Weaving Cloth from Rock!

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 306, 17 March 1928, Page 26

Weaving Cloth from Rock!

f j., SBESTOS, the strangest i material in nature, is the only mineral, the only rock, that can be m rX '*Ti»l woven into fire-proof garments and moulded j into instruments inpervious to flame. With asbestos armour and tools men can fight the fiercest fires known. That is why, when oil-wells have flamed, asbestos clothes and shoes have been rushed by air mail as far as the Wyoming fields. That is why even the messenger dogs of forest rangers in California are clad in asbestos coats to defy the timber flames. “Some have thought the three who survived Nebuchadnezzar’s very furnace were clad in asbestos, writes Orville H. Kneen in “Popular Science.” Ancient writers tell of a ‘stone which is carded and woven to form handkerchiefs’ for emperors, the fabrics ’cleansed by casting them into the lire.’ Corpses of royal Romans were sometimes wrapped in asbestos that their ashes might be preserved after cremation. “An ancient Greek writer tells of a lamp of gold for the statue of Athena with a wick of unburnable ‘karpasian flax.’ The Greek word asbestos means unextinguishable. Eskimos, finding asbestos in Labrador, have long used it for lamp-wicks. “Marco Polo’s countrymen only laughed when he brought tales, in 1295 A.D., of Tatars who had clothes made from the skin or hair of a mythical salamander, which lived only in fire. Polo learned that the material was really ‘earth-flax,’ mined in the Ural Mountains as it is to-day, dried, powdered and woven. Magicians, he said, cleansed it in Are. Four centuries before the 'Emperor Charlemagne performed the same ‘miracle’ for his guests with his table-cloth. “The mystical material, ‘fibrous and crystalline, elastic and brittle, heavy as rock in its crude state, yet as light as thistle-down when treated mechanically,’ has withstood, the heat and enormous pressure of volcanic fires and earth adjustment, apparently without alteration. Changes in temperature cannot make it expand or contract. Since the earth was in its infancy, these veins of silky fibres have seemingly survived when the hardest rock has worn or melted away. , “Such everlasting qualities lend colour to a story from the Canadian woods, not far from where most of the world’s commercial asbestos is mined. An Englishman who had worked in an asbestos factory in England came to -work in the woods. One evening the French Canadians saw his cast his socks into the hot stove and a few moments later drew them out and put them on again. They promptly decided him to be either the devil himself or a devilish assistant, and refused to stay on the job unless he should be instantly dismissed. ‘You are,’ a well-known asbestos man told me, ‘almost surrounded with asbestor modern comfort and convenience would be inconceivable without this mineral curiousity.: Of course iron-holders, mats and stands, gasburners and gas-logs, are commonly known, but not many are aware that asbestos-composition floors also are being laid, unburnable and ever-wear-ing.

“Your stoves and ovens are so efficient because of the same beafr wave resistant. If you started to uncover all the asbestos in your home you would have to take a part the electric w r ires, all your electric appliances, phonograph records, radio parts, even your telephone mouthpiece. Few common materials are fire, or even heat-proof. Only asbestos stands between us and the fire demon.’ u In power plants, Mr. Kneen goes on to quote, every hot piston stem» steam pipe, pipe, strap and valve bas its asbestos packing and gaskets. could not begin to retain and handle these enormous but efficient forces without asbestos and graphite. Even electric switchboards, insulators and panels are moulded from it, while tiny fibres are made into lamp filaments. You can live in a completely fireproof home, if you desire, made of asbestos lumber and roofed with asbestos shingles or tiles.. “Chief of asbestos parts in motorcars are the brake linings, for which we have to thank C. W. RaymondBack in 1905, while Ford was still experimenting, Raymond tried mohair, leather and other materials, none ol which would stand up under the high heat and pressure of a friction brake. Asbestos with woven brass wire solved the problem, and Raymond patented the brake lining, 75,000,000 feet oi which stops 20,000,000 cars to-day. “Our safe steel railroad coaches were once thought impracticable, because of the difficulty in insulating against cold and rumbling. Now catti® hair between layers of asbestos keep them at vapourless temperaturesShips’ bulkheads are made fireproo with asbestos boards. . “Asbestos is just beginning to ta to the air, around the motors and insulation. But tank covers wo> save accidental fires and BBD6B mail bags would save lett as readily as the asbestos s used to save the ‘human com of bygone country fairs. “ e gasoline poured over him and ’ and then plunged in a blaze or & into the tank beneath. “In 1876 Italian miners begs*A" toil up to the Alpine mines, brought the asbestos swiftly do toboggans. But the Italian pr was too scarce and expensive. ___ 1878 the immense Quebec were opened. The fibres were sn but some were long enough p woven, and they were much st than the Italian. . “A keen Canadian first saw co]Bmake shingles, cements ana positions of the very short had been regarded as waste. tanC eg, ! mixed with lime and other suds 1 it makes hundreds of articles.