Ashtabula weekly telegraph. (Ashtabula, Ohio) 1880-1886, 1880-06-25
Mrs. BenediCt's New Industry.

Mrs. Benedict is, we presume, a
widow. At any rate in the glimpse we
have of her life no husband appears
upon the scene, and as Mrs. Benedict
has been engaged in what Mr.. Darwin
calls struggle for existence the failure
of her husband-if she has one-to make
himself felt in that struggle reduces him
to zero, so that we may safely regard
the lady as a widow whether or not she
owns tombstone in the cemetery of the
village in which she lives.
Mrs. Benedict's business is that of a
rat-catcher, new profession now fairly
opened to women whom the tyrnnny of
man excludes from the bar and from
Congress, and one which Mrs. Benedict
at least has made lucrative. There have
been rat-catchers before, and in London
there are men engaged in the business
who will go into dark cellar with a
mysterious sack and by arts known only
to themselves persuade innumerable rats
to adjourn their wall meetings for mass
meeting inside the sack. So also there
are various pastes, potions and powders
sold in all cities, each of which is war.
ranted to kill rats with certainty, and to
be rather wholesome and invgorating
than otherwise to any young children
who may chance to make luncheon off
the dishes prepared for the household
vermin. The business of rat extermina-
ton, therefore, is not strictly new, and
yet Mrs. Benedict is fairly entitled to
rank as its inventor at least in an i'm
portant sense. She has raised it to the
dignity of profession; she has given a
certain scientific character to its opera
tions which places the business upon a
level with analytical chemistry, or metal
lurgy, or the more delicate and precise
parts of the mechanical engineers work.
1t has always been easy for house
wives who were troubled with rats to
poison them, bat the problem has been
to induce them to die upon the field of
honor, so to speak-to wit, the kitchen
floor. They have usually preferred to
retire to their inaccessible retreats in
the walls as soon as they have felt the
symptoms of arsenical poisoning, and
the low state of sanitary science pre-
Yailing in their communities is such that
poisoned rats are never properly buried
Or incinerated by their associates. The
problem has been how to kill the rats
without bringing unpleasant odors in
the house. An erratic genius in New
Hampshire once attempted to solve this
problem by preparing an explosive
compound which he believed would so
completely and evenly distribute the
material of which rats are made in the
region round about as to obviate that
difficulty, but his invention failed be-
cause American house walls are not
commonly iron-clad, and the explosions
were destructive of plastering.
Mrs. Benedict has solved the difficulty,
and is entitled TO the honor we give to
an inventor and benefactor. She has
found out how to induce rats to die in u
neat and more or less regular circle on
the kitchen floor or table. Like all in
ventors she is somewhat indebted to
accident. She was engaged, it appears,
in the domestic manufacture of plaster
casts OF various kinds. She nodded
Cupids and other more or less addressed
heathen divinities, which the prevalent
art temper of our people enabled her to
sell among her neighbors. Complaint
having been made of the fragility of
these wares, Mrs. Benedict began a
course of experiments with the hope of
giving BIedlbI uuIdDlllly 10 n0I CtSls'
One of her devices was to mix
wheaton flour with her pulverized
plaster of Paris, so that the
gluten of the flour might make the paste
less brittle. One evening she had visi,
tors, who rang her door-bell just as she
was sitting the mixed plaster and flouI
for the third time by way of mixing
them intimately, as chemists say, She
had already set dish of water at hand,
intending to make an experimental cast
at once, and when the door-bell rune
she hastily removed her apron and went
to welcome her guests, leaving her ma
terials upon the kitchen table. The
guests staid until late bed time, and
when they bade her adieu Mrs Bene,
dict went to bed, without returning tc
| the kitchen.
What happened in the night was this
A rat, shifting the odor of flour, made
his way up tho legs of the table, to the
top, where ne was speedily joined by