HOT WATER BOTTLES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 October 1942, Page 4

HOT WATER BOTTLES

POUNDED UP FOR WAR SERVICE. Britain is looking round for every available ounce of scrap rubber. Most of it is being found in old motor tires. But the housewives are joining in with tires from their prams, old rubber sponges, garden hose, bathroom mats, and even hot water bottles. If the scrap is reinforced with cotton or otherwise, the foreign substance is first burned out by an alkali “digester.” What remains is put through another strainer, which incidentally draws out any metal that may remain. Then the rubber is pounded, refined, ironed, rolled into sheets, and so is ready at last for a dozen or two new incarnations. The Navy needs millions of miles of rubber insulated cables. Rubber is used in the de-gaussing equipment to protect merchant ships against mines. Thirty-five Churchill tanks eat up 55 cwts. of it; 300 lbs. of it go into a 3.7 A.A. mobile gun. The R.A.F. need it for their landing wheels to protect their petrol tanks, for de-icing equipment, for their dinghies, and for the “Mae West” jacket.

Apart from ordinary tiros, there is the bullet-proof variety; there is antigas clothing, ground sheets and lifesaving jackets. In short .the British housewife’s hot water bottle may find itself appearing almost anywhere on the war front from a paratroop helmet sailing down into Europe to a barrage balloon in the London sky.