Fortunes Lurk in Old Wool.
See what a difference such knowledge has made in the wool industry. Sheep's wool is dirty and greasy when it comes to the mills. Wash it with strong alkali in running water. That is what has always been done. But a man in Massachusetts thought it would be a good idea to dissolve the grease with some such solvent as naphtha. He saved the naphtha to use over again; he recovered the grease, which is the most softening and penetrating of all fats and is most valuable for ointments, and he recovered carbonate of potash. Sheep wearing heavy wool in the hot weather perspire freely, and this perspiration contains carbonate of potash.
After the wool is once woven into cloth, we may dismiss from our minds all thought of effecting any more economies. When the suit of clothes is worn to rags, the rags are still as good as new, for the wool is picked out into strands of fiber again and woven anew. It isn't ground into shoddy as it was in the days of the Civil War.
The wool is picked apart as long as it has any staple to it at all, and forms part of the most expensive and enduring of fabrics. It may be mixed with cotton, but when it comes to be a rag again, the cotton is burned out either with acid or with heat, the dust is taken out, and once more behold absolutely pure wool, much safer to wear than the new wool of the tropics and semi-tropics. When there is not enough wool to hold together it goes into our clothing. With wood ashes and scrap iron it ceases to be a fabric and becomes a dye, Prussian blue.
The cotton rag has no such long life. All it is good for is paper stock. The paper business is essentially a wealth from waste industry. For a long time, linen rags, cotton rags, and old rope were the only materials of which paper was made. Cheap books and magazines and newspapers had to wait until it was discovered that the resins and gums in which the fibers of wood are imbedded could be dissolved away, leaving the pulp of the wood in just the same condition that the pulp of rags was.