The Big Apple

Over the years, there have been many theories about how New York City came to be called “The Big Apple.” Some say it comes from the former well-to-do families who sold apples on the city’s streets to make ends meet during the Great Depression. Another account posits that the term comes from a famous 19th-century brothel madam named Eve, whose girls were cheekily referred to as her “Big Apples.” But the nickname actually springs from a catchphrase used in the 1920s by The Morning Telegraph sports writer John J. Fitz Gerald in his horse racing column, “Around the Big Apple.” Beginning on February 18, 1924, he began every column with the header, “The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There’s only one Big Apple. That’s New York.”

At that time, the jockeys and trainers of smaller horses were said to want to make a “Big Apple,” which was their term for the big money prizes at larger races in and around New York City.

Fitz Gerald reportedly first heard “The Big Apple” used to describe New York’s racetracks by two African American stable hands at the New Orleans Fair Grounds, as he explained in his inaugural “Around the Big Apple” column: “Two dusky stable hands were leading a pair of thoroughbreds around the ‘cooling rings’ of adjoining stables at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans and engaging in desultory conversation. ‘Where y’all goin’ from here?’ queried one. ‘From here we’re headin’ for The Big Apple,’ proudly replied the other. ‘Well, you’d better fatten up them skinners or all you’ll get from the apple will be the core,’ was the quick rejoinder.” Fitz Gerald took that colloquialism and applied it to his column, where it quickly began to gain traction.

Once the term had entered the vocabularies of societies up north, its popularity slowly spread outside of the horse-racing context, and everything from nightclubs in Harlem to hit songs and dances about the city were named after “The Big Apple.” Most notably, New York jazz musicians in the 1930s, who had a habit of using the nickname to reference their hometown in their songs, helped the nickname spread beyond the northeast.

Throughout the mid-20th century, it remained New York City’s nickname however it had fallen out of fashion in the 50’s and 60’s until it was officially adopted and re-launched by the city in the 1970s. The New York Convention & Visitors Bureau hoped that using the moniker would brighten the image of an economically downtrodden and crime-ridden city in decline and revive the tourist economy. In 1997, to give Fitz Gerald his (somewhat unjust) due, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani signed legislation naming the corner where Fitz Gerald and his family lived at West 54th Street and Broadway between 1934 and 1963 “Big Apple Corner”

A BYTE OF THE APPLE

Apple Computers, Inc. was founded on April 1, 1976, by college dropouts Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who attended the Homebrew Computer Club together; a computer hobbyist group that gathered in California’s Menlo Park from 1975. Wozniak had seen the MIT computers and kits and wanted to build something that was more user friendly.

Jobs and Wozniak started out building the Apple I in Jobs’ garage and sold them without a monitor, keyboard, or casing until 1977. Then came the Apple II, which revolutionised the computer industry with the introduction of the first-ever colour graphics.

Now in the twenty first century you can’t hear the word ‘apple’ without thinking of computers. The Apple Computers brand and it’s products, most notably the iPhone has now become as ubiquitous to the word apple as the fruit itself. The company has become one of the most popular and profitable of all time with a net worth of $2.08 trillion, this is a higher market cap than most countries GDP (gross domestic produce) and Apple creates more revenue than countries like Italy, Brazil and Canada. So why is the largest tech company on the planet called Apple?

There are many theories to this but the answer is actually more straightforward than you think, Steve Jobs liked apples.

When the company was first being set up, Jobs had come up with the name while on one of his fruitarian diets, where he had spent some time in Oregon at a place called the “apple orchard” which apparently was some sort of commune. While travelling back with co creator Steve Wozniak from this commune he suggested the name Apple Computers because it sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

There was also a practical consideration when choosing this name. When the company was founded in 1976, most companies would choose names that would appear first in the phone book starting with the A’s, so Apple