I found two stories on the same day, from separate papers, that turned out to be one story. Twice.

First up, a weapon disguised as an accessory, a weapon adopted by police, and the speech that connected the two on purpose.

The photo shows Frances Cummings and Frank Streich of Chicago demonstrating a new product: a "safety pen," which looked completely ordinary and was actually a small gun loaded with tear gas. The idea, plainly stated in the caption: no flapper needs to walk home from an auto ride if her driver gets fresh. She just aims and fires.

In a separate paper, the same wire service ran a different demonstration. Police officers John W. Young and John Quill showed a room full of police chiefs how a tear gas club worked, built to be carried the same way a patrolman carries a night stick. One officer aimed it at the other, point blank. The caption is almost cheerful about it: "not nice, but certainly carries the wallop."

Two days before that police demonstration, a former U.S. Army chemical warfare officer stood in front of that same convention, the International Association of Police Chiefs, and made the pitch directly. Women could handle "mashers" on the street, he argued, but were helpless against a robber in their own homes without tear gas. His reasoning was identical for police: tear gas works faster than a bullet, leaves no lasting injury, and doesn't require the skill a gun does. Same solution, same speech, both audiences at once.

And this wasn't just talk. Two months earlier, Pittsburgh had already started equipping officers with these devices, a manufacturer's vice president personally handing them out to traffic officers, and forty-six of the gas guns already in use at the Western Penitentiary. The pitch line for the product was almost cartoonish in its confidence: it made one officer "as good as 15 men."

Four documents, roughly two months apart, tell one continuous story: a chemical warfare veteran makes the public case, a manufacturer starts equipping police departments, and a consumer version gets marketed to women, all inside a single summer.

Elsewhere on the exact same date, a London paper ran something considerably gentler. London's schoolchildren had started their summer holiday, and the boys headed straight for the Serpentine. A policewoman disapproved of the scene enough to be photographed mid-gesture, and the paper's own caption did the joke for us: you may drive a boy from water, but you can't make him dress.

A syndicated comic strip running the same day landed on nearly the same joke from a different angle: a city cousin shows up at the old swimming hole in a fancy bathing costume, trying to impress the local kids, and gets nothing but mockery for it.

Why was it so hard 100 years ago to keep their clothes on?

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Waitsburg Times, July 23, 1926
Rochester Journal and the Post Express, July 23, 1926
Morris Herald-News, July 23, 1926
The Daily Sketch, July 23, 1926
The Times, July 21, 1926
The Pittsburgh Press, May 23, 1926