The raw materials, as may be seen, are cheap and abundant, merely cellulose, salt, sulfur, carbon, air and water. Any kind of cellulose can be used, cotton waste, rags, paper, or even wood pulp. The processes are various, the names of the products are numerous and the uses are innumerable. Even the most inattentive must have noticed the widespread employment of these new forms of cellulose. We can buy from a street barrow for fifteen cents near-silk neckties that look as well as those sold for seventy-five. As for wear—well, they all of them wear till after we get tired of wearing them. Paper "vulcanized" by being run through a 30 per cent. solution of zinc chloride and subjected to hydraulic pressure comes out hard and horny and may be used for trunks and suit cases. Viscose tubes for sausage containers are more sanitary and appetizing than the customary casings. Viscose replaces ramie or cotton in the Welsbach gas mantles. Viscose film, transparent and a thousandth of an inch thick (cellophane), serves for candy wrappers. Cellulose acetate cylinders spun out of larger orifices than silk are trying—not very successfully as yet—to compete with hog's bristles and horsehair. Stir powdered metals into the cellulose solution and you have the Bayko yarn. Bayko (from the manufacturers, Farbenfabriken vorm. Friedr. Bayer and Company) is one of those telescoped names like Socony, Nylic, Fominco, Alco, Ropeco, Ripans, Penn-Yan, Anzac, Dagor, Dora and Cadets, which will be the despair of future philologers.
A PAPER MILL IN ACTION
This photograph was taken in the barking room of the big pulp mill of the Great Northern Paper Company at Millinocket, Maine
CELLULOSE FROM WOOD PULP
This is now made into a large variety of useful articles of which a few examples are here pictured
Soluble cellulose may enable us in time to dispense with the weaver as well as the silkworm. It may by one operation give us fabrics instead of threads. A machine has been invented for manufacturing net and lace, the liquid material being poured on one side of a roller and the fabric being reeled off on the other side. The process seems capable of indefinite extension and application to various sorts of woven, knit and reticulated goods. The raw material is cotton waste and the finished fabric is a good substitute for silk. As in the process of making artificial silk the cellulose is dissolved in a cupro-ammoniacal solution, but instead of being forced out through minute openings to form threads, as in that process, the paste is allowed to flow upon a revolving cylinder which is engraved with the pattern of the desired textile. A scraper removes the excess and the turning of the cylinder brings the paste in the engraved lines down into a bath which solidifies it.