A Man Turns

It all started when one night last winter Mrs. Philip Burnham of Wilmington, Del. could not go to the Red Cross to fold bandages. Mr. Burnham went instead. Delaware bandage-folding has not been the same since.

Mr. Burnham is an architect-engineer for Du Pont. He was bored stiff by the hand work of reducing 16-inch squares of gauze to four-inch sponges--at four minutes to a sponge. He went home and said so. Then in self-defense he invented a semi-automatic bandage folder that would do the job in one minute. The device was made of wallboard, hinged with cloth tape, and was worth about 30-c-. Later, saturated fiber sheet and waterproof adhesive tape were used. Mr. Burnham gave the Delaware Red Cross full patent rights.

Last week Du Pont announced that two models of Mr. Burnham's folder, to fold three sizes of bandage, are now in mass production. With high industrial grandeur, the bulletin added that Lammot du Pont, chairman of the Board of Directors, applied the inventor's basic principle and developed a working model that has been adopted as standard by the Delaware Red Cross for folding the smallest size dressing.

Red Cross workers outside of Delaware must continue with hand folding until the Burnham folder is nationally adopted. Until then, "requests for information will be welcomed by the Delaware Chapter in Wilmington."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.