The Flax Industry.

Progress, Volume I, Issue 2, 1 December 1905, Page 34

The Flax Industry.

Very few persons realise the enormous amount which might be saved to the community, byimprovements in the manufacture of fibre from New Zealand phormium tenax. Millions of pounds have been, wasted, and hundreds of thousands are thrown away every year through the methods employed in the production of the fibre. The processes of stripping, bleaching and scutching are, all of them, as crude and antiquated as it is possible to conceive. The stripping injures the fibre, the bleaching is dependent upon the weather to produce a good colour, and is imperfect and wastful of time under the best conditions. Scutching, as at present performed, turns an amount of good flax into tow, which in itself, if saved, would be sufficient to pay a fair profit upon the wholeindustry. From time to time attempts have been made by inventors to improve the methods of production, but their efforts have been merely spasmodic, very few indeed of their suggestions have had a practical trial ; no one apparently is prepared to spend the few hundreds, or thousands as the case may be, required to improve the processes and save the colony this enormous annual loss. In a subsequent number we hope to showthat it would profit the colony to set up a commission of experts, even if the cost amounted to per year, to inquire into the industry, and to examine the processes which have been suggested for its improvement ; and, after experiment, to recommend to flaxmillers methods calculated to prevent the annually recurring loss.

A cubic foot of earth weighs about five and a-half times as much as a cubic foot of water. A cubic mile of earth then weighs 25,649,300,000 tons. The volume of the earth is 259,880,000,000 cubic miles. The weight of the world without its atmosphere is 6,666,250,000,000,000,000,000 tons. If we add to this the weight of the atmosphere given above, we get a grand total of 6,666,255,819,600,000, 000,000 tons. No wonder (says the American Machivisl) Atlas became round-shouldered.