One interesting side note about this passage:
“Another man who made a highly profitable find in the food field in recent years is Leo Peters, originator of the “Pak” margarine package, made out of plastic and containing a capsule for coloring. By merely kneading the “Pak,” a housewife can give a pound of margarine the appetizing hue of butter. It took Peters a long time to put the idea across, but once it was accepted by manufacturers he began collecting royalties estimated at $1,000,000 a year.”
Why, you might ask, couldn’t they just put the dye in the margarine? Well it turns out that the dairy lobby in this country had/has some serious pull. They saw margarine as competition to butter and had many laws passed that restricted the it’s appearance, primarily making it illegal to dye it to look like butter. The last state to repeal these laws was Wisconson in 1967. In Quebec, Canada it is STILL illegal to sell yellow margarine. More information on wikipedia.
Oh, and does anyone think that machine below looks at all “human-like”?
GADGETS Can Make Your FORTUNE
By West Peterson
THIRTY-FIVE thousand inventions will be patented in the United States this year. If one of them is yours— possibly a simple gadget with universal appeal—you may reap a fortune!
Anything from a new household appliance to an improved method of food processing, from a unique use of plastics to another member of the wonder drug family can pay off huge dividends to the lucky— and skillful—discoverer. While it’s true that many inventions are now made by research teams in well-equipped laboratories, there’s still plenty of opportunity for the scientific or gadget-minded individual.
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Can you imagine cooking ham, eggs, toast and coffee at your desk? I once worked with a woman who had a habit of microwaving bacon in our office, that was bad enough for me.
Eggs, Toast, Coffee
can all be made on this one compact utensil, among the first of the promised innovations awaiting the end of the war. After making ham and eggs, you can toast bread by raising the movable grill three inches above the heating unit. It’s a boon for harried secretaries.
Interesting article on the history and development of the lowly tin can. Also, if you have not yet been introduced to the techie crack that is the National Association of Manufacturers Blog, by all means, check it out. Every Saturday they post a video tour of a different factory or manufacturing process. One of my dreams has always been to make a Factory Tour tv show (without John Ratzenberger and all the promotional sound bites). Anyway, they have an excellent video showing the entire manufacturing process for tin cans here and it is very, very cool.

ROMANCE Of The TIN CAN
CUT all the tin plate used annually to make the tin cans of America into a strip one foot wide and you can wind that strip around the earth fourteen times.
Or, to visualize it another way, take the five billion odd square feet of tin plate into which we put our fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, beer, paint, oil. candy, cheese and tobacco each year and it would be a simple matter to can the moon. You’d have the biggest cheese can ever made, and still have a lot of tin plate left over.
The vastness of tin can production has brought this familiar article into the lives of nearly every American family, for it is in this country that the greatest volume of tin cans is produced. A good year will find between eight and nine billion cans for the food racks of this country and this is the business that accounts for the major percentage of cans.
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This one is very close to current milk cartons. The only difference I can see is that instead of being folded and stapled, the top of the container is heat bonded, allowing you to simply pull the sides apart instead of taring the overlap.
Pouring Spout for Milk Carton
A pouring spout for cardboard milk cartons of the type shown that will eliminate dripping and spilling, and allow the carton to be drained completely, can be made by slitting the ridge of the carton and pulling out the fold under the ridge. To re-seal the carton, simply push the flap back to its original position. On most cartons, this can be done without removing the staple, but a few have a long staple, which interferes if not removed.
W. Dyre Doughty, Tucson, Ariz.