New Ideas

GOODS & SERVICES

Bread & Butter. To perk up sagging sales of butfer, the American Dairy Association made a deal with International Milling Co. of Minneapolis to include 25-c- toward the purchase of a pound of butter in every 5-lb., 10-lb., or 25-lb. sack of International's Robin Hood flour (a 50-c- coupon is in every 50-lb. bag).

Tree Doctor. Chas. Pfizer & Co. of Brooklyn has developed a new antibiotic drug* for trees and plants that cures such previously fatal plant diseases as fire blight (in apple and pear trees) and halo blight (in beans). Agrimycin, a compound of streptomycin and terramycin, is absorbed into the plants' systems just as antibiotics penetrate the human blood stream. The drug will be available in quantity by March.

Cardboard Kibitzer. Atlanta's Bridge-Masters put on sale a cardboard bidding wheel that gives the correct bid for any situation with a twist of a disk. Price: 50-c-.

Giant Copter. At Philadelphia's International Airport, the Air Force took the wraps off the world's largest helicopter, the YH-16 Transporter, built by the Piasecki Helicopter Corp. of Morton, Pa. Weighing more than 15 tons, the 134-ft. copter, powered by 1,650-h.p. Pratt & Whitney engines fore & aft, can carry 40 troops, 32 litter patients, or three jeeps, has a top speed of more than 146 m.p.h. and a fuselage, almost 78 ft. long, about as big as that of a Convair 240.

Bringing in the Leaves. For tobacco, last of the major field crops to require picking by hand, the Long Mfg. Co. of Tarboro, N. C. has developed a seven-man harvester mounted on wheeled stilts that can gather and tie into bundles enough leaves to fill two drying barns a day (seven men working by hand can fill only one barn a day). The harvester, which will be in production by January, can also be converted into a crop duster. Price: about $1,200.

Large Print. Manhattan's Mutual Life Insurance Co. last week estimated that it was saving $250,000 a year through a policy of simplifying its paperwork. It began by translating the legal gobbledygook familiar to most policies into English the average person could understand, eliminating most of the "fine print" which has been the butt of many insurance jokes. When a farmer complained of the time he had lost getting a Mutual form notarized, the company discovered that it was needlessly having 75 different forms notarized, junked that policy too, and is saving policyholders $80,000 a year in notary fees.

* For other news of antibiotics, see MEDICINE.

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