CHAPTER VI 



CRYSTALLIZATION 



HAVING clarified and purified the cane juice, the next 

 step is with all speed to evaporate the water until 

 crystallization takes place. This, as we saw, was done 

 in the last coppers of the copper wall. But the great 

 waste of fuel and the excessive heat spoiling the sugar, 

 soon led to search for better methods. They cannot 

 all be enumerated, much less described, in a popular 

 treatise, but a few are worth a passing notice. Alfred 

 Fryer, the Manchester sugar refiner, to whom reference 

 has already been made as a man not only of ingenuity 

 but also of ready wit, maintained that the proper 

 way of making sugar in the tropics was to do so as 

 quickly as possible, and at a minimum cost, and to 

 send the rough raw material home to be converted 

 into refined sugar. He, therefore, about forty years 

 ago, invented, constructed and worked (in the West 

 Indies) a simple apparatus called Fryer's Concretor. 

 The clarified juice is run, in a thin stream, over a long 

 sloping platform of metal divided by trays into a series 

 of lanes from side to side, along which the thin stream 

 of juice slowly meanders in a zigzag direction. Heat 

 is applied underneath, and the thin film of juice evapor- 

 ates so rapidly that by the time it arrives at the other 

 end of the platform it is nearly ready to crystallize. 

 The evaporation is finished in a cylindrical vessel 

 fitted with plates which slowly revolves, hot air being 

 at the same time injected. This finishing process 

 exposes the juice to further heat, and completes the 

 evaporation. The juice is then run out, and allowed 



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