Manufacturing Silver.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 27 August 1910, Page 4

Manufacturing Silver.

FROM BASER. METALS

It is alleged that Dr F. W. Lange, \ of Coranton, Pennsylvania, has discovered 'how to manufacture silver " from baser metals. A lengthy account is published in the York World of how the doctor mixed eight ounces of silver and a similai weight of "chemicals and base metals" and after certain processes produced sixteen ounces of "pure silver." Dr Lange has kept secret the essential feature of his discovery but he states that he is absolutely satisfied that "the element" derived from his mixture of silver and other less valuable substances "is the same in its chemical action, in weight, appearance and character, as assayed, appearance and character, as assaved, refined silver." The success of the process, asserts tbe World, has not been judged merely by the inventor's own tests of tilve material taken from his furnace. Samples have been sent to a number of assayers and chemists for analysis without any information being supplied as to the origin of the material. The reports statethat the substance is "silver running from 92 to 98 per cent pure, the small balance being moisture and impurities." Eleetroplaters _ wiliom Dr Lange has asked to try it have agreed that it is silver, and photographers have worked with nitrates derived from it, under the belief that they were using the ordinary chemical. If the assertions put forward by the American newspapei a>re trustworthy, in short, a material has been manufactured by the combination of silver and base materials that "anlysis as silver, re-acts as silver and gives general results identical with those of silver." Probably the reporter lias been misled somewhere, unless tihe doctor hasbeen deceiving himself by merely combining with the original quantity of silver some impunities that give increased weight and are not easily/detected in a hastv 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 os an ounce in 1880, and now it brings scarcely 2s an ounce.