The red trousers of the French soldiers are dyed with German alizarin, also a coal-tar product, because it doesn't pay to raise madder any longer. In coal-tar are all sorts of valuable drugs, dyes, and perfumes. But we don't know it—industrially.
Stay! I do my country an injustice. We can make moth-balls and carbolic acid. But that is as much as ever we can do. And this is why we do not utilize the saw-dust and make a better business out of it than the sawmill can.
And garbage! I wonder how much orange-peel and lemon-peel is thrown away in New York City every day, and how much the neroli or essential oil that could be got from it would be worth. I wonder if the stalks and fag-ends of vegetables could not be distilled and something made from them. But the limit of our wisdom in regard to garbage is: burn it and get power from it. Somebody is going to get rich from this garbage problem one of these days. But it will be the test-tube and not the cogwheel that will make the money. It will be the industrial chemist, not the mechanic.
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.
Where Old Magazines Go.
If the resins are not thoroughly dissolved away the paper turns brown in the course of time. Naturally enough, the wood-pulp makers let the solution of resins run off and become a nuisance, but they, too, are learning that there are glucoses and pyroligneous acids and all manner of riches to be obtained from the solution of the vegetable matter, to say nothing of the possibilities of a sort of gum or glue which is softened both by heat and by moisture.