TRIFLES THAT WIN WARS

The great stories of today's passing parade have turned from those of little things to the vast historical news of the war. The parade is now in uniform. Yet, here are three trifles, a billiard ball, a glass bottle without a cork, a spider web. And each has a story to tell, which is of real importance to a nation at war. What has a billiard ball to do with world history? Billiards is a game that takes a perfectly level table, a hardwood cue, and about 20 years of practice, and three fine ivory balls. Right after the Civil War, as today, our supply of African ivory was cut off. In the national newspapers appeared an advertisement, a prize of $10,000 to anyone who can discover a substitute material for ivory in the manufacture of billiard balls. Yankee inventors in every corner of the land went to work, mailed their samples into the testing room of the billiard company. Each entry and the box in which it came was carefully numbered, and preparations for the tests began. A billiard ball smacks the others at speeds as high as 22 miles an hour, and it takes a sledgehammer beating. But they started in gently and hopefully like this. And now and then one went into the shape of an egg. It is considered difficult to make a good shot with an egg-shaped billiard ball. For weeks and months the tests went on. Some shattered, some cracked, some chipped, but the process continued until the weary cue man was disgustedly blasting them clear off the table just to bring the hopeless job to its end. A perfectly round ball that had withstood the terrific force of a professional's cue, a substance almost as white and strong as ivory. I believe this to be a material by adding nitric acid to cotton celluloid. Celluloid, man discovering that he could recombine the elements of nature to form new materials, which slowly developed into the vast plastics industry of today, and will lead to a whole age of new and wonderful additions to our daily lives. And today, more important, the plastics allow us to substitute vital parts of the war machine when wartime shortages threaten production on every side. All beginning 75 years ago with a new kind of billiard ball. And how can an empty glass bottle without a stopper affect our lives in today's passing parade? The second story is hidden in a tragic romance forgotten through many a year. It was in 1912, and a young French scientist and his bride were driving home after a day in the country. They were very proud of their big new automobile, which was considered the wonder of the century. Yet to them in that mass of faulty machinery is coming catastrophe. You keep hearing the sound of shattering, splintering glass. You keep hearing your wife moaning, "If my face is destroyed, I want to die." Early automobile accidents always had the same story, glass. She will live, but men will turn away when they see her face. Edward Benedictus suffered more than he deserved. Being a scientist, he tried to plunge into work that would ease his torment, but he was profoundly shaken, obsessed with the sharp memory of the shattered glass, hearing over and over again the crash of metal, tinkling of glass. Broken glass. Broken art. A bottle cracked, yet the deadly splinters imprisoned what had been kept inside the bottle. The simple fluid called collodion, the old-fashioned stuff that farmers used to preserve their eggs with. And because the stopper had not been on the bottle, the stuff had dried. But how could this familiar liquid serve to keep the glass from shattering into knife-like fragments? A thin coating of collodion. His obsession now became to conquer glass, and in the tiny laboratory he worked in silence, constantly thinking of the broken windshield that had destroyed his wife's beauty. He worked now with large panes of glass. Had an unimportant bottle in a laboratory held a secret that would someday save human life? The guess was right. Collodion, when evaporating, leaves a deposit that holds glass together, and was to become the superbly valuable guardian called shatterproof glass, becoming the great development that took away the chief horror of an accident on wheels. And in the grimmest struggle of our history, becoming a safeguard of the soldier's precious life, even in crash landings like this. All the product of a valueless trifle, a bottle that once stood on the shelf of a man who hated glass. Finally, we come to the spider web, third trifle hiding the story of a thing that helps us wage a stupendous war. Most of the time a spider web is just one of those eternally cursed things that you walk into when you're out for a romantic stroll. And the creator that manufactures them is probably one of the least lovable creatures God ever made. Despite his atrocious habits, however, many a patriotic spider has been drafted into the war effort. They are fed the finest quality of flies and gnats, and in general they are treated like star boarders, each guest being given a private room to himself. The spiders, when asked to share a bed together, have a brotherly habit of eating each other up. Now and then they are gently taken out, told to lie still on their backs, and by tickling their spinning machine a little, they are encouraged to manufacture the most precious strand of silk on earth. It took many hours to photograph this simple operation, which doesn't bother the spider a bit, by the way. And the silk is so delicate that, save with the use of special devices, even our camera could not photograph it. The spider thread is so slender that 2 oz of it would stretch across the continent of North America. But despite all the wisdom of science, no machine can make a thread so fine or so strong. For this silk is 300% tougher than the hardest metal ever made. Only a spider web, commonest trifle of all. Yet because the human hair once used is entirely too coarse for the powerful instruments of this war, the spider web is vital. Right this guy to cross the eyepiece, no torpedo could be fired with accuracy. Without it, our anti-aircraft equipment would never be among the best in the world. Nor could the range finders of our mighty guns be of any use at all. Three trifles that affect all the history of the passing parade. A billiard ball becoming the plastics that are changing the materials of the world. A glass bottle becoming the shatterproof glass that protects a million lives. And the web of a spider becoming the guiding line at the heart of the finest bombing sight ever invented by man.