MODERN USES OF THE METAL ALUMINIUM 625 



of which was made into kitchen utensils. In the United States 

 a huge business has been built up, mainly by the exertions of 

 university students, who in their long vacation were engaged 

 to educate the public to appreciate the advantages of aluminium ; 

 whilst even the Indian " ryot," who has always cleaned his 

 pots and pans by polishing them with sand, is rapidly learning 

 to substitute aluminium for the brass bowl prescribed by 

 immemorial custom. Only in England is progress slow, mainly, 

 in the writer's opinion, because in England the housewife does 

 not cook and is not mistress in her own kitchen — where she 

 walks in fear and trembling — and because no one has arisen 

 who has had the courage to undertake the education of our 

 national institution, Mary Ann. 



In addition to the advantages cited above, the lightness of 

 aluminium is the cause of its wide use for the field equipment 

 of soldiers and travellers, to whom every ounce saved in the 

 weight of water-bottle and cooking-pot is of importance. More- 

 over, the malleability of the metal renders it practically unbreak- 

 able, a factor of no small consequence when the treatment to 

 which field equipment is subjected is borne in mind. 



Chemical Plant 



The properties which have rendered the success of alu- 

 minium in the kitchen possible are also those upon which 

 its claims as a material for the construction of chemical plant 

 are based. This is true more especially of apparatus suitable 

 for use in foodstuff factories, which have been erected in such 

 large numbers during the past two decades. A modern jam 

 factory, an extract of meat factory, a cordial factory, is each but 

 a domestic kitchen magnified a thousandfold, a well-equipped 

 condensed milk or margarine works being but the apotheosis 

 of a dairy, where purity of taste and colour and freedom from 

 infection must and do reign supreme. 



The chief attraction which aluminium offers to the maker 

 of foodstuffs lies in the fact that aluminium salts can be con- 

 sumed in considerable quantities without exerting any injurious 

 effects whatsoever upon the human system. If this fact be of 

 importance in the kitchen, it is immeasurably more important 

 in the factory, as the introduction of poisonous material derived 

 from the apparatus used on a large scale would endanger the 



