BEATING THE GERMANS.

Feilding Star, Volume XII, Issue 3011, 4 August 1916, Page 4

BEATING THE GERMANS.

AT THEIR OWN GAME

Pyrogallol and amidol, used in developing photo plates and had before the war been exclusively imported from Germany. The war caused the price to rise hv leaps and bounds, and threatened to become prohibitive. The photographers were not resigned to the threatened shortage of developers. "Come," said they to the chemists; "get to work and produce us pyrogallol and amidol." In the Patents Office at Melbourne lay the specifications of Julius Hauff's amidol, and hither a chemical assistant hastened to peruse it. But, oh, the wily Hun! All that the chemists knew, though they consulted tho text books, was that nhenol, a coal-tar product, could be so treated that amidol could be produced. What they did not know were all the details of the quantities, temperatures, crystallisation, manipulation, and purification, which must be carefully observed if a pure article were to be produced. All this detail had to be worked out, and it was worked out in the chemical laboratory of the Victorian Railways Department. There, among the beafrers and burners, the gas generators and water-baths, the ambition of the Huns as represented by a patent taken out by Julius Hauff. of Stuttgart, for amidol, a chemical used in photography, has received a check. Julius Hauff has lost his secret irrevocably, for Victorian Railways amidol wi dllevelop 10 prints to 9 developed by a similar quantity of the German article. What has been done in tho laboratory can be done in the factory. A tentacle of the German octopus ha 6 been severed. Hitherto pyrogallol has been used for developing plates only, but the departmental photographers have discovered a method of using it instead of amidol in print development. They say it is even better than the "amidol for the ■prints. Special apparatus is (being designed, so that the chemists may nroduee sufficient pyrogallol and amidol will develop 10 prints to 9 developgraphers independent of the market.