The nitrate process was discovered by Count Hilaire de Chardonnet while he was at the Polytechnic School of Paris, and he devoted his life and his fortune trying to perfect it.  Samples of the artificial silk were exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1889 and two years later he started a factory at Basancon.  In 1892, Cross and Bevan, English chemists, discovered the viscose or xanthate process, and later the acetate process.  But although all four of these processes were invented in France and England, Germany reaped most benefit from the new industry, which was bringing into that country $6,000,000 a year before the war.  The largest producer in the world was the Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken of Elberfeld, which was paying annual dividends of 34 per cent. in 1914.

The raw materials, as may be seen, are cheap and abundant, merely cellulose, salt, sulfur, carbon, air and water.  Any kind of cellulose can be used, cotton waste, rags, paper, or even wood pulp.  The processes are various, the names of the products are numerous and the uses are innumerable.  Even the most inattentive must have noticed the widespread employment of these new forms of cellulose.  We can buy from a street barrow for fifteen cents near-silk neckties that look as well as those sold for seventy-five.  As for wear—­well, they all of them wear till after we get tired of wearing them.  Paper “vulcanized” by being run through a 30 per cent. solution of zinc chloride and subjected to hydraulic pressure comes out hard and horny and may be used for trunks and suit cases.  Viscose tubes for sausage containers are more sanitary and appetizing than the customary casings.  Viscose replaces ramie or cotton in the Welsbach gas mantles.  Viscose film, transparent and a thousandth of an inch thick (cellophane), serves for candy wrappers.  Cellulose acetate cylinders spun out of larger orifices than silk are trying—­not very successfully as yet—­to compete with hog’s bristles and horsehair.  Stir powdered metals into the cellulose solution and you have the Bayko yarn.  Bayko (from the manufacturers, Farbenfabriken vorm.  Friedr.  Bayer and Company) is one of those telescoped names like Socony, Nylic, Fominco, Alco, Ropeco, Ripans, Penn-Yan, Anzac, Dagor, Dora and Cadets, which will be the despair of future philologers.

[Illustration:  A PAPER MILL IN ACTION

This photograph was taken in the barking room of the big pulp mill of the Great Northern Paper Company at Millinocket, Maine]

[Illustration:  CELLULOSE FROM WOOD PULP

This is now made into a large variety of useful articles of which a few examples are here pictured]