Evening star., 1941-08-24
Making Paper From
Worlds TuIIest Trees
BIZ Frederic J. HdSkin.

world, the Tasmanian hardwood euca-
lypts, are being fei.ed to make newsprint.
Until only a few months ago no one
had ever made commercial paper from
these hardwood trees, ana with the con-
quest Of this new material TO meet mans
Unsuitable and eVer-increaSing demand
for the printed page another frontier
yields to science and commerce.
Tasmania, the island south of Aus
tralia which is one OF the six Australian
states, contains the worlds largest vir-
gin forests of eucalyptus. When the first
settlers pushed their way deeper into
the great Australian bush there were
millions of these huge tough trees, some
more than 400 feet high.
Settlers, however, were not interested
m forestry. They wanted cleared land,
and when the trees were too large to
fell, they ring-barked them, SO that the
towering giants died, leaving bleached
white skeletons to mark their folly. It
was not until some of the best forests
had been ring -barked or burned that a
hardwood lumber industry grew up
around the eucalypt. Now, new in
dustry, hardwood paper-milling is turn
ing out neWsprint for Australian news
papers, and cellulose for war industry.
1t is the latest chapter in the intriguing
story of paper that runs through the
centuries from papyrus, grasses, silk,
linen, cotton. straw and rags to the long
rib red North American sprute.
1t was only about rs years ago that
wood supplemented rags and straw as
the source of pulp for newsprint. Mer-
riton, now Interlaken, Mass, was the
founding place, chemists using a Euro
pesn formula that had not yet won
acceptance abroad From that stemmed
the vast wood-pulp and paper-making
industry of this continent. Long-fbered,
easily worked conifers were in such
abundance throughout the Northern
Hemisphere that it seemed they were
inexhaustible for centuries to come, illu-
sorry as that idea has proved.
But Europeans found the Australian
bush stranger to that abundance.
Conifers are not native there. Instead,
there abounds in all places some one or
another of the nearly 500 types Of euca-
lypt hardwood that shed their bark
instead of leaf. These trees captivated
scientists, none of whom has yet salts
factorily traced the history of the euca-
lypt.s Saplings that shoot to feet high
in 18 or "a months. the tallest-growing
tree renewing its life in 40 years, upset
all European forest traditions. Califor-
mia, Spain, France. Portugal. Madagas-
car, Brazil all now boast sizable growths
of these gums, but of all their eucalypts
the Australian is the mother.
Thirty-five years ago Auguste de Ba-
way, a Belgian industrial chemist in
Australia and founder Of the electro
lytic process of extracting zinc, proved
in his laboratory that these hardwoods
would make black paper. 1t has taken
35 years to learn how to turn it white.
Paper technicisns were too well salts
fled with the abundant confer to show
much interest. Application of their
regular chemical practices to eucalypt
pulp gave poor results. In United States
and Canadian mills Australian logs,
treated the confer way, yielded pulp
too costly to bleach. and paper bluish-
gray instead of white. Their newsprint
had q blue black stain akin to that
which marks a steel axe or saw that
cuts a green gum. Iron and tannin
that make the tree tough puzzled the
paper experts.
The skepticism that developed around
the use of hardwood pulp in the United
States had several origins: The abun-
dance of softwoods that produced
technical self-sufficiency, the difficulty
of working the pulp by accepted methods
and the poor yield from it in paper, and
finally the fact that the Australian pro-
edge of the paper industry. But lack
of knowledge of the paper industry left
for them a field for exploration. So
they continued to experiment.
The Forests Products Laboratory,
Madison, Wis, in the early 1920s heard
of the formula worked out for hardwood
pulp by L. r. Benjamin of Australia.
The laboratory brought eucalypts from
Brazil and put them through tests in
1927, with encouraging results. The fol-
lowing year, cooperating with the New
Zealand Forest Service, it utilized Me-
Zealand woods. American industrialists
have since made some Improvements on
the Benjamin formula adding the latest
semi-chemical process and the use or
the wood mill in beating pulp. This
confirmed the tremendous discovery Of
the new source of pulp, the hitherto
little-known hardwood, and opened for
the whole world new vista in cellulose
reserves Comparatively, by trial and
error, the peoples of the four Pacific
nations, Australia. the United States,
Canada and New Zealand, have had a
hand in this technical exploration.
Depletion of the timber reserves on
the North American continent through
expanding demands of industry has been
an endless source of worry to the gov
ernments. Taking a lesson from this
experience, smaller, more centralized
countries have prohibited the destruc-
ton of a tree without permission and
without the planting of new tree IN
its place. Australia, New Zealand,
Brazil, the Baltic countries, Russia,
Canada and the United States still have
the most limited silvicultural controls
merely because abundance makes them
unalert. Mainsprinp of movements for