How a New Dye is Bonn.

Hokitika Guardian, 21 October 1922, Page 4

How a New Dye is Bonn.

A thick, black, evil-smelling substance trickles slowly from a vat.

A chemist takes an infinitesimal portion and torments it with acids, and tortures it with biting alkalis, and washes it with ether, and dry-cleans it with benzine, and heats it. and cools it, and drops it into a magic potion, and adds it to some devil’s lirew, and hey, presto! He has caught the living lire that sparklet} in the foaming ■waters of Isidore, and the bloom of the young .heathen - on the heights of Ben Lomond, and the shimmer that hides in the •shell of the pearl oyster—and a now dye in horn. The lorries hang and clatter the iron kegs across the yard. The towering acid vats, whose breath turns cold iron into smears of rust, splash their contents into the huge stills. The electric motors drive the powerfid mixing blades across the giant tanks, and the avalanche of white, glittering soda crystals falls like Alpine snow down the wooden chutes. The flood of benzine, that would hurst inLo a. flame rivaling Etna it-sell were an iron lied to strike n spark 'within a stone’s throw, pours into the seething mass.

Then the great autoclaves begin their work, and the pent-up steam, with titanic pressure, carries out iis appointed task. The great blowers force the reluctant compound through filter after filter until tin* last trace of impurity is removed and the lew hundred-weights of dye, representing tens <>l thousands ol pounds in value are ready for the dyers, standing waiting and expectant beside their vats. There, is a new shade of silk in the liingasins of l’aris;'tlie belles of Buenos Aires 11 nan t new fin ary along the. Alvaer-avenue; and the buyers °f Siam ami Sydney, of Shanghai and Santa Lucia! wait for their consignments.

Ami over there. in the topmost story of a p;re:it steel and concrete building, a chemist of the Intcrrcssen with aejds and magnets .with test 1 lilies mill niicvoseupes, seeks to liiul o;lt lifur and from u-luit the dvo "as made, and, bullied and bioken by failure after failure, realise that the hathovlnnd is no lemiev -the leader ol ti e world’s ehemieal science, lint that, tint mantle of its former greatness is now on the shoulders of a young stripling—a British industry, which he himself called into being when ho plunged the world in wav! G, B. B.