It Rains Peroxide to Bleach Clothes.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 5 June 1914, Page 2

It Rains Peroxide to Bleach Clothes.

When the country housewife spreads her sheets and table cloths and other linen upon the grass, placing stones upon the corners to hold them down, she knows she is going to have beautifully white things if the sun shines on them. And she rather welcomes a thunderstorm that will shower them with rain. The chemists have only recently discovered the why of this bleaching which women have been practising ever since cleanliness became a virtue. It is all due to peroxide of hydrogen, the same peroxide with which some ladies bleach their hair. There is peroxide of hydrogen in all rain water ; after a thunderstorm there is more than usual. It is due, according to Prof. A. S. Neumark, to the action of ozone on water, the former "being formed by the influence of the silent electrical discharge on moist rarefied air in the upper .regions of the atmosphere. It is also claimed that ultra-violet light is one of the causes of the presence of hydrogen peroxide in