PART II (continued 5)

So there has been a meeting of minds; and to-day the salesman studies the technicalities, and the technical man is learning salesmanship, and their boss is standing behind them both with a new policy. This is the policy of performance, not promises—service before sales. Under that policy the very terms salesmanship and sales department are beginning to disappear, to be replaced by new nomenclature, which more accurately indicates what a manufacturer's representative can do for the customer, and gives him access to the latter on the basis of confidence and good will.

(Munsey's Magazine)

THE ACCIDENT THAT GAVE US WOOD-PULP PAPER

How a Mighty Modern Industry Owed its Beginning to Gottfried Keller and a Wasp

BY PARKE F. HANLEY

On the day when President Wilson was inaugurated to his second term, this country had its fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of wood-pulp. Were it not for a series of lucky chances that developed into opportunity, this wood-pulp anniversary might have remained for our children's children.

Have you ever given thought to the accidentalism of many great discoveries? The element of haphazard is generally combined with a series of coincidences. Looking back over the developments that led to gigantic contributions to our civilization, one cannot fail to be struck by the coordination of events. Apparently there always has been a conspiracy of natural forces to compel men of thought and resourcefulness to add another asset to progress.

Your earliest school readers have been full of these—for instance, Watt and his steam-kettle, Franklin and his kite. Now the youngsters are reading that the Wrights derived a fundamental principle of aviation—the warping-tip—from the flight of crows. With the awe comes a disquieting thought. How far back should we be were it not for these fortuitous circumstances?

Among all the great things that have been given to the world in the last three-quarters of a century, few measure beside the wood-pulp industry. With its related trades and sciences, it is comprised within the ten great activities of mankind. In manufacture and distribution, it employs an army matching in size the Russian battle hordes. Its figures of investment and production are comparable to the debts of the great war.

Yet it remained for a wasp and Gottfried Keller to bring us out of the era of rag paper. Together, they saved us from a retardation of universal thought. Therefore, let us consider the agents.

First, the wasp. She was one of a family of several hundreds, born in the Hartz Mountains in the year 1839. When death claimed most of her relatives at the end of the season allotted as the life of a wasp, this survivor, a queen wasp, became the foundress of a family of her own. She built her nest of selected wood-fibers, softened them to a pulp with her saliva, and kneaded them into cells for her larvæ. Her family came forth in due course, and their young wings bore them out into the world. The nest, having served its purpose, was abandoned to the sun and the rain.

Maeterlinck, who attributes emotions to plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect. She would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of gravitation to Sir Isaac Newton.

As to Keller, he was a simple German, by trade a paper-maker and by avocation a scientist of sorts. One day in 1840—and this marks the beginning of the accidents—returning home from his mill, he trod upon the abandoned nest. Had not the tiny dwelling been deserted, he probably would have cherished nothing but bitter reflections about the irascibility of wasps. As it was, he stooped to see the ruin he had wrought.

The crushed nest lay soft in his hand, soft and pliable, and yet tough in texture. It was as soft as his own rag-made paper. It was not paper, and yet it was very much like paper. Crumbling It in his fingers, he decided that its material was wood-pulp.

Keller was puzzled to know how so minute a creature had welded wood into a paperlike nest. His state of mind passed to interest, thence to speculation, and finally to investigation. He carried his problem and its possibilities to his friend, Heinrich Voelter, a master mechanic. Together they began experiments. They decided to emulate the wasp. They would have to granulate the wood as she had done. The insect had apparently used spruce; they used spruce under an ordinary grindstone. Hot water served as a substitute for the wasp's salivary juices.

Their first attempts gave them a pulp astonishingly similar to that resulting from the choicest rags. They carried the pulp through to manufacture, with a small proportion of rags added—and they had paper. It was good paper, paper that had strength. They found that it possessed an unlooked-for advantage in its quick absorption of printing-ink.

Have you followed the chain of accidents, coincidences, and fortunate circumstances? Suppose the wasp had not left her nest in Keller's path. What if he had been in haste, or had been driven off by the queen's yellow-jacketed soldiers? What if he had no curiosity, if he had not been a paper-maker, if he had not enjoyed acquaintance with Voelter? Wood-pulp might never have been found.

Leaving Gottfried Keller and Voelter in their hour of success, we find, sixteen years afterward, two other Germans, Albrecht and Rudolf Pagenstecher, brothers, in the export trade in New York. They were pioneering in another field. They were shipping petroleum to Europe for those rising young business men, John D. and William Rockefeller. They were seeking commodities for import when their cousin, Alberto Pagenstecher, arrived from the fatherland with an interesting bit of news.

"A few weeks ago, in a paper-mill in the Hartz, I found them using a new process," he said. "They are making paper out of wood. It serves. Germany is printing its newspapers on wood-pulp paper."

To his cousins it seemed preposterous that wood could be so converted, but Alberto was convincing. He showed them Voelter's patent grants and pictures of the grinders. The Pagenstechers went to Germany, and when they returned they brought two of the grinders—crude affairs devised for the simple purpose of pressing wood upon a stone. They also brought with them several German mechanics.

A printer in New York, named Strang, had already secured the United States rights of the new process. He was engaged in the manufacture of calendered paper, and, therefore, had no occasion to use wood-pulp; so he was willing to surrender the patents in exchange for a small interest.

