Rosie The Riveter was born on this day in 1920.

Well, one of them.

And maybe on this day. All of those diet claims about centenarians and their lifestyles could be suspect if so many are fraud or clerical error the data are meaningless. No one is even sure when Rose Will Leigh, the original archetype for "Rosie the Riveter", was born.

The B-24 Liberator bomber consisted of 450,000 parts held together by 360,000 rivets of 550 different sizes. It weighed 18 tons. During World War II, Henry Ford's Willow Run plant in Michigan produced 8,685 of them, thanks to 42,000 employees working around the clock.



Rose was one. Naomi Parker was another. The photo inspiration for the famous "We Can Do It!" poster was likely Naomi Parker of California.


They not only weren't the same people, they weren't even attached in culture of the time. The poster doesn't mention Rosie but Rosie as an archetype was in movie serials played in theaters all across the nation. That link only happened decades later and due to journalists.

We know how many B-24s were produced because science and engineering are empirical. We don't know how many centenarians there are because government is not. Most in culture today don't even know the We Can Do It! posted and Rosie The Riveter were different. Yet everyone in the 1940s and 1950s knew that.

It's just one example of why decades from now you'll read claims by history majors about today and think, "What are you talking about? That's not what happened at all."

Then they'll say because it was on TV or social media, that's the archive and it must be true and you are just an old fuddy-duddy with a subjective viewpoint.