DYES AND DYEING.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18291, 14 June 1929, Page 5

DYES AND DYEING.

STORY OF A BRITISH ENTERPRISE Those who persuaded Mr James Morton, the founder first of the Sundour Fadeless Fabrics and late of Scottish Dyes, Ltd., to overcome his dislike of publicity and to tell, as he did before the Royal Society of Arts the story of the development of fast dyeing and dyes in England, deserves well of all students of colour problems. It was, in 1902, Mr Morton stated, that during a visit to London he made an inspection of a famous West Ena shop to see how the coloured fabrics he had manufactured looked. He was shocked to find that the colour schemes, to which he had given so much attention, had been quite ruined by exposure to sunlight for even a few days, and he decided at once to investigate this problem and see if fast colours were not possible. He collected hundreds of samples of coloured fabrics and took them home with him to Penrith, where at once he emptied his greenhouse of its young tomato plants, and filled it with ihs samples for the purpose of testing the effects of sunlight. The result was disastrous to the colours; within a week they had been ruined, deep shades of expensive velvets becoming almost white. From that moment began Mr Morton’s quest for colours “fast to light," Eventually he arrived at a range of colours that could be relied on and was able to offer goods with a guarantee of the stability of the colours. It was a bold step; to meet eventualities that might arise a reserve was set aside, but it was found possible to discontinue this at the end of two years. When it was decided to start their own dyeing operations he visited the technical colleges at Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford to find present or past students for the important post they had to fill, and so obtained the services of Dr Teltscher. In the course of the work alizarines were found to be good friends, and old mineral colouring matters for buffs and browns were valuable; blues and greens were difficult to obtain, and, though the vat dyes, then new, were helpful, their manipulation in commercial bulk proved to be a piece of interesting new work. From their own particular fabrics they turned to plain dyed piece goods, a departure, he said, that got Lancashire manufacturers by the ears, and they foretold early disaster to a firm that guaranteed plain dyed cloths. But they w’ent on with the work and produced these plain dyed goods at a time when Germany had not yet applied the colours in this form.

The outbreak of war. and the consequent difficulty of obtaining colours, brought a time of anxiety. Blue and yellow, with their combination into green, were again the crux of the situation. The chemical research department which they had set up wrestled with the problem, and it was solved, but it meant the solving of engineering as well as chemical difficulties. The whole problem of the manufacture of these long process dyestuffs, not only from silver salts to the finished dyestuffs, but from crude tar anthracene all the way to silver salt, had to be tackled. In the result they manufactured not only for themselves, but were able to sell to others—they produced dyestuffs for which the woolmen were hungering.

It was development that brought Scottish Dyes, Ltd., into existence, and not the least of their achievements—it was work which occupied the research staff for four years—was the production of a green—Caledon jade green—which was the fastest all-round colour of the vat series. It was the coming of this colour which brought

over representatives of the Badische Company to negotiate for its production in Germany. Mr Morton chaffed them about a bust of him they had suggested in 1913; “Surely the jade green justifies the honour." •'Bust!" replied one of them. “Do you know when we read of your specification for that jade green we were so wild we had failed to discover it ourselves that we could have ‘kilt’ you.” A still later success was the production of these anthraquinone vat dyestuffs in a form soluble in water. In all that time they never dispensed with the services of a single chemist, and they never engaged a chemist previous experience in dye-making. “No one," said Mr Morton, in conclusion, “must ever deny the honour due to the Germans, but we must never forget that they got the scent all this trail from the young man Perkins of his country.