If her bequest as a chef , television personality , and all around delicious human being were n’t enough to solidify Julia Child as one of the coolest people who ever know , here ’s another awe-inspiring resume - builder : she made shark repellant .
It was 1943 , World War II was raging , and a 31 - yr - old fry ( then McWilliams ) was work for the Emergency Rescue Equipment Special Projects section of the Office of Strategic Services , the forerunner to the CIA . fighting increasingly took place on water system , and the arrangement hoped to not just prevent shark attacks , but also burn from barracudas and piranhas . The ERE section — include Child — was tasked with flog up a intermixture that could do just that .
grant to documentsrecently released by the CIA , the organization had been looking for a solvent since July 1942 — just a calendar month after the OSS was created — and essay over 100 substances in their search , including common poison as well as " extracts from decayed shark meat , constitutional acids , and several pig Strategic Arms Limitation Talks , including bull sulphate , and copper acetate . "
Copper acetate proved to be the most promising ; mental test on decoy showed that it was " 60 percent effective in dissuade shark insect bite , " accord to the CIA . It was mixed with contraband dyestuff into a disk - shaped “ patty ” that could be add on to the body in a number of ways and would smack like a all in shark when released in the water , endure 6 to 7 hours .
But the repellant apparentlytested poorlywith barracudas and piranhas , and , in a December 1943 memo to the Navy Research Department , Edward Howell , Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics , wrote that though the cake was slightly effective against small sharks , the Bureau thought “ that it is unlogical to await that such effect as was show in normal alimentation behavior would give any promise of affecting the voracious behavior of the few species known to have attacked man . ”
Despite its dubious effectuality , the Army and the Coast Guard wanted to use the repellent — which , they argue , could potentially deter bites and would go a long way to improving the esprit de corps of people who could potentially be attacked — and it stuck around for another 25 years .
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