THE STORY OF ARTIFICIAL SILK

very much averse to publicity. They did
their iob and let fame take care of itself.

Chardonnet discovered how to make filaments
 by an accident. He dropped a piece
of film on a hot stove. The cloths that he
made were inflammable. They were prohibited
 by a French law from being sold. He
had to sell them in South America, where
there was no such law. And he had to adopt
an English denitrating process, eventually, in
order to prevent his cloths from being inflammable
 and dangerous to wear. He was
helped all through by an English firm in
I eck.

In 1927 the League of Nations, for some
strange reason, published a Report on Artificial
 Silk. This Report said : ‘ The Artificial
Silk industry began in France in the closing
years of the last century, and thence spread
to the countries of Central Europe.” It does
not mention the English pioneers. It gives
very few British figures. This Report was
prepared by an Italian, a German, a Frenchman
 and a Pole, and it is wholly inaccurate
and misleading—a distinctly anti-British Report.
 One of my purposes in writing this
book is to correct the entirely wrong im-3