Many other products besides foods are made from corn starch.  Dextrin serves in place of the old “gum arabic” for the mucilage of our envelopes and stamps.  Another form of dextrin sold as “Kordex” is used to hold together the sand of the cores of castings.  After the casting has been made the scorched core can be shaken out.  Glucose is used in place of sugar as a filler for cheap soaps and for leather.

Altogether more than a hundred different commercial products are now made from corn, not counting cob pipes.  Every year the factories of the United States work up over 50,000,000 bushels of corn into 800,000,000 pounds of corn syrup, 600,000,000 pounds of starch, 230,000,000 pounds of corn sugar, 625,000,000 pounds of gluten feed, 90,000,000 pounds of oil and 90,000,000 pounds of oil cake.

Two million bushels of cobs are wasted every year in the United States.  Can’t something be made out of them?  This is the question that is agitating the chemists of the Carbohydrate Laboratory of the Department of Agriculture at Washington.  They have found it possible to work up the corn cobs into glucose and xylose by heating with acid.  But glucose can be more cheaply obtained from other starchy or woody materials and they cannot find a market for the xylose.  This is a sort of a sugar but only about half as sweet as that from cane.  Who can invent a use for it!  More promising is the discovery by this laboratory that by digesting the cobs with hot water there can be extracted about 30 per cent. of a gum suitable for bill posting and labeling.

Since the starches and sugars belong to the same class of compounds as the celluloses they also can be acted upon by nitric acid with the production of explosives like guncotton.  Nitro-sugar has not come into common use, but nitro-starch is found to be one of safest of the high explosives.  On account of the danger of decomposition and spontaneous explosion from the presence of foreign substances the materials in explosives must be of the purest possible.  It was formerly thought that tapioca must be imported from Java for making nitro-starch.  But during the war when shipping was short, the War Department found that it could be made better and cheaper from our home-grown corn starch.  When the war closed the United States was making 1,720,000 pounds of nitro-starch a month for loading hand grenades.  So, too, the Post Office Department discovered that it could use mucilage made of corn dextrin as well as that which used to be made from tapioca.  This is progress in the right direction.  It would be well to divert some of the energetic efforts now devoted to the increase of commerce to the discovery of ways of reducing the need for commerce by the development of home products.  There is no merit in simply hauling things around the world.