The after-dinner speaker just didn't have a Stop button. He burbled on and on and on, oblivious to his increasingly restless audience. Finally one of the more drunken diners hurled an empty wine bottle at him. It missed, and hit the Chairman instead.
As the Chairman slid slowly to the floor clutching his head, he was heard to murmur, "Hit me again, I can still hear him."
Thomas HancockDied 26 Mar 1865 at age 78 (born 8 May 1786).English inventor and manufacturer who founded the British rubber industry. His chief invention, the "masticator," worked rubber scraps into a shredded mass of rubber that could be formed into blocks or rolled into sheets. This process, perfected in 1821, led to a partnership with the Scottish chemist, Charles Macintosh, inventor and manufacturer of waterproof rubber impregnated fabric. Hancock established the first English rubber factory in 1820 and supplied Macintosh. The process of vulcanization was discovered (1839) independently by Hancock and an American, Charles Goodyear. That made possible a resilient rubber product, and led eventually to the large-scale usage of rubber in bicycle and automobile tires. |
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