The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1896-11-05
Copyright, 1896, The S. S. Mcclure
COmpany)

Company
The announcement, maze simultane-
ously in France and in England, that
the discovery OF a process for the
manufacture of silk directly from wood
pulp has proven an unquestionable
commercial success. means not only
that the silk worm raising industry, as
well as the silk worm itself, is doomed,
but it marks the latest step in that
wonderful advance, within the last ten
years, in the use of wood pulp as a
material for manufacture. Very few
people probably are aware of the varied
uses to which this product technically
known as tcellulose," is now put-that
from i now comes the larger part of
The paper which we use, and most of
the car wheels of the coaches upon
which we ride, and rails for railways,
and wagon wheels, and horse shoes,
Imitation porcelain ware, barrels, boats,
window panes. furniture of many
kinds telegraph poles, drain pipes and
thing, paving brick, collins, carpets,
thread, heavy guns, matches, yes, and
portable houses. paint, artificial teeth
and even bicycle frames.
1t would indeed require a long cata-
logue to tell of the protean forms
which wood pulp is now made to as
sumo. To ii we owe the penny blanket
sheet newspapers, and the marvelously
low priced magazines and cheap books
and cheap wrapping paper There are
in the United States two newspapers
which alone use Up in a year more
paper than was produced in the whole
country % years ago. and there are
five or six newspapers in the United
States which together use up more
paper than was made in the whole
world at that period. Today great
forests are being annually slaughtered
10 afford material for the wood pulp
machines. An enormous industry has
been built up in this and other coun-
tries, whose capitalization and annual
product runs up into the hundreds Of
millions. And still those engaged in
the industry regard it as yet in the
stage of short dresses
The latest application to the manu-
facture of silk seems to confirm this
view. Almost all the uses of cellulose,
indeed. aside from that for paper max
ing, have come within the last ten
years, and probably the last year has
seen more new uses made of this re-
markable substance than in all the
other ten put together. New patents
are being taken out every month. and
with the enormous extension that will
be made by the invasion of the vast
spruce and fr forests OF the north Pa
cific coast IN this country, and of ST.
IBERIA it is entirely probable that the
next few years VIII witness a still more
remarkable advance.
This late development is somewhat
curious in view of the fact that the
idea of grinding wood up into pulp and
employing ii for various purposes is
not nearly so new as most people sup
pose. AS far back as 1719, a French
man named Reamur published an
essay upon the subject, taking his hint
from the wasps, whose paper-like nests
are literally made from wood pulp
manufactured by those insects. But it
was only something like 80 or 30 years
ago that anv practical trial of the
matter was made and it is almost
wholly within the last quarter of a
century that the industry has begun
to assume any importance. Its first,
and still its principal application was
in the manufacture of paper. In the
beginning. ii was used purely as an
accessory to rags and straw fibre, it be-
ing originally the belief that a paper
of sufficient strength and firmness of
texture could not be made from wood
pulp alone. Now, however not only
the paper upon which this article is
printed. but the magazines and a very
large proportion of the books now pub
lished are made wholly from pulp.
OF the latter, however, there are two
distinct varieties, that of wood pulp
proper and that which is more properly
described as wood fibre. The first is
obtained by a purely mechanical and
the second chiefly by a chemical pro-
cess. The production of wood pulp