Word: wool
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Britain's women are not yet down to dhotis. But the British Board of Trade, adding up the average, found that in one year the average woman now buys: one dress, two pairs of gloves, four ounces of knitting wool, two yards of material, one pair of knickers (underdrawers), no vests (undershirts), one-fifth of a nightdress, one-fourth of a suit, one-third of a petticoat...
...clothes moth. It has been known to eat house insulation as well as clothes, rugs, etc. (it is destructive in the larval stage only). Best weapons against the moth are sunlight, moth balls or flakes, paradichlorobenzene. Chemists have recently developed effective new methods for permanent mothproofing of wool - for postwar...
...Wool pants that keep a sharp crease, even in the rain...
Monsanto Chemical Co.'s Donald Howard Powers, the 43-year-old Princeton graduate who achieved these homely miracles, shrugged them off as only a beginning. He has already developed other chemicals which double the wear of wool and cotton, make textiles mildew-proof...
...Very fine grains of silica (in visible to the naked eye), deposited on the threads, make snagged threads cling to their neighbors instead of unraveling. The same chemical is used to put a lusterless coating (which must be renewed from time to time) on blue serge and to impregnate wool so that it achieves a durable crease when pressed under heat. To make wool shrink-proof, Powers first wets it to open the fibers, then injects a resin inside the hollowed fibers. This stiffens the tiny, fuzzy barbs that stick out of the side of a woolen fiber and prevents...