BEET JUICE 39 



the pressed pulp from another press, disposing of the 

 pressed cake of valuable cattle food, and running for 

 more pulp to recharge the second press. And so on 

 for all the row of presses. 



The trouble and expense of this method of work 

 soon led to the invention of various kinds of continuous 

 presses, which did the work without all this expenditure 

 of labour and loss of time. Some of these presses did 

 their duty fairly well, and were regarded at the time 

 as the height of perfection. 



But a great revolution was approaching. In the 

 year 1860, Julius Robert, sugar manufacturer at 

 Seelowitz in Austria, successfully put into practical 

 form an entirely new method of extracting the juice 

 from the beetroot, called the Diffusion process. His 

 success was complete. All the sugar factories in Ger- 

 many and Austria gradually adopted it, and in little 

 more than ten years its use had become universal in 

 those two countries. In some parts of a beetroot 

 factory of to-day, instead of pandemonium you would 

 find almost silence. You begin to wonder where the 

 workmen are, and where is the sugar juice. You see 

 a vast room, full of tall cylindrical vessels armed at the 

 top with a complicated regiment of valves, and appar- 

 ently doing nothing. You hear, indeed, one machine 

 making a slight noise on an upper floor, but you see 

 no one until, perhaps, a solitary man begins to manipu- 

 late one or two of the valves. That is the only sign 

 of life which you can, at the first glance, detect in that 

 very important wing of the establishment. 



This process of Diffusion is so interesting, and has 

 had such an important bearing on the success of the 

 industry, that it must be described in some detail. 

 It was found, some sixty years ago, that when two 

 liquids of different densities are separated by a 



