In late 1953 the Swanson company had 260 tons of frozen turkey in ten refrigerated railroad cars. The cars had to keep moving to stay cold.

A salesman named Gerry Thomas proposed a solution. Sell the turkey as a frozen dinner in a partitioned aluminum tray. The first run was 5,000 trays at 98 cents. In 1954, the first full year, Swanson sold ten million.

The invention is disputed. The company’s bacteriologist and the Swanson brothers have also been credited. The tray itself was borrowed from airline food service.

In 1947 a restaurant called Red’s Giant Hamburg in Springfield, Missouri, opened a window for drivers. It is identified as the first drive-through restaurant.

In 1948 Harry and Esther Snyder opened In-N-Out in Baldwin Park, California. Drivers ordered through a two-way speaker. Nobody left the car.

By the 1970s, drive-throughs had surpassed drive-ins. The format recombined three American things: the car, the road, and the counter.

Apple introduced the iPhone in January 2007. Steve Jobs described the goal as to “reinvent the phone.”

The phone was a recombination. It joined an iPod music player, a cell phone, and a mobile internet device, along with a camera.

None of those parts was new. The combination was, and it reached stores on June 29, 2007.

American fast-food restaurants and school cafeterias hand out a utensil that is two things at once. It is a spork.

The word appeared in 1909 in a supplement to the Century Dictionary. It is a blend of spoon and fork. Similar utensils had been made since the late 19th century, and patents date to at least 1874.

The word was later registered as a trademark. It became an ordinary word anyway.

In 1982 a NASA engineer named Lonnie Johnson was testing a heat pump at home. A stream of water shot across the bathroom. His first thought was, “This would make a great squirt gun.”

The prototype was built from PVC pipe, Plexiglas, and a two-liter soda bottle. Toy companies rejected it for years.

In 1989 Johnson fired the gun across a conference room at Larami. The company president said, “wow.” The toy launched in 1990 as the Power Drencher. Renamed the Super Soaker, it did 200 million dollars in sales in 1991.

Since 1972, Reese’s peanut butter cups have run ads built on one gag. Two people collide. “You got peanut butter in my chocolate!” “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!”

The slogan sealed the logic. “Two great tastes that taste great together.” The candy itself was a 1928 recombination. H.B. Reese pressed Hershey’s chocolate around his own peanut butter filling.

Google Scholar carries a motto under its search box. “Standing on the shoulders of giants.”

The phrase is old. The idea appears in the 12th century with Bernard of Chartres. Isaac Newton made it famous in a 1675 letter. The meaning fits the tool. Research builds on prior work.

In the Bronx in the 1970s, DJs built new music from old records. Grandmaster Flash perfected the method. He played two copies of the same record and toggled between them, catching the same drum break each time.

The result sounded like a beat that never stopped. In 1981 he recorded “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel.” Three turntables cut at least nine records into one track.