NAVAL STORES BECOME CHEMICALS 



pletely freed ourselves of that natural monopoly. Al- 

 though we must have five million pounds a year for 

 such plastics as Celluloid, we were not caught short 

 during World War II when Japanese supplies were 

 completely cut off. 



These two were only the start. Now the wood-rosin 

 plants turn out scores of the most surprising products: 

 a sweet licorice flavor much used in candy and chewing 

 tobacco; a liquid that dissolves Bakelite; a powder, one 

 teaspoonful of which added to a bag of cement makes 

 it flow smoothly and set much more quickly. In the big 

 meat-packing houses, Mr. Porker is dipped into a vat of 

 melted plasticlike rosin and comes out in a glove-fitting 

 suit that peels off, bringing with it the last, tiniest 

 bristle from the tip of his snout to the end of his curly 

 tail. Hercules has synthesized from terpenes a potent 

 fly killer, Thanite. Newport has worked out the first 

 commercial process for making isoprene, the chemical 

 mother of natural rubber, and a most valuable ingre- 

 dient for compounding with synthetic rubber. Several 

 pretty war babies have been born in the laboratories 

 of both companies. These likely youngsters will go 

 places and do things in the postwar world. 



Wood-rosin men are modest about all this sensational 

 chemical juggling. What they like to boast about is 

 that their big plants, their laboratories, their array of 

 new chemical products, are all built on the salvage of 

 a waste dead pine stumps, relics of the lumbering days. 



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