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Show Twas This Way 88 By LYLE SPENCER Western Newspaper Union. Wrapped in Cellophane LITERALLY everything from darning needles to oil-burning furnaces are delivered wrapped in cellophane. The last ten years have seen the rise of this amazing paper which has brought millions to its exploiters and a new sales argument argu-ment to manufacturers. The honor of its discovery belongs be-longs to Dr. J. E. Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist who was born in 1872 and educated at the University of Bern. Along about 1900, while he was working in a textile factory in France, his boss gave him the job of inventing a tablecloth impervious im-pervious to dirt. In trying to produce such an ideal fabric, he stumbled on the idea of combining very thin sheets of viscose vis-cose with sheets of cotton cloth. The tablecloth was no good but the thin sheets of viscose proved to be a swell idea. It was the beginning, as Dr. Brandenberger called it, of la cellophane. Cellophane it essentially viscose or modified cellulose solidified into thin sheets instead of threads as in rayon or' artificial silk. Rayon' and cellophane are made by the same process from the same materials, ma-terials, and are really the same thing except that one is in threads and the other in sheets. Neither rayon nor cellophane amounted to much until a way was found to make them moisture-proof. Since then their rise has been rapid, although neither is yet the perfect product it someday will be. " James Bowie and His Fatal Knife JAMES BOWIE was one of the toughest and bloodthirstiest characters char-acters that ever roamed our Southwestern South-western frontier. He was a slave runner, a stage-coach robber, and several times a murderer. But with all that, he invented a new kind of knife that will be remembered long after his notorious character is forgotten. During a street brawl in New Orleans Or-leans one night, Bowie was seriously ser-iously slashed by someone wielding wield-ing a heavy Mexican carving knife. The wound did not teach him to keep out of such fights, but it did set him to thinking about a knife with which he could effectively defend de-fend himself from such attacks. So while he was in bed, he whittled out such a knife from a piece of pine board. When he recovered, he had his wooden knife duplicated in steel by a blacksmith. The "Bowie" knife had a keen, two-edged blade nine inches long with a heavy, notched handle. When he exhibited it around town, the other frontiersmen, who carried long, curved Spanish sabres, laughed at his apparently puny weapon. wea-pon. But when Bowie got in his first fight with it, they soon changed their minds. When his adversary drew back his arm to make a lunge, Bowie instantly thrust the knife into in-to his abdomen and disembowelled him before he knew he had been struck. Within a few years, the knife and its owner had become feared and respected all along the frontier. No man dared to pick a fight with Jim Bowie. When Texas started its revolt re-volt for independence, he decided at last to go straight, and accepted a commission as colonel in the insurgent in-surgent army. His career was brought to an heroic end in the bloody battle of the Alamo, when the Texas forces were wiped out to the last man. Queen of Intoxicating Liquors CHAMPAGNE is usually associated associat-ed with bright lights, jazz orchestras, or-chestras, and Parisian revels. Yet it was originally concocted by a Benedictine monk, who would undoubtedly un-doubtedly be horrified could he know the reason for champagne's modern popularity. Way back in 1668, Dom Perignon was appointed cellarer and wine-keeper wine-keeper for his monastery. In those days wine was an ordinary table beverage, as it still is in France, and considered a necessity of life. In pursuit of his new duties, the young monk conceived the idea of "marrying" the different wines produced pro-duced in the vineyards around him. He had noticed that one sort of grape imparted fragrance to wine, another generosity, and a third, color. col-or. He also discovered that a piece of cork was a much superior stopper to the old-fashioned flax dipped in oil. By repeated experiment and mixing, he finally evolved an effervescent effer-vescent wine that, unlike the still wine then known, sparkled and bubbled bub-bled when uncorked. After suitable aging, Dom Perignon Perig-non allowed the other monks to sample his new invention. To his pleasant surprise, the popping of corks soon became a familiar sound in the dining hall. News of the wine soon spread to the townspeople nearby, and within a year, the Marquis de Sillery had introduced it in court circles where it immediately became the rage. |