SHALL THE . SILK WORM DIE ?
APORTENT has loomed upon the horizon of Shepherd's Bush : the first Exhibition of British Artificial Silk has opened its doors to the general public for this one day, Saturday.
_ We live by trade, of course. The factories of the North sustain us, the traffic of the Thames is our life- blood. Lately, that stream was sluggish, but here, at this Exhibition so well devised by The Draper's Organiser, is a quickening of the pulse of trade. More, it' is the birth, or at any rate the baptism, of a new industry that has set the looms of Lancashire awhirr and caused the hosiers of Leicester to rejoice.
In the • production of artificial silk the Midlands can recapture the supremacy that once was ours in cotton. Here is a new stuff for a new age—the fabric of the future. Already fifty million flesh-tint stockings flaunt, its prestige with the mothers of to-morrow. Soon we may all live and sleep in artificial silk.
Two hundred years ago a clever Frenchman said': " Worms produce a gum which dries into silk. Why, can't we ? " For a century the idea lay fallow (who can say what germination went on in long-dead brains ?) and then a Lancashire cotton printer, named Mercer, chanced on the " mercerization " of cotton. A few years later a youth who was trying to make quinine out of allytoluidine (it is vain to wonder why) evolved a brilliant mauve out of his messes and became the spiritual father of the present British Dyestuffs Corporation. Then came German competition and British lethargy in research, so that the nascent industry wilted. But in 1917 it rose again, a Phoenix from the ashes of war, and now employs 3,000 workmen and uses 400 telephones. Just how much dyestuff it produces I don't know, but the Bradford Dyers' Association alone keeps 10,000 workmen dyeing fabric enough each year to carpet the whole round earth with eleven breadths.
It is a huge industry, this making of artificial silk. One British firm, Messrs. Courtauld's, control a third of the total output of the world and are capitalized— at market value of their holdings—at 188,000,000. And more, it is a growing industry. Thirty new companies were registered last year with a total capital of £4,000,000. Only twelve months ago, no artificial silk was produced in Lancashire ; now there are fifty merchants dealing in it. We consume twice as much of this material per capita as any other country in the world, and our young chemists are in the forefront of its Research battle.
For this material is not garnered from the kindly earth, nor sheared from beasts; it is won by conflict, beaten out of nature with axe and hammer. We have done what the Frenchman suggested, simulated the silkworm. Bombyx Mori produces silk out of two little holes after a quiet time for digestion : at Coventry there is a modern worm, several acres in size, that eats not mulberry leaves, but pine forests with its twenty-four jaws; digesting the pulp with flails and paddles and producing seven miles of thread a second.
Let us come to grips with the stuff. The Lanark Hosiery Company showed me a three piece suit, consisting of a jumper, skirt and sleeveless cardigan, in various shades of cyclamen, rose marie and saxe, to sell for 54 guineas. An unbiassed expert told me the same thing in real silk would cost ten guineas at least—and what woman would not prefer two suits to one ? Filtex silk is a new material (made by A. C. Pearson & Co., Nottingham) from an English patent which enables the stuff to be washed without any special precautions. I am told there is a big market for it overseas, and I can well believe it. As to washing artificial silk, you are all right if you use Lux. I had to accept a packet of it as a present, but left it in a convenient corner.
At another stall I saw a champagne-coloured Paisley, shawl, retailed at a guinea, which would cost at least ten if made of real silk : Spanish shawls are also being made at a tenth of their old cost.
At Messrs. Brunner, Mond's stand I got a few tips straight from the stable about the manufacturing side, of which I confess I knew nothing yesterday. Apparently it takes 4 to 5 pounds of chemicals, chiefly alkalis, to make one- pound of artificial silk, and as about thirty million pounds of the latter are produced a year, it is obvious to what huge ramifications (95 per cent. in British soil by the way) this industry is spreading. There are two main processes for making artificial silk, first the Viscose, by which wood pulp is treated by chemkals, forced through minute orifices, and then coagulated by acids into the fibre from which -the silk is spun. The other process is the Celanese, by which cotton is combined with acetic acid to alter its organic composition. More then ninety per cent. of all materials used in either process come from the British Empire, as has been said.
We hear much of the vast sums spent on Research work in America, so it is refreshing to hear that the British Dyestuff's Corporation have spent £450,000 in five years on their laboratories and are now sending £50,000 a year. Of course they reap a good return on this, otherwise they wouldn't do it. They have recently started a Suggestion Box in their factories wherein any member of the firm is at liberty to place any ideas that may occur to him ; in the certainty that he will be liberally rewarded if he contributes to efficiency. It is good news to hear that at least a dozen new ideas are accepted every month. One young man recently had an idea that doubled the yield of a certain dye, thereby effecting a saving of £5,000 a year. Good business, that.
A clever invention is being developed by the British Bead Printers of Northampton. (Incidentally, they chose Northampton for their plant because of its absence of smoke.) " Juwella " beads are made from the flexible synthetic glass recently discovered in Vienna. They are brilliant, beautifully coloured, half the weight of ordinary glass,, and riveted to the fabric by an ingenious process which enables them to stand washing and ironing withotit dainage. The company have the world rights to this invention, and if, as is possible, "Juwella" gowns become the fashion, an important British industry may develop.
There is not space to pay tribute to the mannequins who glided - about to the strains of " Valencia," and gladdened my eyes with fabrics dyed more cunningly than was ever possible with the old silk, nor can I do more than say what a debt of gratitude we all owe to The Draper's Organiser for having arranged and staged such a good show.
Artificial silk has come to stay. It is better than real silk in some ways, and worse in others, but, anyway, it can stand on its own pretty feet. It is a shame to call it artificial : as well call stout artificial beer. Drapers have racked their brains to name this child of crucible and loom, -but with poor results so far. The future may necessitate a gloss on Meeker's " Not on silk nor on samite we lie,"- but I doubt whether " rayon," or " canine " (which won a prize for a good name) or the Jabberwockian- " glossamer " will find favour with our shimmering posterity. We may just call it silk.
- - -F-. YEATS-BROWN.
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