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Show Is It Raining? Just Drop Coin New Vending Machine Hands Out Umbrellas GARY. INB. No need to worry about sudden showers. Just purchase pur-chase an umbrella from a vending machine at a department store, depot, airport even at a baseball game! Such a possibility may become be-come a reality soon, all because of an idea that came to Jane Burgess, an Indianapolis, Ind., housewife and mother of three children, reports National Patent Council. Mrs. Burgess's idea came to her out of necessity. Caught in the rain without an umbrella and without money enough with her to purchase even the cheapest umbrella she could find, Mrs. Burgess began thinking someone should invent a throw-away umbrella that would cost well under a dollar. The idea haunted her until at Christmastime last year she came across a little folding Christmas bell. There was the answer, and her idea materialized. material-ized. She and her husband, Bob, a railroad rail-road conductor, developed the idea. Then they took their umbrella to a friend. Curtiss McCoy, a toy and gadget manufacturer. He liked what he saw, and by early summer their product was ready for marketing. The product consisted of a neat packet of black, accordion-pleated, waterproof paper, 16 inches long,' and a wooden rod 19 inches long. -Unfold the paper into a circle, snap together, insert the rod in a metal holder, and the result is a serviceable service-able "papersol." With their idea ready to be marketed mar-keted and already accepted by one Indianapolis store, the inventive Burgess had to face still another an-other problem. There was no machine ma-chine available that would fold paper pa-per into accordion pleats. So Bob went to work and, with his typewriter, type-writer, scored paper so that it could be evenly pleated. Later the job was turned over to a company wi'h machinery ma-chinery for scoring, until a machine for such pleating could be manufactured. |