The Women's Guide to ID Badge Placement (According to the Government in 1947)

via NASA. Digging into NASA’s Apollo-era history of nuclear propulsion for manned deep space missions, I found another gem in the history of the government not really knowing how to address women’s clothing. This time, we’re talking beauty and badges. For the back story on this image, we need to the Plum Brook Station before it was a NASA centre, all the way back to the Second World War when it was the Plum Brook Ordnance Works. In 1941, some9,100 acres of land was acquired by the US government near Sandusky, Ohio. Operating as a government contractor, the Trojan Powder Company built a munitions factory called the Plum Brook Ordnance Works. For three years during the Second World War, Plum Brook manufactured explosives, namely trinitrotoluene (TNT), dinitrotoluene (DNT), and pentolite. The factory was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week (minus a handful of short work stoppages) from just before America’s entrance into the Second World War in 1941 to the war’s end in 1945. In that time, more than eighteen million hours of labour produced some billion pounds of ordnance. The end of the war brought the end of Plum Brook, at least for a moment. The site was shut down and prepared for a return to the government. That transfer came in 1946 when control of the site was transferred to the Ordnance Department in 1946. Work resumed, but the focus was starting to change. In the wake of a war that ended with the atomic bomb, American scientists were starting to consider other uses from atomic power, including propulsion. It was during this period that the Plum Brook Ordnance News, a local paper, printed an infographic telling women how to best wear their identification badges.