Evening star., 1941-01-28
Of Stors, Men
And Atoms
Notebook of Science Progress
In Laboratory, Field
And Study
By Thomas r. Henry.

become wholly American.
When the Germans overran two-thirds
of France last June they wrecked
monopoly two generations old-manufac-
ture of the paper in which cigarettes are
wrapped 1t afforded jobs for nearly
1000 Frenchmen and brought revenue
OF several millions every year.
Now the United States must make its
own cigarette paper, with the prospect
that the use of cigarettes will increase
greatly, as is always the case in a war
year. This will be possible, it is ex-
planned by experts of the United States
Bureau of Standards here, through sew
eral revolutionary developments in the
past few years by which it is possible
to make the proper grade of linen paper
out of fax fiber instead of rags.
Hitherto this has been impossible. Flax
contains a lot of non-fibrouS material
and there are "knots" in the fiber ITSELF
To get rid of these knots and the other
impurities has required drastic chemi-
cal treatment. The fiber itself did not
stand up well and the resulting paper
was too weak to stand the strenuous
treatment it got in cigarette making.
If any of the impurities were left they
ruined the cigarette
The new chemical findings also make
it possible to manufacture directly from
flax some high-grade writing papers, Of
types now made in Europe out of linen
rags. The actual rag paper industry in
this country is of small proportions and
is highly specialized
Cigarette paper made of wood pulp,
the Bureau of Standards experts say,
would be unusable.
Making of cigarette paper has been
highly specialized art, largely concen-
trated in about 20 French factories. Most
OF these are in the occupied zone Ex-
ports are almost completely shut off. In
1899, the last year for which complete
figures are possessed by the Department
of Commerce, these amounted to nearly
5000 tons, with total value of approxi-
mately s4.0000O0. From the rest of the
world, including the United States, the
supply was only about so tons.
The French paper was made of linen
rags. 1t was of almost as good quality
as the paper used for money. 1t had to
be less than thousandth of an inch
thick, but yet strong enough to stand the
pull of rolling machines in factories. 1t
had to be entirely free of dirt and burn
with q white ash" Very minute
amounts of impurities would result in
brown or black ash, which would in
dicate there was something wrong with
the cigarette
The greatest difficulty of all was to get
paper with exactly the same combus-
ton rate as tobacco. This varies slightly
with different tobaccos. The problem
became acute about 20 years ago, when
the ever-burning cigarette first appeared.
The paper had to fit the formulas OF the
different companies The burning rate
Is regulated by impregnating the paper
with chalk, sometimes as much as 20 per
cent.
Another requirement was that the pa
per be almost absolutely alright. The
slightest pin prick would make a Gig
arctic virtually unsmokable. French
paper chemists worked for years to pro-
duce a paper which would meet these
requirements
Titanic flowers Of fire on the face of
the sun, with the dark areas of sunspots
as their centers and long filaments of
flaming hydrogen gas as their petals, are
being studied by astronomers at the
Mount Wilson Observatory Of the Car
negie Institution of Washington. These
great flaments. sometimes forming vor-
tices or whirls, have long been known to
color observers
The normal surface of the chromo-
sphere, or outer atmosphere of the sun,
looks like the skin of an orange when
viewed with the spectrohelioscope under
the best possible observing conditions.
1t is finely granulated, like the orange.
Near large sunspots, however, there is a
marked change in the appearance. The
atmospheric gasses are drawn out into
long fllaments, indicating the presence
OF extensive fields of force.
Seen under the best conditions" saws
DR.. r. S. Richardson, "theSe filaments
remind one of petals or tendrils grow
ing out of sunspot penumbra and spread
ing over the hydrogen chromosphere.
Occasionally they form pattern similar
to the arrangement of iron filings around
barmagnet, or to the lines of flow in
vortex
These fllaments he warns, must not
be confused with the great polar prom
1nences, geySers of fire thousands of
miles high, which shoot up from the
suns face. They are smaller and lighter.
but sometimes it is difficult to dis
tinguish between the two phenomena.
Welcomed solar flares seldom are
observed. The cause is still debatable.
Sunspots are known to act like great
magnets, and one theory has been that
the filaments are arranged by magnetic
forces like iron filings If this were
the case, however, the direction of the
petals" would always be in accord with
the polarity of the magnet Another
theory, which seems more in accord
with present evidence, is that they are
whirlpools in the suns high atmos-
phere, whose form depends on how the
gasseS are flowing into or out of the
spot.