V. Longan for a ‘Shopping Wagon’ (Patent Number 1,817,260). (4)
Now you might object to the idea that the ‘shopping wagon’ is not the same as a ‘shopping cart’ but as both terms derive from the same type of vehicle (cart is roughly the same thing as a wagon) then we can only conclude that we are talking about a similar thing.
After all what is a ‘shopping wagon’ but an early version of a ‘shopping cart’?
Scratch another jewish invention myth.
References
(1) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions
(2) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_cart#History
(4) Index of Patents issued from the United States Patent Office, 1931, p. 1312; also Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, Vol. 409, p. 286