Country Life
A NEW WOOD PRESERVER By a happy coincidence the formation of the new association for preserving timber (discussed in this place last week) coincides with news of an invention and discovery not hitherto practised in Britain. At present new timber and many sorts of older timber cannot be successfully preserved at all, if exposed to damp or weather. It is now claimed that by aid of a cheap and simple machine, pumping cheap and simple chemical substances (chiefly sodium fluoride), a preservative may be made to circulate through the timber, either before or after erection, and so protect it from the quick destruction wrought by the microbe and fungus that break off the majority of our posts at the ground level, where the destructive agents find their optimum of air and moisture. If the new association can discover, or prove and thereafter popularize, an economic method of such a sort it will add an immense sum to the nation's wealth. Much of the almost valueless timber will become a source of wealth and the bill for imported wood will decrease. Two of the reasons why—at a time of paucity in timber— British trees remain valueless are the lack of local sawmills and the remoteness of any sterilizing equipment. In wood, as in grain, we provide every facility for the imported and few for the home-grown material. That is our inheritance from the industrial revolution. We kill the raw material for the sake of the manufactured.
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