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this incident from Emerson’s maker of mousetraps whose skill attracted the world t o his hut in the woods. It is characteristic of Doctor Miner that from the time he went to Gloucester to take his first (and only) job he made himself part of the community. H e has served on the board of health of that town, has been a trustee of Pennington Seminary, and an active member of the Methodist Church. Mrs. Miner was Emma E. Mayers, a Gloucester girl. He acknowledges no hobbies, for his
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home and his garden and small granddaughter occupy his spare time during the week, while his active participation in church work precludes Sunday golf. As a matter of fact, I believe his hobby is living, for surely he has developed that commonplace practice to a fine art. If man is but dust, the particular grade of raw material from which Harlan S. Miner is made was most certainly a rare earth. A. E. BUCEANAN, JR.
AMERICAN CHEMICAL INDUSTRIES The Brown Company
Brown Company Mills with White Mountains In Background
OUNDED on a lumber business originally established a t Berlin, N. H., in 1852, the Brown Company is today one of the largest producers of forest products in the world, with a history of development for over sixty years under the direct management of one family. The last forty years of that management have produced an inter-related group of chemical engineering industries which show little resemblance t o the original sawmill with its output of 25,000 feet of lumber a day. The relation of chemical products such as caustic soda, carbon tetrachloride, and calcium arsenate to the essential purpose of the enterprise-the conversion of trees into products for human use-makes a complex story. The story begins with the establishment of the sawmill of H. Winslow and Company in 1852 on the Androscoggin River at Berlin. This concern became the Berlin Mills Company in 1866, and two years later passed into the present line of control when W. W. Brown purchased the chief interest in it. In 1917, when excessively patriotic Americans were reacting violently against the most remote suggestions of things Germanic, the Berlin Mills Company found it necessary t o disclaim any Prussian connections, and became therefore the Brown Company. The story of the development of the present activities of the
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Brown Company must be told in three parts. The first part deals with lumber, the second with pulp and paper, and the third with chemicals. All three of these lines are being continued actively today, but for the sake of clarity it will be necessary t o follow them through separately, indicating how the manufacture of pulp and paper grew from the original lumber business, and how, in turn, the manufacture of pulp and paper gave rise t o a group of chemical products. The lumber story comes first. The first sawmill at Berlin, built in 1852 as the result of the opening of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad, now the Grand Trunk, to t h a t point, was continually expanded by its different owners, especially by Mr. Brown after his acquisition of the property in 1868. In 1888 the construction of a kyanizing plant for preserving spruce with mercuric chloride foreshadowed later chemical developments. In 1890 production reached 150,000 feet of lumber per day. When, in 1897, the mill burned, a new one with a capacity of 200,000 feet per day was built t o replace it. In 1904 a plant was added t o put out 2000 window frames a day. Subsequently the increasing demands for pulp and paper caused some reduction in the lumber output, so that when the mill burned a second time in 1913, and was replaced by a modern and highly efficient plant of
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concrete construction, the capacity was decreased to 150,000 feet per day. Upon this background of lumber production was superimposed a n early development of paper pulp. A groundwood mill was erected in 1888, and three years later the Burgess Sulphite Fibre Company, controlled by Mr. Brown, was built on the east bank of the river, and a two-machine paper mill was laid out for the production of newsprint. This mill started making paper in 1892. As the production of newsprint increased, a market was also visualized for bleached wood pulp for finer grades of paper, and in 1898 the Berlin Mills Company built the first unit of the electrochemical plant which was later to become the basis of its chemical by-product manufacture. A second newsprint mill was constructed, which began in 1904 t o put out 200 tons of paper a day. At the time this was the largest unit in the world making both groundwood and sulfite pulp and finished paper in one plant. In 1906 the Berlin Mills Company bought the Burgess Sulphite Fibre Company and increased the output of newsprint to 400 tons a day. During the extension of woodlands accompanying the growth of the pulp and paper manufacture, forests on the St. Maurice River and water-power rights at La Tuque in the province of Quebec were obtained by the company. At La Tuque a plant was started for producing kraft or sulfate pulp. This was in 1910, when kraft paper was being made in the Scandinavian countries but was practically unknown in the United States. By 1912 the pulp from La Tuque was being made into kraft paper as fast as the mill at Berlin could turn it out. In this same year of 1912 the import duty on newsprint was removed, and a large amount of Canadian product was dumped in this country, severely depressing the market. With increasing production of sulfate pulp a t La Tuque, the Berlin Mills Company decided to swing its entire Cascade Mill a t