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THE INDIA RUBBER WORLD 



[June 1, 1919. 



The Rubber Trade In Great Britain. 



By Our Regular Correspondent. 



THE only feature of new interest in the present low-level 

 price of rubber is the attention l)eing given to finding 

 some new uses for it. The Rubber Growers' Association 

 is moving in the matter, but the prize scheme it is said to be 

 preparing has not yet seen the light. It seems obvious that some- 

 thing besides rubber pavements will be required to absorb rub- 

 ber to the extent desired, and the position as regards the price 

 of finished articles is not the same as it was when the rubber 

 pavement was being advocated some years ago as a panacea for 

 increased output. The new expenses associated with labor have 

 to be considered, and it may be that they will press more heavily 

 upon rubber as a pavement material than upon its present com- 

 petitors. 



In contrast to what has occurred in some industries, demobil- 

 ized rubber workers are being regularly reinstated in. their old 

 jobs, the positions being vacated by the women workers who had 

 occupied them. A point which came up at a recent general meet- 

 ing of the Whitley Council was in regard to the propriety or ex- 

 pediency of replacing women by temporary men until the original 

 holder of the position was available. A prominent rubber manu- 

 facturer, who said that he was reducing the woman staff regu- 

 larly in favor of returned men, agreed with Mr. Duke, the rub- 

 ber workers' secretary, that it was not advisable to dismiss women 

 in favor of temporary men. .Among those who are drawing 

 the much-talked-of out-of-work donations are a good many rub- 

 ber workers, mostly from the proofing side. These do not come 

 from works generally, as some firms have not dismissed any 

 hands. The fact is at this time of general upset that some firms 

 are busier than others. Although the war rush has, of course, 

 subsided. Government peace orders are coming forward as usual 

 and these are naturally on a larger scale than they used to be. 

 Under present conditions some firms have much of their work 

 on hand, while others may have little or none, hence the effect 

 on the labor required at different works. 



NEW WORKS. 



Now that the government restrictions on the issue of capital 

 for new ventures have been removed, as far as Great Britain is 

 concerned, we may expect to see some schemes put before the 

 public. \ recent one is the offer of £200,000 8 per cent cumu- 

 lative participating preference shares in Fuller's United Electric 

 Works, Limited. Part of the works which are at Chadwell 

 Heath, Essex, were started during the war for the manufacture 

 inter alia of ebonite, insulated electric cables and carbon black, 

 and seem to have made very good progress, being helped natur- 

 ally by the scarcity of ebonite and gas black. The fact that the 

 four companies which are now merged into one earned 30 per 

 cent upon their capital in 1918 must of course be looked upon by 

 investors in the light of war demands and prices and the absence 

 of diflSculties of foreign competition. The names of the com- 

 panies now merged are: John C. Fuller & Son, Limited (founded 

 in 1875 at Bow, London) ; the Fuller .Accumulative Co., Lim- 

 ited ; Fuller's Wire & Cable Co., Limited, and Fuller's Carbon & 

 Electrical Co., Limited. 



EFFECT OF REDUCED HOURS ON OUTPUT. 



In view of the reduced number of hours now in force in rub- 

 ber factories, I asked a manufacturer the other day if it was his 

 experience that there was no falling off. His answer was that 

 the general results are much the same, mainly because better 

 time is now being kept by hands who persistently lost time in 

 the past by not turning up regularly before breakfast. With 

 respect, however, to the regular and steady workers the output 

 certainly shows a diminution. The claim that the output will 



be the same with a reduction in hours of work has really been 

 negatived by the workers in their demand for a 10 per cent ad- 

 vance on piece-work rates. This has been granted locally in 

 several cases by virtue of a special clause in the Whitley Coun- 

 cil regulations. The 47-hour week is now uniformly adopted 

 throughout the rubber trade, and it has this good effect, that 

 one manufacturer knows that another cannot gain an advantage 

 over him by working a longer week, as was the case in the 

 past. -Mthough manufacturers now have to spend a good deal 

 of time attending meetings and seeing to a new class of corre- 

 spondence, the general opinion seems to be that it is worth it 

 if the dislocation of business caused by strikes is done away 

 with. 



.\n important part of Mr. Porritt's recent lecture on 

 rubber at the Royal Society of Arts dealt with the new prob- 

 lems of labor in the factory. Cheap labor, he said, is now a 

 memory of the past and manual operations will have to be per- 

 formed more efficiently or supplanted by mechanical processes 

 if the new conditions are not to be reflected in unduly increased 

 costs of production. While unnecessary labor will have to be 

 eliminated, that which is essential should be made more efficient. 

 SOCIETY OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY. 



I referred recently to the somewhat belated report of the 

 Society of Chemical Industry for 1917, and now have 

 a word to say regarding that for 1918, which has ap- 

 peared more promptly. The chapter on india rubber is written 

 by Dr. Twiss of the Dunlop Rubber Co., Limited, instead of by 

 Dr. H. P. Stevens, who wrote the two preceding ones, a change 

 of authorship having been made in several of the subjects in 

 order to get new points of view. Despite the change from a con- 

 sulting chemist to a works chemist, with a naturally wider pur- 

 view of "applied chemistry," there is no extensive lifting of the 

 veil on matters intimately concerned with rubber manufacture, 

 a remark which applies equally to many ether subjects treated 

 of in the volume. We have, however, a useful and succinct 

 summary of matters of technical importance of special interest 

 to those who have omitted to read their trade journals carefully 

 throughout the period under review. 



With regard to the published list of accelerators for vulcan- 

 ization. Dr. Twiss points out that its length is apt to be mis- 

 leading because in some cases the same chemical substance ap- 

 pears several times under different trade names. He makes 

 the important observation that very little definite information is 

 available as to the influence of accelerators on the aging of vul- 

 canized rubber, and still less as to the possible influence of the 

 proportion of free sulphur on the activity of the accelerator. 

 Speaking of reclaimed rubber, he says there is a tendency towards 

 open acknowledgment that the essential effect is purely a thermal 

 one and that the various chemical operations used in conjunc- 

 tion with heat are unnecessary. The main objection to a more 

 general acknowledgment of this lies, I think, in the fact that it 

 knocks the bottom out of a good many patents. The 1918 

 patent of the Dunlop Rubber Co., Limited, and D. F. Twiss de- 

 pends on thermal treatment with avoidance of oxidation effects 

 and not on any specific chemical reaction. Perhaps some pro- 

 nouncement on this important matter will come from America, 

 the home of reclaiming. The paragraph on analysis is somewhat 

 thin, touching as it does on only one topic — the extraction of 

 rubber with acetone. Reference is made to the fact that when 

 the resin contents of a rubber is known and is non-variable 

 the free sulphur in an acetone extract is obtained by simple 

 subtraction instead of a tedious estimation. I imagine that this 

 procedure is by no means a novel one, though, of course, it has 



