Book Board Chat

Good Afternoon from Penn's Woods where it has been a beautiful day.

June Kamm (dupo) What Nyad did is an incredible feat for anyone let alone someone 64 years old. I have a lot of respect for her - the same as I do for someone who makes it to the Olympics. They don't even have to win a medal, just getting there is a lot of hard work, skill and talent. Someone once asked me if I would ever want to climb Mt. Everest and I said no. It was a dream of his but it wasn't something up my alley but for him climbing Mt. Everest was something he wanted to do because it was there.

I think Nyad summed up her swim quite well in this, both as to what it meant to her and as an inspiration to others. Might not be something I would want to do but I am no about to knock what she accomplished. She made her dream come true and not all of us can say we did that. I like the message she has in doing it . . .

"It's been a thrilling journey,'' Nyad said, urging fellow Baby Boomers that it's never too late to pursue personal goals and dreams. "The truth is, we're just coming into our own. I wanted this swim not to just be about an athletic record, but a lesson to live life fully engaged, to be alert and alive every day."

In October she is going to swim for 48 hours in a specially built Italian lap pool in New York City's Times Square to raise money for victims of Hurricane Sandy.

carol (bookdelle) hahaha! Don't worry there are still young people who know what Labor Day is about as well as what unions gave us in terms of 8 hour work days and 40 hour weeks. If Swifty didn't learn about strikebreakers and the horrors in school, I know he would have in reading the many, many biographies and history books of captains of industry.

Like many others here when I went to school we started school after Labor Day but by the time I had reached HS, school started that Thursday or Friday before Labor Day. The main reason for starting a couple of days before Labor Day seemed to be in order to give out free tickets to the County Fair.

Schools here begin with week before Labor Day and the teachers start the week prior to that. However, the city school district changed their calendar last year and now start mid-August. This year they started Aug 12. and the change was made in order to allow more time to prepare for the state standardized testing in the spring. The earlier start allows for the schools to be closed for more time during the winter which is supposed to save money during the heating season. In PA, the older schools do not have AC.

Like many others here I remember the days of when everything had to ironed because perma-press was not a common feature in clothes. My mother had a Mangle Iron Machine which was great for sheets, table cloths, napkins etc.

I found out how great perma-press was in the mid-1960s when I wore a school uniform to HS and was responsible by that age for taking care of it. When the entrance exam was administered was when you also ordered the uniform and it was suggested that you get at least 2 navy serge uniforms and 5 white blouses. The only choice you had was all cotton blouses or perma-press. I ordered 3 of one and 2 of the other or maybe it was vice versa. Anyway those perma-press blouses came out of the dryer ready to wear but the cotton ones needed touch-up ironing, but since the uniform covered almost all of the blouse except for the collar, short sleeves, and a narrow strip down the front. Those wide lapels hide so much that all you had to do with the cotton ones was iron the collar, sleeves, and the strip down the front! LOL

The person to thank for wash-and-wear clothing is Ruth R. Benerito. In 1953, Brooks Brothers manufactured wash-and-wear shirts using a blend of Dacron, polyester, and cotton that was invented by Ruth R. Benerito, which they called "Brooksweave".

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ruth Mary Rogan Benerito (born January 12, 1916) is an American scientist and inventor known for her work related to the textile industry, including the development of wash-and-wear cotton. She holds 55 patents.

Personal life

Ruth Rogan was born and raised in New Orleans. In an age when girls did not usually go on to higher education, her father made sure his daughters received the same education available to boys. She completed high school at age 14 and entered Sophie Newcomb College, Tulane University, at age 15, to study chemistry. She graduated during the Great Depression and hoped to do research, but jobs were not enough and for a time had to teach at local schools in Jefferson Parish, west of New Orleans, before making her name as a research chemist.

Her further studies took her to Bryn Mawr, and back to Newcomb where she taught chemistry while researching advanced quantitative analysis and physical chemistry, organic chemistry, kinetics, and thermodynamics. While working as a teacher, Benerito took night classes to earn her master's degree from Tulane University. During World War II she taught college classes, and she earned her doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago after the war. She married Frank Benerito in 1950 and went to work at the USDA Southern Regional Research Center of the US Department of Agriculture in New Orleans, where she spent most of her career.

In later years, while she was researching cotton fibers, Benerito taught classes part-time at Tulane University and at the University of New Orleans. She retired from the USDA in 1986 but continued to teach part-time at Tulane and the University of New Orleans.

Invention of wrinkle-free fiber

Ruth Benerito is most famous for her work relating to the use of mono-basic acid chlorides in the production of cotton, with which she has 55 patents, which allows for more wrinkle-free and durable clothing. She invented these wash-and-wear cotton fabrics while working at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) laboratories in New Orleans in the 1950s.[1] Before this innovation, a family needed considerable time to iron clothes. Benerito found a way to chemically treat the surface of cotton that led not only to wrinkle-resistant fabric but also to stain- and flame-resistant fabrics. The invention was said to have "saved the cotton industry."[2]

The secret of the invention is the use of a process called crosslinking. Cotton is composed of a material called cellulose. Like synthetic nylon and polyester fibers, cellulose is a polymer; that is, its molecules are shaped like long chains containing many thousands of atoms. The long, chainlike shape of the molecules is what makes cellulose, like nylon and polyester, a good fiber. She discovered a way to treat cotton fibers so that the chainlike cellulose molecules were joined together chemically. This procedure is known as crosslinking, and it makes cotton resistant to wrinkling.

It was first thought that crosslinking was making the cotton fabric wrinkle resistant by strengthening its fibers, but the amount of crosslinking used in her treatment is small and does not add much strength. She developed a new theory on how crosslinking works. It is known that cellulose molecules can stick to each other by means of the weak hydrogen bonds between molecules. She proposed that one side effect of her crosslinking process was the strengthening of the hydrogen bonds, which made the material resistant to wrinkling.

Method feeding seriously wounded soldiers

Besides her contribution to textile industry, during the Korean War, she developed a way to give fat intravenously to patients who were too sick to eat—a method used to feed seriously wounded soldiers, helping thousands of people.

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_R._Benerito#Contributions
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