THE CENTENARY OF BEET SUGAR.

Waikato Argus, Volume VI, Issue 411, 18 March 1899, Page 3

THE CENTENARY OF BEET SUGAR.

A letter to a Vienna paper draws attention to the faot that January 15th, was the hundredth anniversary of the creation of the beetroot sugar industry. The text of a short petition, dated January 11th, 1799, is given, in which Franz Karl Achard, Director of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science, lays a memorandum before his Sovereign, Frederick William 111., showing how sugar might be made from beetroot, hitherto used only as fodder, and also submitting samples of the new article. Four days later, on January 15th, 1799, the King replied by ordering experiments to be made in all the Provinces on a large scale, and awarding Achard a grant of money for the continuation of his studies on the subject. Sugar at that time, and for a short while afterwards, coat two hundred to three hundred thalers per hundredweight retail, and the consumption of Bugar in all Europe, at the end of last century, was between two hundred and two hundred and fifty thousand tons. To-day, four and a-half million tons of beet-root sugar are produced in Europe alone, besides three million tons of cane sugar. Archard, who refused a bribe of two hundred thousand thalers, offered him by the cane sugar interest if he would publish a statement that he had made a mistake, and that beetroot was not adapted for the purposes he proposed, died a poor man, although he was the first practical beet sugar producer in the world. In another column of the same paper a revolution iu the beetroot sugar industry by the new electrolytical process, which is already adopted in Belgium, Egypt, Germany, and elsewhere, is described in detail, and its speedy adoption recommeuded to manufacturers in AustriaHungary, lest they should be unable to com pete with other countries.