INVENTION AND DISCOVERY.
A new paper doll has been invented by a Brooklyn woman.
It is so arranged that the arms and legs are fastened on movable discs, and Miss Dolly, instead of being the flat, uninteresting thing that most paper dolls are, can move her arms and legs, and attend tea parties, and take refreshments, just as any well brought-up stuffed dolly can.
She is to wear a great many beautiful dresses, which will take on and off easily, and will be a very nice companion for the little women who live in apartments, and have not much room for their dollies.
Scissors or shears.
This is a very useful invention for a boy's tool-box or for mamma's work-table.
It is a combination affair. In the first place, it looks like an ordinary pair of scissors. But when you open them to cut anything, you get the first surprise: one of the blades is marked off in inches, half-inches, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths.
Then when you are prepared for the wonders these shears have to show, you find that on one handle is a hammer-head, and that they can be used as a hammer. Close to the hammer-head a screw-driver is arranged. At the point of the shears is an awl for boring holes; and, most practical of all, the scissors when they are opened out form a perfect carpenter's square.
This wonderful tool was invented by Benjamin Ford, of Newcastle, Maine. Any boy who has such a pair of shears, and a paper of screws in his pocket, can build and make to his heart's content, and the happy mother who has this tool on her work-table is done forever with breaking her back over the tool-chest, to find some particularly elusive screw-driver or gimlet.
Photographs in relief.
A new plan in regard to photographs has been invented.
It is to take a photograph, similar to the one that is to be embossed, and, after cutting it in a certain way, press the portions outward that it is desired shall stand in relief.
An open mask of the same shape as the photograph is then used, and the two photographs are dampened and pressed tightly together until the face and figure stand out from the card, and the picture looks as if it had been carved in wood.
This is a very ingenious invention, but the work is very difficult, and can only be done by people who are regularly trained to do it.
G.H.R.