The Orange County Fair July 14th 2012   (Page 4)

Did You Know? - Archaeological ruins and texts show that stilt walking was practised in ancient Greece as far back as the 6th century BC.

Sylvain Dornon, the stilt walker of Landes, started from Paris on the 12th of March 1891 for Moscow, which he reached after a journey of fifty-eight days. Although this long journey upon stilts was a curiosity, not only to the Russians, to whom this sort of locomotion was unknown, but also to many Frenchmen, walking on stilts was common before the 1870s in parts of France.

Did You Know? - QR Code (abbreviated from Quick Response Code) is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code) first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside the industry due to its fast readability and large storage capacity compared to standard UPC barcodes.

The code consists of black modules (square dots) arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be made up of four standardized kinds ("modes") of data (numeric, alphanumeric, byte/binary, Kanji), or through supported extensions, virtually any kind of data.

Did You Know? - Embroidery is the art or handicraft of decorating fabric or other materials with needle and thread or yarn. Embroidery may also incorporate other materials such as metal strips, pearls, beads, quills, and sequins. Embroidery is most often recommended for caps, hats, coats, blankets, dress shirts, denim, stockings, and golf shirts. Embroidery is available with a wide variety of thread or yarn color.

Did You Know? - Crochet is a process of creating fabric from yarn, thread, or other material strands using a crochet hook. The word is derived from the French word "crochet", meaning hook. Hooks can be made of materials such as metals, woods or plastic and are commercially manufactured as well as produced by artisans.

Crocheting, like knitting, consists of pulling loops through other loops, but additionally incorporates wrapping the working material around the hook one or more times.

Crochet differs from knitting in that only one stitch is active at one time (exceptions being Tunisian crochet and Broomstick lace), stitches made with the same diameter of yarn are comparably taller, and a single crochet hook is used instead of two knitting needles. Additionally, crochet has its own system of symbols to represent stitch types.

Did You Know? - An afghan is a blanket, wrap, or shawl made of colored yarn. It is knitted or crocheted, often in geometric shapes. It can also be referred to as a "throw". Afghans were first made in Afghanistan and commonly featured geometric designs with many holes in the pattern. They are hand-stitched or knitted. In North American craft tradition, afghans are draped over sofas or large chairs for decoration.

Did You Know? - Singer Corporation is a manufacturer of sewing machines, first established as I.M. Singer & Co. in 1851 by Isaac Merritt Singer with New York lawyer Edward Clark. Best known for its sewing machines, it was renamed Singer Manufacturing Company in 1865, then The Singer Company in 1963. It is currently based in La Vergne, Tennessee near Nashville. Its first large factory for mass production was built in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1863.

In the 1960s the company diversified, acquiring the Friden calculator company in 1965, Packard Bell Electronics in 1966 and General Precision Equipment Corporation in 1968. GPE included Librascope, The Kearfott Company, Inc, and Link Flight Simulation. In the 1968 also Singer bought out GPS Systems and added it to the Link Simulations Systems Division (LSSD). This unit produced nuclear power plant control center simulators in Silver Spring, MD; while flight simulators were produced in Binghamton, New York.

Did You Know? - Buttons and button-like objects used as ornaments or seals rather than fasteners have been discovered in the Indus Valley Civilization during its Kot Diji phase (circa 2800–2600 BCE)[5] as well as Bronze Age sites in China (circa 2000–1500 BCE), and Ancient Rome.

Buttons made from seashell were used in the Indus Valley Civilization for ornamental purposes by 2000 BCE. Some buttons were carved into geometric shapes and had holes pierced into them so that they could be attached to clothing with thread. Ian McNeil (1990) holds that: "The button, in fact, was originally used more as an ornament than as a fastening, the earliest known being found at Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley. It is made of a curved shell and about 5000 years old."

Functional buttons with buttonholes for fastening or closing clothes appeared first in Germany in the 13th century. They soon became widespread with the rise of snug-fitting garments in 13th- and 14th-century Europe.

Did You Know? - Inlay is a decorative technique of inserting pieces of contrasting, often coloured materials into depressions in a base object to form patterns or pictures that normally are flush with the matrix. In a wood matrix, inlays commonly use wood veneers, but other materials like shells, mother-of-pearl, horn or ivory may also be used. Pietre dure, or coloured stones inlaid in white or black marbles, and inlays of precious metals in a base metal matrix are other forms of inlay. Master craftsmen who make custom knives continue a tradition of ancient techniques of inlaying precious metals; additionally, many new techniques which use contemporary tools have also been developed and utilized as well by artisans.

Did You Know? - Although the name of the candy bar sounds like the name of the famous baseball player Babe Ruth, the Curtiss Candy Company traditionally claimed that it was named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth Cleveland. The candy maker, located on the same street as Wrigley Field, named the bar "Baby Ruth" in 1921, as Babe Ruth's fame was on the rise, over 30 years after Cleveland had left the White House, and 17 years after his daughter, Ruth, had died.

The company did not negotiate an endorsement deal with Ruth, and many saw the company's story about the origin of the name to be a devious way to avoid having to pay the baseball player any royalties. Curtiss successfully shut down a rival bar that was approved by, and named for, Ruth, on the grounds that the names were too similar.

Did You Know? - Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are a brand of candy filled with peanut butter and coated with chocolate, marketed by The Hershey Company. They were created in 1923 by H. B. Reese, a former dairy farmer and shipping foreman for Milton S. Hershey. Reese was inspired by Hershey, so he left the dairy farm to start his own candy business. The H. B. Reese Candy Co. was established in the basement of Reese's house in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and used Hershey chocolate in his confections.

Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were his most popular candy, and Reese eventually discontinued his other lines. Several years after his death, Reese's company was sold to The Hershey Company, then known as Hershey Foods Corporation, in 1963 for $23.5 million.

The H.B. Reese Company is maintained as a subsidiary of Hershey because the Reese plant workforce is not unionized, unlike the main Hershey plant.

Did You Know? - The Milky Way bar was created in 1923 by Frank C. Mars and originally manufactured in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was the first commercially distributed filled chocolate bar. The name and taste was taken from a famed malted milk drink (milkshake) of the day – not the Earth's galaxy, as many contend.

Did You Know? - Hershey's Kisses milk chocolates were introduced in 1907. The candy got its name by the machine that made them, which made kiss sounds when the hersheys were done.

Another Pennsylvania chocolatier, H.O. Wilbur & Sons Chocolate Company, had been making a similar product known as Wilbur Buds since 1894. The shape and size of those candies likely served as an inspiration for Hershey's Kisses chocolates.

Hershey's Kisses chocolates were originally wrapped by hand. Automated wrapping began in 1921. The same automatic wrapping process allowed for the insertion of the distinctive paper "plume", that the company used to guarantee that consumers were getting the genuine Hershey product, rather than an imitation. This thin paper strip was registered as a company trademark in 1924. Italian confectioner Perugina manufactures a small chocolate and hazelnut candy called Baci (Italian for Kisses). Baci are reputed to have been used as a clandestine method for delivering love notes between two confectioners, Giovanni Buitoni and Luisa Spagnoli. This may have served as the inspiration for the paper strip.

Hershey's Kisses chocolates have been produced continuously since 1907, except for the period of time between 1942 and 1949. Rationing of raw materials during World War II made the aluminum foil for the wrappers a scarce commodity.