The Durant news. (Durant, Miss.) 1882-1985, 1942-05-21
BEHIND THE SCENES IN
AMERICAN BUSINESS"
By JOHN CRADDOCK

NEW 1Ohh, Way Io-lIN0 I'LL
both consumer-goods and industrial fields,
the week brings abundant evidence that good
old american ingenuity" which we Am.
orleans have so proudly hailed for many
generations-and which the present war il
putting to its sternest tests right in there
pitching, trading punches with Mars. 4
specially shop here held an ingenuity show"
that revealed: a wool-like cloth that's made
of soy beans a victory electric fan,
with blades Of masonite, and with silver in
stead of copper in the cord-wire a sun
lamp bulb which needs no reflector or metal
stand because the reflector is inside the buff.
which screws into an ordinary electric out.
let a clothes brush with no bristles at all
its made of plastic and cleans by friction.
There'll be a lot of that. Materials due for a
terrific upsurge in just this sort of thing are
glass, plastics, and wood.
On the industrial front American ingenui-
ty is batting out home runs at a lively rate.
One example (nameless) is an auto parts
company which, undertaking shell manufac-
ture, found j thad to utilize subcontractors
in surrounding cities, so organized a motor
truck route that now covers a 125-mile route
every day, touching all six bases and con-
shutting, in effect, a 125-mile assembly
line" -. And General Electric now is turn
ing out a half-ton of mercury a day that il
so pure the purity has to be expressed like
this: SO. 99995 per cent! Formerly raw mer-
curry came from Spain, Italy and Austria;
now it is made from cinnabar ore from Call
fornia.
MIDGET FIGHTERS]Maybe you wouldt
know them by name but the smallest SOL
diers on the battlefront of the United Ma
ton are called Saccharomyces Cerevisiae.
Just call them yeast cells" for short. So
tiny that whole divisions can use a mic
roscope slide for a parade ground, these an
imal like soldier organisms have gone about
for victory. Scientists in the Schenley Re-
search Institute make a career of giving
them the best possible care. That means
sterilized surroundings, controlled tempera-
lures, the proper nutrient solutions for food.
Care like that makes for healthy. uncon-e
taminated yeast and the action of yeast is
vital in converting grain to ethyl alcohol
essential in the manufacture of smokeless
gunpowder.
BITS O. BUSINESS Nations depart
ment store sales margins over same weeks
of 1941 still %dwindling. For May 9 week it
was only 6 per cent Movie industry is
on a hurry-up production schedule, not
knowing when war curtailment sword will
fall for one reason or another. Has its big
gest inventory in history-$6O, OOO, 900 worth
of finished productions and $3.50 0 0 900
worth a-shooting . Glenn L.. Martin COM
n n1ono rrol,c%;or %h;C - will ho four
times that of 1941 -. Johnson and johnson
the surgical dressing makers, have develop
ed a cotton cloth that is neither spun nor
woven, just pressed. It's not to be put on
the general market now, though it's ready,
because various divisions of the armed SER
vices are using it Good idea: by psyche
logically prepared to make allowances in
your 1912 budget for enforced savings as
well as taxes . Percentage of all stee!
being produced that is required directly for
war needs is 98.6 symbolically, that's
blood temperature of red-blooded Ameri-
cans, except maybe when they're boiling
to grind the Axis!
COLLABORATION-It becomes increas-
ingly clear that the country's critical rubber
problem today can be met only with about
conservation of the rubber now in use. Yet
even more than that is needed for the '.long
pull to insure against this sort of thing ever
happening again. The joining of hands Of
collegiate and industrial researches, which
has wrought well for this country in the
past, has now been effected to tackle this
problem, with the B.. F. Goodrich company
providing financial aid to Cornell university
in seeking a long-term solution through
possible new botanical sources of rubber in
the western hemisphere. In announcing the