Berlin from newsprint to kraft paper. This change was accomplished during the period from 1914 to 1917. At present this mill is one of the largest producers of kraft paper in the world. Its product, Nibroc Kraft, comprises 9 per cent of the production of this type of paper in North America. During the war about 80 per cent of the output of the Brown Company was used directly for war purposes. One of the developments during this period was the fiber-conduit plant for making powder containers for 6-inch guns. This plant was idle for some time after the war, but is now actively engaged in manufacturing fiber conduit for underground electric cables. One of the newer products of the Brown Company is Alpha Fibre, a material with a n extremely high content of alphacellulose, which makes it suitable as a substitute for rags in papermaking and for cotton linters in the manufacture of rayon, cellu-
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loid, and similar substances. Still more recent developments are Duracel Fibre, intended to replace hemp and jute in the manufacture of electrical insulating paper, sandpaper, and tag, envelope and bag papers; and Wytek Fibre for making paper of exceptional color and strength. The preceding outline of the growth of the pulp and paper activities of the Brown Company must now in turn serve as a background for the story of the chemical by-product development. This part of the growth might be said to have begun in 1908 with the erection of the plant for caustic soda recovery from the cell liquor of the electrochemical plant. Before 1908 this had been run into the river, no doubt much to the disgust of any aquatic life, The recovered caustic proved so valuable that expansion of the electrochemical plant was contemplated. This necessitated further plans for the utilization of the excess chlorine not required for the bleaching of sulfite pulp. A plant for the production of chloroform was built in 1909. In 1917 the manufacture of sulfur chlorides was commenced, and an electric furnace was installed for producing carbon bisulfide from charcoal and sulfur. This carbon bisulfide was used, in turn, with part of the sulfur chloride output t o make carbon tetrachloride in a plant constructed in 1918. Liquid chlorine was added as a product in 1921, and calcium arsenate in 1924. Meanwhile, in 1914, a plant had been built t o utilize the hydrogen formerly wasted to the atmosphere by the electrochemical plant. This hitherto unutilized by-product was used for the hydrogenation of vegetable oils t o make a shortening and frying material for domestic cooking. Subsequently a patent suit caused cessation of operations. The case finally passed t o the Supreme Court and a decision was handed down in favor of the Brown Company. At present a source of peanut oil is being developed on the Shawano plantation of the company in Florida and will be utilized after a sufficiently high continuous production is attained. During the development of the three main lines of endeavor of the Brown Company the resources of the company have been augmented until the total assets run well over 75 million dollars. The company now controls the forests on more than 6000 square miles of territory in Canada and the United States; from these woodlands are cut each year some 400,000 cords of wood; this cutting is made in accord with the best plans for forest conservation, and is compensated for by the yearly production of 4 million transplants in its forest nursery on Cupsuptic Lake in Maine; thirty boats, ranging in size up to an ocean-going steamer, are used; and the company owns and operates the Berlin Mills Railroad, with some eight hundred standard-gage freight cars, chiefly in pulpwood service. GEORGE A. RICHTER
BOOK REVIEWS Industrial Microscopy. BY L. C. LINDSLEY.283 pages. William Byrd Press, Inc., Richmond, Va., 1929.
The
The wide applicability of chemical microscopy, its practical advantages over ordinary analytical methods, and its growing use in industry make its thorough study imperative for every chemist. Up to the present time the material was scattered in several (partly German) textbooks, most of which were too voluminous and specialized for the beginner. Lindsley’s book represents the first and very successful attempt to present in one small volume the fundamentals of practically all important technics and applications-general laboratory methods, inorganic qualitative analysis, alkaloids, textiles, pulpwood and paper, starches, minerals, even photomicrography and micrometry. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by numerous excellent photomicrographs. A book so ambitious in scope and so small in volume will necessarily suffer from a few handicaps. In view of the great in-
fluence of concentration on the microscopical appearance of precipitates, not only the beginner, but even the advanced worker will miss more explicit data on the concentration of the reagents. The table of page 53 could be made more inclusive in the next edition. Terms like “very dilute” and ”less dilute” and the absence of even such vague data in many exercises presuppose analytical experience or else might commit the student to laborious groping. The chapters “The Microscope” and “Crystals” do not seem explicit enough for the entirely untrained beginner, but they seem too elementary for the student who has had the fundamentals. General, well-known properties and reactions of which no use is made for microchemical detection occupy considerable space which might have been preferably devoted t o more microchemistry. The terminology is puzzling in places-e. g., the differentiation in chapter headings between “chemical reactions” or simply “reactions” and ”crystalline reactions.”-WM. H. G E S E L ~
