Part 53 (2/2)

Maeterlinck, who attributes eht wrap a dra place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the erm theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of gravitation to Sir Isaac Newton

As to Keller, he was a simple German, by trade a paper-maker and by avocation a scientist of sorts One day in 1840--and thishome from his mill, he trod upon the abandoned nest Had not the tiny dwelling been deserted, he probably would have cherished nothing but bitter reflections about the irascibility of wasps As it was, he stooped to see the ruin he had wrought

The crushed nest lay soft in his hand, soft and pliable, and yet tough in texture It was as soft as his own rag-made paper It was not paper, and yet it was very ers, he decided that its material ood-pulp

Keller was puzzled to kno so minute a creature had welded wood into a paperlike nest His state of mind passed to interest, thence to speculation, and finally to investigation He carried his problem and its possibilities to his friend, Heinrich Voelter, a an experiranulate the wood as she had done The insect had apparently used spruce; they used spruce under an ordinary grindstone

Hot water served as a substitute for the wasp's salivary juices

Their first attely sis They carried the pulp through to s added--and they had paper

It was good paper, paper that had strength They found that it possessed an unlooked-for advantage in its quick absorption of printing-ink

Have you followed the chain of accidents, coincidences, and fortunate circumstances? Suppose the wasp had not left her nest in Keller's path

What if he had been in haste, or had been driven off by the queen's yellow-jacketed soldiers? What if he had no curiosity, if he had not been a paper-maker, if he had not enjoyed acquaintance with Voelter?

Wood-pulpGottfried Keller and Voelter in their hour of success, we find, sixteen years afterward, two other Gerenstecher, brothers, in the export trade in New York They were pioneering in another field They were shi+pping petroleu businesscoenstecher, arrived fro bit of news

”A feeeks ago, in a paper- a new process,” he said ”They areits newspapers on wood-pulp paper”

To his cousins it seemed preposterous that wood could be so converted, but Alberto was convincing He showed therinders The Pagenstechers went to Gerrinders--crude affairs devised for the siht with them several Ger, had already secured the United States rights of the new process He was engaged in the manufacture of calendered paper, and, therefore, had no occasion to use wood-pulp; so he illing to surrender the patents in exchange for a senstechers wanted water-power for their grinders, and they located their first e Bowl, in Curtisville, now Interlaken, Massachusetts On an outlay of eleven thousand dollars their mill was built and their machinery installed Two or three trials, with cotton waste added to the ground wood, gave them their paper Their first product was coreater difficulty to dispose of the stock The trade fought against the innovation Finally Wellington Smith, of the near-by town of Lee, Massachusetts, was persuaded to try it Rag-paper had been selling at twenty-four cents a pound Senstechers, which shows the purchase of wood-paper at eleven cents

The paper was hauled to Lee in the dead of night, for Shter of his fellow enstechers were rushed with orders They built a second mill in Luzereater water-power to be obtained at Palest mill in the United States

Manufacturers tuet the benefit of the new process The originators in this country held the patent rights until 1884, letting them out on royalties until that time With each new plant the price of paper fell, until at one period it sold at one and a half cents a pound

Trial had proved that spruce was the only suitable wood for the pulp

Until 1891 rags were combined in about one-quarter proportion Then it was found that other coniferous woodssubmitted to what is called the sulfite process In this treatment small cubes of wood, placed in a vat, have their resinous properties extracted, and the wood is disintegrated A coround and sulfite wood makes the paper now used for news-print

As has been told, the prie of the wood-pulp paper was its ireater speed in printing, and led in turn to the developazine presses, fed by huge rolls of paper, which they print on both sides simultaneously These wonderful e--ht-page newspapers in a single minute, or three hundred thousand in an hour

With the evolution from the flat-bed to the web or rotary presses there ca-machines--the linotype, the ht to such simplification, newspapers have sprouted in every town, ale, and the total number of American periodicals is counted by tens of thousands There are azines that have a circulation ofdaily newspapers in New York print anywhere from one hundred thousand copies to four times as many, and they can put extra editions on the streets at fifteen-ate circulation of daily newspapers in the United States is close to forty million copies Weekly newspapers and periodicals reach fifty millions, and monthly publications mount almost to one hundred millions; and all this would be impossible without wood-pulp paper

The annual production of wood-pulp in the United States and Canada is estienstecher, the survivor of the innovators, to be worth nearly five hundred millions of dollars Take into consideration the hundreds of thousands e in the raw product, the countless nu trades Then hark back to the accident that put the wasp's nest under the toe of Gottfried Keller!

(_Providence Journal_)