MANUFACTURING SILVER.

Colonist, Volume LII, Issue 12878, 23 August 1910, Page 4

MANUFACTURING SILVER.

It is alleged tliat Dr. F. W. Lango, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, has^dis-, covered how to manufacture silver from baser metals. A lengthy account is published:. in the New York "World" of how the doctor mixed eight "ounces of silver and a siinilat •■ weight of "chemicals and base metals" atuf after certain processes produced sixteen oiincos of . "pure silver." Dr Lange has kept secret tho essential feature of his discovery, but he states that he is absolutely satisfied that "the element" derived from his mixture of eilver and other les? valuable substances "is the came m its chemical action, in weight, appearance and character, as assayed, refined silver." The success of the process, asserts the "World,'" has not been judged merely by the inventor's own tests of the material taken from his furnace. Samples have been sent to a number of assayers and chemists for analysis \\ithout any . information being supplied as to the origin of the material. Ihe repqits shw that thj substance is "silver running from 9S> to 98 per cent, pure, the - small balance being moisture and impurities." Electroplaters, whom Dr. Lango has asked to try it have agreed that it is silver, and photographers have worked with nitrates derived from' it, under the be- ' lief that they were using the ordinary chemical-. If the assertions, put forward by the American newspaper are trustworthy, in short, a material has been manufactured by the combination of silver and base materials that "analyses as silver, re-acts as silver and gives general, results identical with those of silver." Probably the reporter" has been misled somewhere, 'inlcss the doctor has been deceiving himself by merely : combining with the original - quantity of silver some impurities that give increased weight and are net easily detected. in a hasty analysis." In any case, a' method of manufacturing silver would be much less profitable to-day than it would have been twenty or thirty years ago. Silver was worth 5s an ounce in 1880, ■and now it brings scarcely 2s an ounce.