So the Welsbach mantle burner came into use everywhere and rescued the coal gas business from the destruction threatened by the electric light.  It was no longer necessary to enrich the gas with oil to make its flame luminous, for a cheaper fuel gas such as is used for a gas stove will give, with a mantle, a fine white light of much higher candle power than the ordinary gas jet.  The mantles are knit in narrow cylinders on machines, cut off at suitable lengths, soaked in a solution of the salts of the rare earths and dried.  Artificial silk (viscose) has been found better than cotton thread for the mantles, for it is solid, not hollow, more uniform in quality and continuous instead of being broken up into one-inch fibers.  There is a great deal of difference in the quality of these mantles, as every one who has used them knows.  Some that give a bright glow at first with the gas-cock only half open will soon break up or grow dull and require more gas to get any kind of a light out of them.  Others will last long and grow better to the last.  Slight impurities in the earths or the gas will speedily spoil the light.  The best results are obtained from a mixture of 99 parts thoria and 1 part ceria.  It is the ceria that gives the light, yet a little more of it will lower the luminosity.

The non-chemical reader is apt to be confused by the strange names and their varied terminations, but he need not be when he learns that the new metals are given names ending in _-um_, such as sodium, cerium, thorium, and that their oxides (compounds with oxygen, the earths) are given the termination _-a_, like soda, ceria, thoria.  So when he sees a name ending in _-um_ let him picture to himself a metal, any metal since they mostly look alike, lead or silver, for example.  And when he comes across a name ending in _-a_ he may imagine a white powder like lime.  Thorium, for instance, is, as its name implies, a metal named after the thunder god Thor, to whom we dedicate one day in each week, Thursday.  Cerium gets its name from the Roman goddess of agriculture by way of the asteroid.

The chief sources of the material for the Welsbach burners is monazite, a glittering yellow sand composed of phosphate of cerium with some 5 per cent. of thorium.  In 1916 the United States imported 2,500,000 pounds of monazite from Brazil and India, most of which used to go to Germany.  In 1895 we got over a million and a half pounds from the Carolinas, but the foreign sand is richer and cheaper.  The price of the salts of the rare metals fluctuates wildly.  In 1895 thorium nitrate sold at $200 a pound; in 1913 it fell to $2.60, and in 1916 it rose to $8.