Word: beeswax
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Most artists are fussy about their paints, but few go to such lengths as Berlin-born Karl Zerbe. His pictures, which hang in 21 U.S. museums, are painted in colors mixed with hot beeswax over a stove, and afterwards cooked into the canvas with an electric heater. The Greeks had a word for it: encaustic. The Egyptians and Greeks liked encaustic for its permanency, used it for murals and mummy portraits. But since the 10th Century few painters had bothered with...
Using penicillin dissolved in water, treatment was gradually worked down to three hypodermic injections two hours apart. Then came the discovery, announced last year (TIME, Sept. 11), that penicillin mixed with beeswax and peanut oil is disseminated slowly through the body, keeping the penicillin content of blood high for hours. The Public Health Service acted swiftly. To 137 doctors throughout the land went instructions and the penicillin mixture with the request that they try single injections of 200,000 units (2 cc.) on as many patients as possible and report the results. Back came results on 1,060 cases: over...
...prolong penicillin's stay in the blood, Army Captain Monroe James Romansky and Technician (4th Grade) George E. Rittman suspend the drug in a mixture of beeswax and peanut oil and inject it into a muscle. They find that the suspension maintains a good level in the blood for six or seven hours after injection and keeps appearing in the urine up to 32 hours. The drug is extracted from the urine with banana oil, from the banana oil with a special phosphate solution...
...summer, on their farm at Ringwood, N.J., they built a 250-foot slide from the top of the orchard across the lawn, greased the slide with beeswax, and sailed down it "at great speed and with wild howls of glee." Ambassador Whitelaw Reid and Presidential Candidate Samuel J. Tilden tried it once when "both of them [were] rather well along in years." Says Author Hewitt: "It is a wonder that they were not hurt...
Natural shellac is produced in much the same way as beeswax. It is a resin secreted by insects called Laccifer lacca. After feeding on the sap of certain cultivated Oriental trees, the insects coat the tree twigs with an exudation called "lac" (from the Sanskrit word laksha, meaning 100,000, referring to the thousands of insects in a colony). Indian natives scrape the lac off the twigs, heat it in cloth bags, strain off the melted shellac. The final product is a flaky substance that dissolves readily in alcohol and, when spread on a surface, dries quickly to a hard...