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 fila- 
ments by an accident. He dropped a piece 
of film on a hot stove. The cloths that he 
made were inflammable. They were pro- 
hibited 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 in- 
flammable 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 Arti- 
ficial 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 French- 
man and a Pole, and it is wholly inaccurate 
and misleading—a distinctly anti-British Re- 
port. One of my purposes in writing this 
book is to correct the entirely wrong im- 
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