The Internet has been an absolute gift to me as an inveterate searcher of trivia and facts. I'm able to satisfy any cravings for knowledge at the click of a mouse, and with my trusty smartphone, can even do it in the middle of the night as has been known.
Last night, for some reason, I remembered an elderly man I once interviewed when I was working as a gauche young reporter at BBC Radio Devon. His name was Edwin Beer and he was over 100. His great age, and the secrets of longevity, was the reason for the interview.
He was the first to use the disabled lift at our newish Exeter headquarters and was a fantastic raconteur. He told me that the secret to his longevity - and he was the second oldest man in Britain when he died at age 107 in 1986 - was Fletcherising.
This is the practice of chewing your food 32 times before swallowing, made popular in the early 1930s by Horace Fletcher.
Well, having remembered Edwin Beer, I began feverishly searching the web to see what I could learn about him. To start with I wasan't doing very well. There was a famous urologist called Edwin Beer and a famous sculptor called Edwin Beer Fishley. But recalling that he had told me he was involved with the invention of the fake silk, rayon, I broadened my search and found a reference to him at the Devon county council website, where it named a book he wrote in 1968, The Beginning of Rayon: Corrigenda and Supplement.
Knowing now that his full name was Edwin John Beer, formerly of Paignton, I discovered an article from an issue of Geology Today in 1989 which described the Edwin Beer Collection.
Leicester University had become the lucky recipient of a large collection of geological specimens. The collection was formed over a long period by Edwin Beer (1879 - 1986) and was donated by his widow Phoebe. "Beer had led an active and eventful life. He was by profession a chemist and was a pioneer in perfecting the process for making artificial fibres."
Searching Leicester University turned up no additional clues. My search on Edwin Beer's remarkable life seems to have ended for the time, with no photographs gleaned. Stay tooned for the next instalment.
10 MINUTES LATER
I've just bought the book for £6.50 on ebay!
