England Has Pioneered Manufacture of Rayon

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26353, 7 January 1947, Page 2

England Has Pioneered Manufacture of Rayon

Information about new textiles was given in a recent 8.8. C. shortwave broadcast by Veda Watkins. “ I have just come in from the hill country on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border where the railway, climbs up from Bradford through Halifax over to Rochdale and' down to Manchester,” she said. “ There can hardly be a route anywhere in the world which has seen more history and more traffic concerned with the development of textiles than this one. Centuries ago, the pack horses carrying Yorkshire woollens used it. Those hills still look down on the woollen and worsted mills of Huddersfield and Bradford to the one side, and to the forest of Lancashire cotton mills on the other, while away to the south lies Macclesfield, whose silks are a household word in all climates. Moreover, the brooks and becks and rivers of this ancient watershed of England have been recognised for generations as producing in excellent quantity, the pure soft water so essential for dyeing and finishing beautiful fabrics of evrey type. The people who live and work in these hill towns have fine fabric making in their blood.

“Now,” Miss Watkins continued, "a3§ new factor, a most important and unifying factor, is making its entry on the textile stage—rayon. Just as Britain has led'the world in the art and science of wool growing and woollen cloth production, and has .pioneered and taught the world the art and science of cotton spinning and weaving, so have British brains and energy and vision pioneered the development of this new fibre, rayon. "It was nearly three centuries ago that an English philosopher, Robert Hooke, in 1664 first forecast rayon as we know it to-day in a book called ‘ Micrographia.’ Hooke claimed to have seen 1 a pretty kind of artificial stuff which remained tinged with a great variety of very vivid colours, and to the naked eye it looked very like the substance of the silk.’ He goes on: ‘And I have often thought, that probably there might be a way found out to make an artificial glutin • ous composition, much resembling, if not fully as good,, nay better than that excrement, or whatever substance it be out of which the silkworm spins his silk.’ He hoped that this hint might give some ‘ingenious and inquisitive person,’ as he puts it, ‘an occasion of making some trial.’ Two hundred and nineteen years later several ‘ingenious and inquisitive people’ did just this. “ Sir Joseph Swan took out a patent in 1882 for producing ‘artificial silk’ >to make filaments for electric light bulbs, from nitro-cellulose. In 1892 Cross and Bevan invente'd the viscose process for the same purpose by treating cellulose from cotton or wood pulp with caustic soda and carbon bisulphide. In 1910 Mr Henry Greenwood Tetley introduced the Viscose process to the United States and founded the American Viscose Company as a subsidiary of Courtaulds. In 1940, before the advent of lend-lease, this Britishowned and British-pioneered interest was sold to America to earn Great Britain dollars to buy war material for our fight against the Axis Powers. ‘‘Rayon’s ‘first name was ‘artificial silk,’ just as radio’s first name was wireless, and this for a natural but, in rayon's case, a most unfortunate reason. Whenever you discover anything you must as a general rule describe it in terms of what you already know. So this new stuff was called artificial silk. Germany and Italy in their famous efforts to be self-sup-porting produced bv the same process something they called imitation wool But nobody still calls a jeep or a motor lorry a ‘ horseless carriage,’ though their strength is still measured in horse-power, and, in just the sairm way. faj* too many people still call rayon ‘artificial silk’; and. though its fineness, like that of silk, is measured in denier, rayon is not artificial anything. It is ravon—a new fibre family in its own right, with its own job to do in the world of textiles.”