HALF-WAY ON THE ROAD

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 135, 12 June 1929, Page 11

HALF-WAY ON THE ROAD

N.Z. NEWSPRINT'S TECHNICAL ■ ■'; . MERIT '

Among those who yesterday watched the broad thin band of newsprint paper speed from the spinning paper-rolls into the revolving mechanism of the "Evening Jost" printing presses, which turned the blank white paper into folded newspapers at the rate of ever so many a second, were officials of the New- Zealand Forest Service. Only a fractional space of time is required to convert a band of newsprint into a newspaper—whole piles of them would mount.up between the stopping and the re-starting of a street triimcar. But the initial transformation from standing "trees (tawa, insignis, ' rimu) m New Zealand to pulp in America, and finally to commercial newsprint at the delivery end of a United States papermaking mill, took both time, thought and labour. Yesterday, hi the deafening atmosphere of the great printing presses, the Director of Forestry (Mr E..Phillips Turner) and the Engineer in' Forest Products (Mr. A. E. Entrican, who represented the Department in the United States), also the Secretary of the Department of Industrial and Scientific Research (Dr. E. Marsden), witnessed the successful test of the homegrown (tawa-inSignis) newsprint, which proved fully equal to the speed, strain, and stress of modern printing. The State Forest officials stood as in a halfway house of their journey; technical ability to produce newsprint from New Zealand woods was tangibly proved the commercial possibility of doing so in New Zealand, hi competition with the world's papers, remains to be tested. And this economic half of the problem is being duly studied.: Technically, the trial run was completely successful. The printing, staff of the; "Evening Post" had no difficulty in securing results with this product of the soil, and the printing was carried out in normal time. ■