MEETING CHALLENGES

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVIII, Issue 296, 30 November 1928, Page 3

MEETING CHALLENGES

WOOL IMPROVEMENT PLANS. WOOD PULP RIVALRY. Tho growth of a substitute is a challenge to efficiency in the threatened article. Generally the challenge is taken up, though there have been cases where tho owners of old-estab-lished proprietary articles being chloroformed with half-a-century of past prosperity, have taken competition lying down, until such time as the rising tide drowned them. But the challenges of intending substitutes are as a rule regarded too seriously to allow tho fight to go by default. Even where the challenged article is a staple possessed of certain fundamental advantages which the challenger may never hope to reproduce, yet the staple industry is quick to organise in its own defence. Such an industry is wool. The competition of artificial silk has directed the attention of the woollen industry to certain real qualities of tho wood-pulp article—qualities which woollens might, by improved processes, be able to emulate—and to certain known defects of wool that may be remediable, such as shrinkage. An important statement was recently made at Leicester by Dr. S. G. Barker, director of research for the British woollen and worsted industries. He disclosed that experiments were being made with wool which, it was hoped, would end in the production of a fabric to compare in lightness and lustre with any other material and so would win back for wool its place in the favour of women. Dr. Barker insisted that wool was the ouly national clothing. Ho said that animals of the field were not clothed in wool pulp. They were provided with an outer covering of a protective character. It was capable of withstanding all climatic and atmospheric conditions, and capable also of giving the maximum health-giving properties to the animal itself. All through the ages attempts have been made to utilise fibres of vegetable origin to supplant wool. Dr. Barker stated that wool as produced on the farnV in the Dominions was not grown with special care to meet tho wants and requirements of the manufacturer. The raw material’ went forward to the industry under a general heading of wool, good, bad, indifferent, and suitable or unsuitable regardless of the finished product. To his mind the grower and the manufacturer should bo linked together with a close and firm scientific link of fleece and fibrie analysis. In his laboratory experimenting was going on vtfth the object of devising a method for the production of lighter cloths. Experimenting work was also being carried on with the object of making wool unshrinkable. Investigations in this direction had reached, such a stage that it was hoped they would by successful in the iienr future.