Silk Purse from a Sow's Ear

In the midst of new, necessary and often impossible discoveries, common sense can lose it's persuasive power, at least that's what Arthur D. Little believed.  He was irritated by folk wisdom sayings like "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."  So he set out to prove how wrong that was and that in America anything was possible.  

In 1921, he secured 10 lbs of gelatin from Wilson and Company, Chicago meat packers.  The was accompanied by an affidavit that stated it was indeed 100% sow's ears.  From this he spun artificial silk thread, wove that into a fabric and produced a purse.  The elegant purse was described as "the sort which ladies of great estate carried in medieval days, their gold coin in one end and their silver coin in the other."

Little's point was to show that the astonishing and unusual were becoming the normal and expected and the definition was becoming blurred.  "New impressions so crowd upon us," he said, "that the miracles of yesterday are common place today."  When invention became the mother of industry, it soon became the mother of necessity in Little's eyes.  

Americans were finding solutions for that which they had not yet even discovered the problem for.  Inventors and Research labs had opened America's eyes and minds to novelty - for thinking outside the box, at things never thought of before.  It hasn't changed since Little's days.  Where would we be without research and development labs like Edison's and Little's?  

Next time...a whole new subject

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Today in Pioneer History: "On June 11, 1776, a committee of five are appointed to draft the Declaration of Independence.  Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R. Livingston made up the famous document that would change the history of the United States of America."