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be a sufficient, in all cases, to equal twelve pounds of pure black salts. One hundred pounds of wood will, if well attended to, make from five to seven reams of paper[1].
- ↑ Mr. Edmund Shaw, of Fenchurch Street, London, obtained a patent in England bearing date September 14, 1837, for a method of manufacturing paper from the leaves which cover the ears of Indian-corn. According to this patent the envelopes or leaves which cover the corn are in the first instance put into a vessel containing water. The water may be pure or slightly alkaline; the water is then boiled in the vessel into which the aforesaid envelopes or fellicular leaves are thrown, after being macerated. When they have imbibed water and become thickened and swollen, so that the matter interposed between the fibres is reduced to a state of pulp or jelly, a slight beating by fulling, mallet, or other mechanical means will effect a separation of the fibre from the adherent glutinous matter, and washing or rinsing with water during the beating, will cleanse it entirely from the glutinous matter. The fibre is then bleached, by immersing, or immersing and beating or stirring it about in a solution of chloride of lime, or with beating engines, as at present practised for the bleaching of rags in paper mills, and the fibre is in like manner reduced to pulp, and paper manufactured therefrom, or the quality of the paper may be varied by the admixture of a portion of rags or other filamentous substance. It may be well to remark, that some attempts to produce paper from the above mentioned material, have been made, but were abandoned from the incapability of producing good white paper. The patentee claims the mode, or process, above described of making white paper by the application of bleached pulp, produced from the stalks or leaves of Indian-corn.
