70 MARINE PRODUCTS OF COMMERCE 



Matsuoka's business was sold in 1923 to John Becker, an American engineer, 

 who greatly improved the process. Becker was issued four patents, one of which 

 (1929) dealt with a highly mechanized general process and two (1929a, b) with 

 dehydrating equipment. His ideas provided the fundamentals of the American 

 methods as they are today. The American Agar Company struggled against the 

 low price of Japanese agar, the annual output depending primarily upon market 

 price, and in 1933 it closed. Shortly thereafter the building was taken over by the 

 American Agar and Chemical Company under the direction of Mr. L. Small, who 

 converted a major portion of the floor space to the processing and freezing of 

 seafoods. Production of high quality agar has continued.* 



In 1933 S. F. Corfield established the United States Agar Company at National 

 City, California. Later he also acquired the American Agar and Chemical Com- 

 pany and served as its manager for a number of years until his death. The Marine 

 Products Company, formerly American Agar and Chemical Company, was 

 the only factory in California producing agar at the beginning of World War II. 



The Agar Products Company, under the direction of E. S. Moorhead, was 

 founded at Los Angeles in 1941. This factory was an active agar producer through- 

 out the war and the period of agar shortage that followed. Since 1947 it has 

 specialized in a highly purified, unbleached agar for special uses as the price of 

 Japanese agar is too low to permit profitable domestic production of the ordinary 

 U.S. P. grade. Two other smaller factories were organized soon after agar became 

 a critical war material, but apparently ceased production when the importation of 

 Japanese agar was resumed. 



Nojih Carolina and Florida. Classification of agar as a "critical war material" 

 by the War Production Board in 1942 stimulated a search for agar raw material 

 at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in North Carolina and at the Palm 

 Beach laboratories of the Institutum Divi Thomae in Florida. Agar production on 

 the Atlantic Coast was first undertaken on a commercial scale in 1943 at Beaufort, 

 N. C. as a result of an announcement (Humm, 1942) that Gracilaria confervoides 

 (L.) Greville was commercially abundant in that area. The factory was first 

 known as the Van Sant Company, but was sold in 1943 to M. Wronker Stansfield 

 and associates and changed to the Beaufort Chemical Corporation. Production 

 facilities were improved and enlarged; however, when North Carolina seaweed 

 resources proved to be inadequate for year-round operations in 1945 and 1946, 

 the factory closed and was sold in 1947 to Sperti Foods, Inc. During 1949 the 

 production capacity of the factory was doubled and many improvements made, 

 particularly in dehydration. 



Experimental work of the Institutum Divi Thomae in Florida in 1942 led to the 

 establishment in 1945 of a factory at Jensen. Agar was produced on a small scale 

 from Gracilaria foliifera (Forsskal) Borgesen collected in the Indian River in the 

 vicinity of Jensen and northward. In 1948 larger supplies of Gracilaria were found 

 at Sebastian. Coincident with the purchase of the Beaufort factory the factory at 

 Jensen was discontinued, although collection of seaweed at Sebastian was in- 

 tensified in order to build up a one-year supply of raw material at the Beaufort 

 factory. Availability of raw material in North Carolina had been irregular and it 

 appeared that only about a six months' supply per year could be obtained in North 



* Thanks are due Mr. E. S. Moorehead for supplying information on tlie history of 

 the California agar industry. 



