THE STORY OF ARTIFICIAL SILK 
mills has suddenly become valuable. If the 
cotton men had only known what to do with 
it, there would never have been any slump 
in the cotton trade. They are now sending 
this waste in bags, wonderingly, to the 
Artificial Silk mills. 
Spruce trees are cut down in Canada or 
Scandinavia. The making of Artificial Silk 
has provided a new customer for the lumber 
trade. The logs are floated to a saw-mill, 
where they are cut into 6-foot lengths. The 
bark is taken off. As yet, we have found no 
uses for the bark of spruce trees. 
These logs are then cut into 1-inch wheels 
and broken up into small chips. Forty tons 
of these chips are put into a * digester ""— 
a huge cylindrical boiler. Chemicals are put 
in and the chips are boiled. They remain in 
the “digester ” for 24 hours. This is the 
first mechanical process in the making of an 
Artificial Silk gown. 
Then the chips are emptied into draining 
chests. From these they pass to sand traps— 
long narrow troughs in which they are cleaned 
of impurities. 
They are then bleached in large vessels 
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