The Denison review. [volume] (Denison, Iowa) 1867-current, 1909-04-21
The Romance of Pill MAKING
BY p HARVEY MIDDLETON

and Africa. the Australian Bush, Chi
ma and Japan-all are made to con-
tribute their share of ingredients for
Americas pills.
In the mammoth pill establish
ments at Detroit you will see store
rooms piled high with bales and
boxes containing gums, barks, roots,
stems, leaves. flowers, seeds and
woods, with logs of sandalwood from
far-off India. Year in and year out
blue-goggled man, wearing huge
leather gloves, feeds these logs into
a grinding machine, reducing them
to coarse powder, from which is dis
titled fine pure transparent Santal
Oil.
The Making of Pills
NOV to the actual manufacture OF
: pills, all the processes of which be-
gin in the Formula department. Here
are thousands of standard working
formulas, embodying the results OF
hundreds of experiments in chemis-
try and pharmacy, and many years
of experience in the handling of CO.
lossal quantities of drugs. We will
suppose that an order is received for
million pills of some standard prep
aration
A formula card is prepared and
sent to the Drug and Chemical de-
partment. where the ingredients men
toned are weighed out and mixed.
Each individual having part to per-
form in the collection of materials
aftiXes his signature to the formula
card, and the accuracy of his work
is vouched for by the signature OF
second person. The in gradients
having been carefully mixed and
and this with the formula card Is
sent to the nass-room, to be worked
into perfectly homogeneous mass
upon heavy rollers of iron or wood,
which thoroughly blends the various
components of the mixture.
A peep into the mass-room is a
curious experience for the unnitiat-
ed, who might easily imagine he
had Numbered into bakery. There
may be dozen or so machines, with
men mixing stuffs of all colors. One
mess looks like gingerbread, and an
other might be angel cake, if it did
not smell so unpleasantly.
Clever Machinery
WIH1cN it is removed from the roll
ers the dough with its insep-
arabic companion, the formula card, is
sent to the cutting room, where deft-
fingered girls shape it into cylinders of
definite weight, from which segments
are cut by one operator, while an
other feeds the pieces into the ma
chine. in which they are whirled be-
tween two belts moving in opposite
directions. This rolls the segments
into cylinders about ten inches long
and three-quarter OF an inch thick.
As the cylinders emerge from be-
tween the nds they slip down be-
tween two corrugated rollers, which
cut them into even lengths and mold
them into spheres OF uniform size.
These spheres are next fed into
the piping machine and rolled into
long slender cylinders or pipes.
These pipes are received upon a tray
in front of the machine, from which
they are transferred to the pill-cut-
ting machine. Any thickness of pipe
can be made by a simple adjustment
of the mechanism
The pipes are now laid across the
tiuted bed-plate of the pill-cutting
machine and lightly busted. BY means
of the lever on the right the lower
plate is pushed backward, when a
movement of second lever, on the
left, elevates it and thus presses the
pipes against the cutting surface of
the oscillating upper plate. Either
round or oval pills are formed by en-
ploying cutters with flutes of round
or oval section.
The freshly nodded pills are now
taken to the drying rooms, where
they are placed in wooden trays con-
tanning clean, dry flour, with when