THE STORY OF ARTIFICIAL SILK 
developed his process and became rich. He 
had no idea as to the value of his invention. 
To-day, 10,000,000 tons of wood pulp are 
made and used every year. Penny news- 
papers and cheap books have been made 
possible. The Artificial Silk trade has been 
made possible—all because a thoughtful man 
noticed the play of children in 1840 in a small 
German town. 
Then, in 1851, John Mercer exhibited his 
mercerized cotton at the Crystal Palace 
Exhibition and proved that fibres can be 
improved—made strong and silk-like—by the 
use of caustic soda. Five years later, W. H. 
Perkin discovered the coal-tar dyes. Perkin, 
too, was a Manchester man. He did his best 
to sell his dyeing secrets to British manu- 
facturers. Failing in that, he at last sold 
them to the Germans and made Germany 
supreme in dyes. 
The next great pioneer was Sir Joseph 
Swan. He was making filaments from 
parchmentized cotton as early as 1883—a 
full year before Chardonnet. It was he who 
first conceived the idea of using cotton pulp 
and squirting it from a glass tube into 
methylated spirit.