SECRET OF BLEACHING.
When the country housewife spreads her sheets and the tablecloths and other linen upon the grass, placing stones upon the corners to hold them down, she knows she is going to have beautifully white things if the sun shines on them. And she rather welcomes a thunderstorm that will shower them with rain. The chemists have only recently discovered the why of •this bleaching which women have been practising ever since cleanliness became a virtue. It is all due to peroxide of hydrogen, the same peroxide with which some ladies bleach their hair. There is peroxide of hydrogen in all rain water; after a thunderstorm there is more than usual. It is ■due, acording to Prof. A. S. Neumark, to the action of ozone on water, the former "being formed by the influence of the silent electrical discharge on moist rarefied air in the upper .regions of the atmosphere. It is also claimed that ultra-violent light is one of the causes of the presence of hydrogen peroxide in rain water. Prof. K. W. Charitskow has proved that the rays of the sun are capable of producing hydrogen peroxide by exposing moist porous substances to the sun in the presence of oxygen. So the bleaching of linen on lawns is due to the oxidising effect of the sun's rays
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Northern Advocate, 26 August 1913, Page 2
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221SECRET OF BLEACHING. Northern Advocate, 26 August 1913, Page 2
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