NEW USES FOR WOOD Forests Supply Food Clothing, Petrol

Southland Times, Issue 23676, 26 November 1938, Page 13

NEW USES FOR WOOD Forests Supply Food Clothing, Petrol

LONDON. THE dress you are wearing may have been made from wood pulp, and so is the paper on which this is written, and so are the high explosives which may one day blow the dress and paper sky high. But paper and dresses and explosives are only three of hundreds of everyday goods that are being manufactured these days from wood, from protein, from milk. This is the day of “ersatz,” as the Germans call substitute goods. The scientists of most nations are searching for substitutes to make them independent of imports in war time. The result is that fine dresses are being made from milk, and suits of clothes from fish, and motorcar fuel from wood.

Yes, milk and fish and wood. Visit the Timber Research Exhibition in London and you can see food and drink and clothing and shelter that have all been made from wood. For food there is molasses and chocolate, for example, both made from wood. For drink there is alcohol—and, from the same wood, another alcohol that can be used for fuel. For clothing—well, 150,000,000 pounds of artificial silk will be manufactured from wood in Great Britain this year. You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear but you can make it from a block of wood. From blocks of wood, as I saw there, you can make photo films and string and dainty wastepaper baskets and fluffy dolls. You can make sausageskins, linoleum and plastic wood and “compo” flooring that looks and feels like marble. From wood you can make wool and blankets and insulators, alcohol and silk and syrup, high explosives and sugar and cattle fodder. Moreover, if you do not want to spend money on petrol for your car, you can quite easily run it on wood. Recently I travelled 50 miles an hour in a little old motor-car that used wood, not petrol, for motive power. . I was in the village of Long .Crendon, Buckinghamshire, about 40 miles from London. I was visiting a young research worker named G. H. Donald, who learned some years ago that cars could run on wood and stopped buying petrol right away. “I can go 60 miles for sixpence worth of wood,” he said, “so why should I pay money for petrol?” I looked at his car. There was nothing unusual about it except for an unusually big luggage carrier on the back. “That’s my wood tank. The principle of the thing is exactly the same as with

petrol,” he said. “An ordinary car runs because a spark ignites the vaporized petrol and causes an explosion which works a piston. Well, if you heat wood, it too, gives off a gas. I assure you that is all there is to it.”

“Fine,” I said, “but does it work?” “Get in the car," he replied. I got in with him and he drove 50 miles an hour. Magical Cellulose 1 RETURNED to London to visit the Timber Research Exhibition, and an expert there explained some other ways in which wood, milk and even fish are being developed to provide cheap substitute goods.

The magic word in such research work today is “cellulose,” one of the chief constituents of wood. Wood is

generally regarded as being composed of lignone and cellulose, together with

smaller quantities of more or less gumlike bodies. The lignone can be removed from the wood by steam or by warm, weak acids, and cellulose, better known as wood pulp, remains. By appropriate treatment with nitric or acetic acid

cellulose can be made to produce

soluble compounds which when precipitated make up into artificial silk, dopes, inflammable and non-inflamm-able films, high explosives and the rest. How is silk made from wood pulp? The cellulose, treated with chemicals, is sent to the various markets in the form of thin sheets of what is known as sulphide wood pulp. In silk-making this pulp is dissolved by chemicals into a syrupy liquid. The liquid is; then squirted through very fine nozzles, and the streams that emerge go through a treatment which solidifies them into filaments of beautiful, silken thread. “Actually,” said my expert, “this process is very similar to the spinning process of spiders. But by simply altering the mouthpiece of the nozzles or spinnerets into long narrow slits the liquid cellulose is made to come out in the form of thin sheets. These are treated to produce celluloid, and photograph and cinema film, cellophane, bottle caps, lacquer for car bodies, dope for the wing fabric of aeroplanes, moulded articles and a hundred other things are made from this liquid.” As early as the last war the Germans were producing clothes from wood, but it was poor stuff compared to those they are making now. Today hundreds of thousands of Germans wear woollen suits or silken dresses made from wood, sleep on sheets made from wood, carry suitcases made from wood and eat sausages whose skins are made from wood. It was in Germany too that I first saw “compo” flooring, which looks like beautiful marble and is 60 per cent, as hard and is also made from wood.

A creosote oil from wood is used for washing fruit trees. Nitrocellulose made from wood goes into explosives. A quite appetizing molasses is made from wood. Sugar can be distilled from wood, and so can certain animal fodders. Drinking alcohol, poisonous wood alcohol and alcohol for fuel can also be derived from the forests. The total number of wood products is several hundred and is fast increasing. And now the chemists are making cloth from milk and fish! The process of making “milk wool” was invented by an Italian, and the process was actually used in Germany 30 years ago. Milk wool, or lanital, is made from a substance in milk called casein. Remove all the butter-milk and

water from skim milk and it is casein that remains. The casein is treated with chemicals and then, like cellulose in the silk-making process, is forced through fine spinnerets, collected in acid tanks, dried—and then made into suits of clothes! Germans are making clothes out of ' fish. The albumen in fish is suitably treated and goes through a mechanical , process similar to that of cellulose and ‘ milk. The cloth produced is strong, durable and warm.

The day may come, then, when sheep can be raised merely for mutton. But speaking of sheep, a fantastic-sounding but true story has just come _ out of Russia about sheep. Russian - scientists, I read have just learned how to make sheep grow coloured wool. They found after long experimentation that by feeding the sheep small doses of a substance called thallium they caused them to -grow coloured fleeces that did not need dyeing! At first., they got the coloured wool all right, but killed the sheep; but at last they got a successful modification of the dose. And they claim also to have another chemical which, when fed to sheep, causes them to moult at the right season, and so save the trouble and expense of shearing! Well, it would be quite possible for women dressed in clothes made from milk and for men in clothes made from wood and for children wearing little suits that, once were fish to appear on the streets of our cities. But I should not like to wake up some fine morning and see sheep wearing many-coloured wool. ■ -