Word: spider
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...1890s reporter Ralph Delahaye Paine, famed young Yale rowing man breaking into journalism on the Philadelphia Press, was inspired to perpetrate a monumental hoax. With rich detail he told readers about one Pierre Grantaire who made a good living by raising and selling spiders for the spurious cobwebbing of wine bottles. After visiting the "spider farm" on Lancaster Pike outside Philadelphia, Reporter Paine said that 4,000 spiders of the species Nephila plumipes (who spun the "finest webs") were busy working for M. Grantaire, that he shipped them to customers in "little paper boxes, so many dozen in each crate...
Though Mr. Paine forgot about it. the spider story continued to turn up here & there. Last year, the monthly Mechanics & Handicraft featured the story in its July number under the title "Webs for Sale." This time Pierre Grantaire was back in his native France, operating from a "little village in the department of the Loire...
...native of New York, Miss Niesen is going west to live, accompanied by her. Great Dane, two cats, numerous puppies, and a South American Ringtailed Spider Monkey. Those who heard Miss Niesen's radio interview last Wednesday are already acquainted with the last mentioned member of her travelling menagerie; the monkey stole the show...
Usually Henry A. Fowler, technician in charge of instruments, has a supply of live spiders bottled for immediate use. A "lazy, male spider" will not produce the tiny, uniformly strong web which is required, so small female spiders must be caught...
...often difficult to make a spider spin its web. Placing the spider on a table, Fowler harasses it to the point of fury with a pencil. The spider then drops off the table edge, spinning a web above it, which is handled with tweezers and a telescopic eyepiece...