Creative Chemistry: Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries

by Edwin E. Slosson

Tulle or net is now what is chiefly being turned out, but the engraved design may be as elaborate and artistic as desired, and various materials can be used. Since the threads wherever they cross are united, the fabric is naturally stronger than the ordinary. It is all of a piece and not composed of parts. In short, we seem to be on the eve of a revolution in textiles that is the same as that taking place in building materials. Our concrete structures, however great, are all one stone. They are not built up out of blocks, but cast as a whole.

Lace has always been the aristocrat among textiles. It has maintained its exclusiveness hitherto by being based upon hand labor. In no other way could one get so much painful, patient toil put into such a light and portable form. A filmy thing twined about a neck or dropping from a wrist represented years of work by poor peasant girls or pallid, unpaid nuns. A visit to a lace factory, even to the public rooms where the wornout women were not to be seen, is enough to make one resolve never to purchase any such thing made by hand again. But our good resolutions do not last long and in time we forget the strained eyes and bowed backs, or, what is worse, value our bit of lace all the more because it means that some poor woman has put her life and health into it, netting and weaving, purling and knotting, twining and twisting, throwing and drawing, thread by thread, day after day, until her eyes can no longer see and her fingers have become stiffened.

But man is not naturally cruel. He does not really enjoy being a slave driver, either of human or animal slaves, although he can be hardened to it with shocking ease if there seems no other way of getting what he wants. So he usually welcomes that Great Liberator, the Machine. He prefers to drive the tireless engine than to whip the straining horses. He had rather see the farmer riding at ease in a mowing machine than bending his back over a scythe.

The Machine is not only the Great Liberator, it is the Great Leveler also. It is the most powerful of the forces for democracy. An aristocracy can hardly be maintained except by distinction in dress, and distinction in dress can only be maintained by sumptuary laws or costliness. Sumptuary laws are unconstitutional in this country, hence the stress laid upon costliness. But machinery tends to bring styles and fabrics within the reach of all. The shopgirl is almost as well dressed on the street as her rich customer. The man who buys ready-made clothing is only a few weeks behind the vanguard of the fashion. There is often no difference perceptible to the ordinary eye between cheap and high-priced clothing once the price tag is off. Jewels as a portable form of concentrated costliness have been in favor from the earliest ages, but now they are losing their factitious value through the advance of invention. Rubies of unprecedented size, not imitation, but genuine rubies, can now be manufactured at reasonable rates. And now we may hope that lace may soon be within the reach of all, not merely lace of the established forms, but new and more varied and intricate and beautiful designs, such as the imagination has been able to conceive, but the hand cannot execute.

Dissolving nitrocellulose in ether and alcohol we get the collodion varnish that we are all familiar with since we have used it on our cut fingers. Spread it on cloth instead of your skin and it makes a very good leather substitute. As we all know to our cost the number of animals to be skinned has not increased so rapidly in recent years as the number of feet to be shod. After having gone barefoot for a million years or so the majority of mankind have decided to wear shoes and this change in fashion comes at a time, roughly speaking, when pasture land is getting scarce. Also there are books to be bound and other new things to be done for which leather is needed. The war has intensified the stringency; so has feminine fashion. The conventions require that the shoe-tops extend nearly to skirt-bottom and this means that an inch or so must be added to the shoe-top every year. Consequent to this rise in leather we have to pay as much for one shoe as we used to pay for a pair.

Here, then, is a chance for Necessity to exercise her maternal function. And she has responded nobly. A progeny of new substances have been brought forth and, what is most encouraging to see, they are no longer trying to worm their way into favor as surreptitious surrogates under the names of "leatheret," "leatherine," "leatheroid" and "leather-this-or-that" but come out boldly under names of their own coinage and declare themselves not an imitation, not even a substitute, but "better than leather." This policy has had the curious result of compelling the cowhide men to take full pages in the magazines to call attention to the forgotten virtues of good old-fashioned sole-leather! There are now upon the market synthetic shoes that a vegetarian could wear with a clear conscience. The soles are made of some rubber composition; the uppers of cellulose fabric (canvas) coated with a cellulose solution such as I have described.

Each firm keeps its own process for such substance a dead secret, but without prying into these we can learn enough to satisfy our legitimate curiosity. The first of the artificial fabrics was the old-fashioned and still indispensable oil-cloth, that is canvas painted or printed with linseed oil carrying the desired pigments. Linseed oil belongs to the class of compounds that the chemist calls "unsaturated" and the psychologist would call "unsatisfied." They take up oxygen from the air and become solid, hence are called the "drying oils," although this does not mean that they lose water, for they have not any to lose. Later, ground cork was mixed with the linseed oil and then it went by its Latin name, "linoleum."

The next step was to cut loose altogether from the natural oils and use for the varnish a solution of some of the cellulose esters, usually the nitrate (pyroxylin or guncotton), more rarely the acetate. As a solvent the ether-alcohol mixture forming collodion was, as we have seen, the first to be employed, but now various other solvents are in use, among them castor oil, methyl alcohol, acetone, and the acetates of amyl or ethyl. Some of these will be recognized as belonging to the fruit essences that we considered in Chapter V, and doubtless most of us have perceived an odor as of over-ripe pears, bananas or apples mysteriously emanating from a newly lacquered radiator. With powdered bronze, imitation gold, aluminum or something of the kind a metallic finish can be put on any surface.

Canvas coated or impregnated with such soluble cellulose gives us new flexible and durable fabrics that have other advantages over leather besides being cheaper and more abundant. Without such material for curtains and cushions the automobile business would have been sorely hampered. It promises to provide us with a book binding that will not crumble to powder in the course of twenty years. Linen collars may be water-proofed and possibly Dame Fashion—being a fickle lady—may some day relent and let us wear such sanitary and economical neckwear. For shoes, purses, belts and the like the cellulose varnish or veneer is usually colored and stamped to resemble the grain of any kind of leather desired, even snake or alligator.

If instead of dissolving the cellulose nitrate and spreading it on fabric we combine it with camphor we get celluloid, a plastic solid capable of innumerable applications. But that is another story and must be reserved for the next chapter.