Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 81.djvu/408

402 the design woven into the cloth or dyed or printed upon it; nothing (such as arsenic antimony, or lead) of a poisonous nature or in any way deleterious to the skin, may be used and the fireproofing must be permanent, that is to say, it must not be removed, even in the case of a garment which may possibly be washed fifty times or more. Furthermore, in order that it may have a wide application, the process must be cheap. What was really to be aimed at was to treat the flannelette in such a way that it acquired practically the properties of wool, which, for all ordinary purposes, may be taken as the standard of a safe material. Apart from the other conditions which I have laid down, when one considers the vigor with which the ordinary washerwoman scrubs garments with soap, not infrequently with the assistance of the scrubbing brush, and takes into account the wonderful mechanical appliances now so largely used for washing clothes with the least expenditure of time, it will not be thought surprising that the discovery of a process of fireproofing sufficiently permanent to resist all these conditions seemed to me at first to be almost an impossibility.

In describing the course of the research, I may perhaps be allowed to give a brief sketch of the development of the subject and to outline the reasoning which led to the institution of the various experiments. Some idea of the difficulty of the subject will be gathered when I say that Mr. Samuel Bradbury, who so ably assisted me in the work and has kept a record of each experiment, tells me that upwards of 10,000 separate burning tests were made before the solution of the problem was reached. Besides these, a great number of further experiments have since been made to see whether an even cheaper process than that which has now been in commercial use for nearly ten years could be discovered.

I suppose that every one would agree that, at the outset of the experiments, the condition which seemed most difficult of realization was that of finding a substance which not only fireproofs, but which during the process becomes so permanently fixed that it will prove to be absolutely resistant to washing with soap and water or mechanical rubbing. Obviously the substance which is to fulfil these conditions must, in the first place, be insoluble in water and secondly in order that it is not liable to be removed by mechanical rubbing and does not render the cloth dusty, it must be fixed in the fiber and not be merely on the surface. I have already explained that when calico is dipped in a dilute solution of sodium tungstate, and then dried the material possesses in a remarkable degree the property of resisting flame and then again alum has often been recommended for the same purpose. Now when solutions of sodium tungstate and alum are mixed, an insoluble aluminum tungstate is produced and it is clear that, if this insoluble salt could be fixed in the fiber, the material would certainly