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Show Lifetime Is Spent In Constant Search For New Products MINNEAPOLIS. - A 76-year-old Minneapolis scientist has been working for 35 years to keep 20,000.-000 20,000.-000 people warm in winter and cool in summer. And it all started because be-cause he realized a youthful ambition ambi-tion to help the nation's farmers reduce their threshing costs. When George H. Ellis was 16. and a mechanic at Sauk Centre, Minn., V La during the eighties, eight-ies, high threshing thresh-ing costs were ruining farmers. So he invented a machine to make binder twine out of straw. This reduced re-duced threshing costs and saved farmers many times the $10,000 he received for George Ellis J0"- In 1906, necessity neces-sity of utilizing waste products from his twine manufacturing process sent Ellis on another search. This quest resulted in the first insulation board ever produced out of flax straw fibers too short to be made into twine. He formed his own company com-pany to develop the new product but it took a full-time salesman 18 months to sell the first insulation board to a home builder. Flax became difficult to obtain, so resourceful. Mr. Ellis substituted wood fibers for straw and a new worldwide board insulation Industry was conceived. Estimated value of the 34 different companies which grew out of his invention is now $150,000,000. More than 20,000,000,-000 20,000,000,-000 square feet now are in use, mainly In homes insulated against heat and cold. Government Commission. Retiring in 1916, Ellis soon grew bored, then accepted a commission from the U. S. government for research re-search in Panama. He later engaged en-gaged in private research all over the world. In 1924 he inined Min. nesota and Ontario Paper company's compa-ny's insulite division as consultant engineer, the post he still holds. Necessity for a preservative for insulation board next resulted in one of the inventor's most dramatic and productive researches. Exhausting all available library material on preservatives pre-servatives he deckled to consult scientists sci-entists at the Smithsonian institution institu-tion in Washington, D. C. Like a detective hot on a clue, he followed tip after tip until his interest was aroused by the institution's institu-tion's ancient Egyptian mummies. Searching for the secret of their remarkable lasting qualities he learned that asphalt-dipped bandages band-ages used for wrapping the dead and their similarly treated caskets had much to do with their preservation. preserva-tion. The result was asphalt-treated insulite board with its preservative preserva-tive qualities, particularly against moisture condensation. Although he has 150 patents and a lifetime of research behind him, Ellis El-lis is working on new industrial developments de-velopments which he prefers to keep secret |