From War Room to Living Room Samples
During the Second World War, Vesta Oral Stoudt (1891–1966) was one of five million American women who contributed to the war effort by working in the defense industry or a commercial factory to replace men who were away fighting. Stoudt worked at the Green River Ordnance Plant near Dixon, Illinois, where she packed boxes of cartridges used to fire rifle grenades. Each box was sealed with a strip of paper with a tab extending from of the box. The box was then dipped in wax to keep the cartridges from becoming damp. In the field, a soldier would grab the paper tab and pull it to break the wax seal and open the box.
Stoudt, two of whose eight children were serving in the Navy, noticed that the paper tab often was not strong enough to break the wax seal, and it would break before the box was open. This worried her. If the tab tore under combat conditions, the soldier would have to open the box with his fingernails or a knife. She was concerned that when the tab broke, the extra time it would take to get a box open could be the difference between life and death for a soldier under fire.
Stoudt took her concern about the weak paper tabs to her supervisors and suggested that the boxes needed to be sealed with a stronger cloth strip that was less likely to fail. She also showed the tab problem and her solution to government inspectors at the plant. They all told her that the government knew what it was doing and would not be interested in changing the sealing tape.
Undeterred, Stoudt wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 10, 1943. In the letter, she suggested the use of "a strong cloth tape… and make tabs of the same" so that the box could be ripped open quickly and reliably. She even included a drawing in her letter to make clear what she was proposing. Stoudt explained that she had shown her suggestion to government inspectors at the ordnance plant who agreed that her idea worked, but they had told her that the government would not be interested in changing the sealing tape.
Roosevelt saw value in Stoudt's idea and passed it on to the War Production Board's Ordnance Department. The Ordnance Department must have been impressed because only five weeks later on March 26, 1943, Howard Coonley, a representative of the Board, wrote to Stoudt saying that they had found her idea "of exceptional merit" and would put new sealing strips into production. Vesta Stoudt received the Chicago Tribune's War Worker Award for her contribution to the war effort and then faded from the historical record.
Johnson & Johnson was a company heavily involved in manufacturing materials to support the war. Because of their reputation and experience in manufacturing adhesive surgical tape, the Johnson & Johnson-affiliated company Revolite was chosen to produce Vesta Stoudt's new sealing tape. The new tape was originally called duck tape. It became known as duct tape only after the war.
To read more, order From War Room to Living Room Everyday Innovations from the Military from Amazon.com
The First World War devastated the culture of the early twentieth century. The Austro-Hungarian Empire vanished. So did the Ottoman Empire and Tsarist Russia. The optimism of the Victorian Era changed to the cynicism of those who had been in the trenches. Yet another victim of the war was the handkerchief, eventually reduced to insignificance by a product of the war: the Kleenex facial tissue.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the handkerchief was in the pockets and purses of every proper gentleman and lady. But the handkerchief today has been mostly replaced by disposable facial tissue. In 2020, trade in handkerchiefs worldwide was $186 million as opposed to a facial tissue market of $12 billion.
The facial tissue story begins with the need for a substitute for cotton. Ernst Mahler (1887-1967) was hired by Kimberly-Clark in 1914. Kimberly-Clark was then a paper manufacturing company. On a tour of Europe in late 1914, cut short by the beginning of World War I, Mahler and a team from Kimberly-Clark found creped wadding, a cellulose-based substitute for cotton. They brought it back to the United States, improved it, and trademarked it as Cellucotton.
The needs of the war created a shortage of cotton, increasing its price. Kimberly-Clark began to manufacture Cellucotton in bulk at the rate of 380 feet to 500 feet per minute and sold it to the government as an excellent substitute for cotton for staunching wounds. This application later led to the invention of the Kotex feminine pad. But Cellucotton had other uses.
Chemical warfare, in the form of poisonous gases, was first used in the First World War. Soldiers had to be supplied with gas masks. Cellucotton was used as a filter for these gas masks. Gas masks required that Cellucotton be produced as sheets, not wads which could be used for bandages, to pack the masks. These sheets would eventually lead to facial tissues.
C. A. "Bert" Fourness had oversight of the gas mask project. He came up with a method of making the Cellucotton smooth and soft. This involved both a change in the composition of the Cellucotton and ironing it to form it into sheets. This was done originally by running the Cellucotton through a wringer washing machine.
After the war was over, in 1918, the need for Cellucotton for bandages plummeted. Kimberly-Clark bought up surplus Cellucotton from the government. They also had Cellucotton production facilities. How to make use of this supply?
To read more, order From War Room to Living Room Everyday Innovations from the Military from Amazon.com