Canada To-day and To-morrow

by Arthur E. Copping

And all this time I have been speaking of J. R. Booth merely in his capacity of Lumber King. He is other things as well. For example, he has long been a wood-pulp magnate. You get a tree, and pound it into a fibry mass which, with added water, resembles thick oatmeal porridge; and when you have spread that mess out and let it partly dry, it rolls up like a thick, coarse blanket, in which form you can ship it across the ocean to be the basis of the great reels of paper that feed the daily Press. The old man acquired the necessary knowledge and machinery for doing that class of business, and he does it on a grand scale.

Thus on my conducted tour of inspection there was much to see. First, I beheld a stretch of river where the water was hidden by wood—logs floating end to end and side by side, giving a ribbed surface to the vista, which suggested acres of a Brobdingnagian corduroy. They look flat and tame—those trees without roots or leaves or branches. Here one saw the forest suspended midway between the poles of its destiny—no longer an asylum for birds and beasts, nor yet house and furniture for man.

I knew something of the stages through which that floating timber had passed. For I have penetrated into Canada’s lofty jungle and visited the camps where companies of sturdy men fell the trees and saw them into logs, and haul those logs to the nearest river, along which they are borne by the current or drawn by tugs, until at last they join the dense congregation of their fellows massed within sight of the mill.

I now saw the places where, one by one, the logs were pushed within reach of mechanism that lifted them out of the water and bore them up an incline, thence to be delivered into the maw of complex, ingenious, deafening, ruthless machinery. You had some inkling of the force of the Chaudière Falls when you saw what that force was doing. Metal platforms went racing airily about with huge logs as though they were featherweights. Sometimes a great blundering log would roll off the platform, whereat a devilish iron arm arose out of the floor and pushed all that timber tonnage back into position. Always the heavily burdened platform was running forward; and, looking ahead, you saw an obstruction along the route—an obstruction of whirling, shrieking machinery. Still looking, you saw the logs, without any jarring or delay, melt miraculously through the obstruction as if they were no more substantial than cloud. And on the other side they were logs no longer, but merely clusters of planks—circular saws having sliced them like so much cheese.

In those vast chambers of clean, quick mechanism—fed at one end with tree-trunks, and elsewhere belching forth streams of boards, beams, laths, and shingles, with avalanches of chips and cascades of sawdust—in those vast chambers, I say, one’s ears are put out of service by the shrieking din, and the visitor has the more occasion for his eyes. He must walk circumspectly, lest peradventure he be hurled hence by an iron arm, and cut with swift precision into thin, wet slices.

From the lumber mills I passed into regions where J. R. Booth makes wood pulp. My guide began by introducing me to a grinder—a huge affair that swallows six tons of logs a day and files them to fibre. Twenty-two of these grinders were growling away at their mammoth meals, and there were others, I learnt, in process of construction. It was certainly a case of lost identity with the thick, grey stuff that went flowing on to the screens. That it had once been the solid part of a forest was a thought as unthinkable as that little boys would soon be running about with it in distant cities, shouting “’Orrible murder! Lytest special!”

The screens are discriminating. The bulk of the fibre passes through a one-hundredth-of-an-inch aperture, and is good for paper. Then the residue runs on a screen having apertures of about a sixtieth of an inch; and while that which penetrates the interstices is available for fine cardboard, that which remains above is suitable for coarse cardboard. Now the several streams of porridge are pumped upstairs to wet-presses that contain revolving cylinders. You next see the stuff clinging to a hurrying felt band that transfers it to wooden rollers. When several thicknesses have wound round a roller, they are cut with a pointed stick, removed, and folded; and there you have your mechanical ground pulp, which is nothing but washed wood fibre loosely matted by water. That mechanical ground pulp constitutes about three-fourths, in bulk, of paper used by the daily and weekly Press. I was conducted to the range of buildings where J. R. Booth makes the constituent which, with certain small accessories, completes the substance of our news-sheets. Again logs are the raw material. But this time they are not ground. They are first despoiled of their bark by one piece of mechanism; then by another piece of mechanism they are cut into chips. It seems ungracious to criticise a machine; but I observed that the “chipper” is apt to be a little remiss. Some of the chips it turns out are rather larger than J. R. Booth requires them to be. So all are subjected to a screening test, those of excessive size being dealt with in an auxiliary apparatus called a “re-chipper.” The little nuggets of wood are now sent upstairs in a carrier, and shot into big bins, each of which holds nearly two hundred tons. Thence they pass through funnels into great steel digesters, in which they are packed down close with long iron rods. The digesters have an acid-proof lining of bricks and cement; and, to be informed of the reason for this, I was taken downstairs again. We visited a part of the premises which, by reason of certain fumes, suggested “Paradise Lost.” I am not a chemist, and I cannot describe what the agents of J. R. Booth were doing with their immense supplies of lime and sulphur. It must suffice to say that they produced sulphurous acid and a horrid smell.

The former is conveyed to the upper story, and pumped into the digesters, previously packed with chips. “Digester” is the technical and literal description, for the acid-saturated wood is now cooked with steam for ten or twelve hours, at the end of which time it is reduced to white fluff. After being washed in cold water it is called sulphite, and is ready to be mixed with mechanical ground pulp to form paper, small quantities of china clay, size, soda-ash, resin, and blue and red earth being added as a kind of seasoning.

Such, at least, is J. R. Booth’s recipe; for I found that, by a recent addition to his manifold activities, he now makes paper. They took me through the mill, a long building containing several machines stretched out in a perspective of great cylinders, suggesting the segments of a huge iron caterpillar.

It seemed that the mixture of pulp, sulphite, and accessories has to pass through a refining engine on its way from one receptacle to another. Afterwards I saw it pouring like gruel on to each caterpillar’s tail. Under a shower-bath of water sprays—necessary for breaking bubbles—the liquid paper ran on to rotating screens, and was received on moving belts of wire gauze. The endless web of grey liquid soon became a web of white substance.