SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



eke out supplies, kraft mills will work in greater percent- 

 ages of hardwood. Flintcote is already using as much as 

 seventy-five per cent in their roofing paper, and at a 

 kraft mill in Alabama, where they jealously guard their 

 secret know-hows, I was told they use up to thirty per 

 cent of hardwood and get, they claim, a better paper. 



More purified chemical cellulose pulp for rayon, 

 lacquers, and transparent film is a prophecy sure to 

 come true swiftly. These chemical users of pulp have 

 long clung to a sort of preconceived prejudice that the 

 only proper alpha cellulose was prepared from sulfite 

 pulp. This notion has been shocked twice. 



Nitrating cellulose to make smokeless powder is an 

 exceedingly tricky operation. Pure materials and scru- 

 pulous control are essential or somebody gets hurt. 

 Shortly after the Germans invaded Poland, the British 

 Admiralty sent Louis Hibbs to this country. In his 

 own right Hibbs is an expert, but to double-clinch his 

 authority, he is a representative of Cross and Bevan, a 

 research establishment where viscose rayon was born 

 and which since 1881 has been "tops" in cellulose chem- 

 istry. Hibbs came here to buy kraft pulp to nitrate for 

 the British Navy, whose specifications for explosives are 

 supersensitive. He made no secret that sulfate kraft 

 pulp was actually preferred to sulfite for this most exact- 

 ing process. 



The other shock came when Rayonier, successful 

 makers of alpha cellulose by the sulfite process on the 



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