The Ely miner., 1914-02-27

used heretofore for news print
paper.
The sheet which newspaper
readers hold in their hands each
day is made of wood. If one looks
closely the little wood 6bers can be
seen, especially in the margins
where printing does not obscure
them. The larger part of the
wood so used is ground up, while
some of it reduced by the action of
chemicals. The chemical pulp has
the Iarges fibers and certain pro-
portion of it is added to the ground
wood to give the finished paper the
required toughness.
Spruce, abundant in the New
England and Lake States and in
Canada, has heretofore been the
standard wood for making news
print paper and as long as there
was supply sufficient to meet the
needs of the paper industry there
was no reason to seek substitutes.
But heavy inroads have been made
on the spruce forests of the western
part of the United States in this
day of great circulations and large
editions, especially of Sunday pa
pers with their many parts. On
rough estimate, newspaper with
an average circulation of sixty
thousand copies and an average
edition of twenty pages, uses each
day the product of about four acres
of forest. When this figure is
multiplied by the great number of
newspapers published in the
United States, many of them with
much larger editions, and when
this is further multiplied by 365,
because many papers are issued
every day of the year. it can be
seen that the drain upon the forests
is enormous. Foresters say that
even under the most approved
methods known to their profession,
it could scarcely be expected that
spruce would be able to hold its
own, but would need supplement-
ing by other material.
1t is but natural, therefore, that
paper manufacturers are looking
for new sources of supply which
will furnish an abundance of wood
pulp, at a price which will not be
prohibitive. Poplar and a few
other woods are used, but they do
not go very far.
In the national forests there are
many woods considered inferior by
lumbermen. Yet they are available
for purchase at low rates and many
of the timber stands are readily ac-
cessible. The forest service, in its
desire to utilize to the best advan-
tage all of the resources of the fed
eral timber holdings, has been
seeking proper uses for these trees
and has experimental in making
pulp, from them at its pulp labora-
tory at Wausau, Wisconsin, an
auxiliary of the forest products
laboratory at Madison. The Wau-
sau laboratory is equipped with
standard machinery and all expert
ments are carried out under condi-
tions which duplicate commercial
practice.
AS final test of the value of
some of these new woods under
practical conditions, arrangements
were made between the forest SER
vice and the Herald to print some
part of its edition on paper made
from various woods that showed
promise as substitutes for spruce.
These woods were ground at the
Wausau laboratory; the product
was then mixed with the usual
proportion, of chemical pulp and
made intesnews print paper, rolls
of which were sent to New York
for the experimental run.
The new woods must fulfil many
conditions as to color, finish and
strength. In these trial runs, most
of the paper is9nade from various
western frs, which show consider
able promise, but the investigators
do not consider their tests complete
until they have subjected the paper
to actual printing conditions. They
grow throughout the mountain
ranges of the west particularly in
the Pacific coast states.