FIREPROOF PAPER.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 262, 5 November 1928, Page 19

FIREPROOF PAPER.

Paper clothes for firemen who must enter burning buildings; fireproof partitions made of paper sheets; burglarproof, fire-resisting safes made of compressed paper for the storage of valuables; to Bay nothing of paper books that fanatics of another Inquisition could not burn if they tried, are all foreseen, says Dr. E. E. Free, in "Week's Science," as results of the invention by a German chemical engineer, Mr. Franz Franck, of a way of making paper that will not catch fire. We read: "In a recent demonstration in Berlin Mr. Franck took a sheet of ordinary newspaper, crumpled it into a ball and wrapt this highly combustible object in a sheet of. his fireproof paper. Thus protected, he held it for a few minutes in the flame of a laboratory blast lamp hot enough to melt a glass window pane or to. burn a hole through a plaster wall. Not only did the fireproof wrapping survive, but the ordinary paper inside was not even scorched, so great is the ability of the new paper to repel heat. Paperlike fireproof materials have been woven previously out of asbestos fibres, but that is not Mr. Franck's process. His material is made of cellulose fibres, just as ordinary paper is, but these are put through a chemical treatment which makes them virtually unburnable. The exact nature of this treatment is not disclosed."