SILK FROM MILK

Taranaki Daily News, 5 August 1937, Page 16

SILK FROM MILK

WORK OF GERMAN CHEMIST. TEN YEARS SPENT ON THE TASK. Mr. Benjamin Roos, 41-year-old German chemist, now working in England, is trying to produce a perfect synthetic silk from milk, says the Sunday Express. . Already he has been ten years on his task, and. has made silk from milk in his laboratories, silk of fine texture and colour. In 1931 Mr. Roos sent Government analysts in Berlin a sample of real silk and a sample of his own invention. The analysts declared it was impossible to distinguish between them. Mr. Roos is not satisfied. So faf he \has spent more than' £25,000 in research work, and for years has kept laboratories going in four countries. But always the secret of combining in his product every quality of the flnest silk has eluded him. He has set himself to obtain five essentials— beauty of colour, strength, softness, elasticity and non-shrinkableness. At present he can combine up to ariy four of tliese qualities, but the remaining point of perfection escapes in the process. Mr. Roos has now succeeded in a remarkable experiment. He is arranging for two cows to be fed for three weeks on mulberry leaves; which is the only diet of the silkworm. "I. intend taking two cows in iine condition and have them left' to pasture in the ordinary way for a week," he said. "Then I will arialyse their milk, the butter made from it, and the casein remaining in the skimmed milk. Casein is the raw material from which I make my synthetic silk. Next, the cows will have a proportion of mulberry leaves fed them. The same tests will be carried out. Later I hope to feed them for three weeks almost entirely on mulberry leaves, again testing the results. , "If the cows fed on mulberry leaves produce casein which is. more suitable for my silk than that from ordinarily fed cows, I shall attempt to make. a chemical analysis to establish the difference between the two caseins. If the chemical constituents of this difference are once ascertained it should be possible to improve the normal casein by manufacturing the 'difference' in the laboratory." An average cow, every day it is milked, can produce enough casein to manufacture nearly 21b 8oz of synthetic silk. This is after butter has been made from the milk. It takes more than 30,000 silkworms, who will eat a ton of ripe mulberry leaves, to yield 121b of raw silk properly reeled.