The Pagenstechers wanted water-power for their grinders, and they located their first mill beside Stockbridge Bowl, in Curtisville, now Interlaken, Massachusetts. On an outlay of eleven thousand dollars their mill was built and their machinery installed. Two or three trials, with cotton waste added to the ground wood, gave them their paper. Their first product was completed on the 5th of March, 1867.

It was a matter of greater difficulty to dispose of the stock. The trade fought against the innovation. Finally Wellington Smith, of the near-by town of Lee, Massachusetts, was persuaded to try it. Rag-paper had been selling at twenty-four cents a pound. Smith's mill still exhibits the first invoice with the Pagenstechers, which shows the purchase of wood-paper at eleven cents.

The paper was hauled to Lee in the dead of night, for Smith's subordinates wished to spare him from the laughter of his fellow millmen. It was sold, and proved successful, and the Pagenstechers were rushed with orders. They built a second mill in Luzeme, New York, but abandoned it soon afterward for the greater water-power to be obtained at Palmer's Falls, where now stands the second largest mill in the United States.

Manufacturers tumbled over themselves to get the benefit of the new process. The originators in this country held the patent rights until 1884, letting them out on royalties until that time. With each new plant the price of paper fell, until at one period it sold at one and a half cents a pound.

Trial had proved that spruce was the only suitable wood for the pulp. Until 1891 rags were combined in about one-quarter proportion. Then it was found that other coniferous woods might be used to replace the rags, after being submitted to what is called the sulfite process. In this treatment small cubes of wood, placed in a vat, have their resinous properties extracted, and the wood is disintegrated. A combination of ground and sulfite wood makes the paper now used for news-print.

As has been told, the primary advantage of the wood-pulp paper was its immediate absorption of ink. This made possible much greater speed in printing, and led in turn to the development of the great modern newspaper and magazine presses, fed by huge rolls of paper, which they print on both sides simultaneously. These wonderful machines have now reached the double-octuple stage—monsters capable of turning out no less than five thousand eight-page newspapers in a single minute, or three hundred thousand in an hour.

With the evolution from the flat-bed to the web or rotary presses there came further development in typesetting-machines—the linotype, the monotype, and others. With paper and presses brought to such simplification, newspapers have sprouted in every town, almost every village, and the total number of American periodicals is counted by tens of thousands. There are magazines that have a circulation of more than a million copies weekly. The leading daily newspapers in New York print anywhere from one hundred thousand copies to four times as many, and they can put extra editions on the streets at fifteen-minute intervals.

The aggregate circulation of daily newspapers in the United States is close to forty million copies. Weekly newspapers and periodicals reach fifty millions, and monthly publications mount almost to one hundred millions; and all this would be impossible without wood-pulp paper.

The annual production of wood-pulp in the United States and Canada is estimated by Albrecht Pagenstecher, the survivor of the innovators, to be worth nearly five hundred millions of dollars. Take into consideration the hundreds of thousands employed in the mills, the men who cut and bring in the raw product, the countless number in the printing, publishing, and distributing trades. Then hark back to the accident that put the wasp's nest under the toe of Gottfried Keller!

(Providence Journal)

One zinc-etching illustration reproducing an old wood-cut of the ship, with the caption, "The Savannah, First Steamship That Crossed the Ocean."

CENTENNIAL OF THE FIRST STEAMSHIP TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC

(7-column head)

One hundred years ago this week there was launched at New York the ship Savannah, which may be called the father of the scores of steamers that are now carrying our soldiers and supplies from the New World to the Old World.

The Savannah was the first ship equipped with steam power to cross the Atlantic ocean. It made the trip in 25 days, using both sails and engine, and the arrival of the strange craft at Liverpool was the cause of unusual stir among our English cousins. Like every step from the beaten path the idea of steam travel between the New World and the Old World was looked upon with much scepticism and it was not until about 20 years later that regular, or nearly regular, steamer service was established.

The launching of the Savannah took place on Aug. 22, 1818. It was not accompanied by the ceremony that is accorded many of the boats upon similar occasions to-day. As a matter of fact, it is probable that only a few persons knew that the craft was intended for a transatlantic trip. The keel of the boat was laid with the idea of building a sailing ship, and the craft was practically completed before Capt. Moses Rogers, the originator of the venture, induced Scarborough & Isaacs, ship merchants of Savannah, to buy her and fit her with a steam engine for service between Savannah and Liverpool.

The ship, which was built by Francis Fickett, was 100 feet long, 28 feet broad and 14 feet deep. It had three masts which, of course, were of far greater importance in making progress toward its destination than was the steam engine.

Capt. Rogers had gained a reputation for great courage and skill in sailing. He had already had the honor of navigating the sea with a steamer, taking the New Jersey from New York to the Chesapeake in 1816, a voyage which was then thought to be one of great danger for such a vessel.

It was natural, then, that he was especially ambitious to go down in history as the first master of a steam ship to cross the ocean. As soon as the vessel had been purchased by the Savannah ship merchants, the work of installing the engine was begun. This was built by Stephen Vail of Speedwell, N.J., and the boiler by David Dod of Elizabeth, N. J.

The paddle-wheels were made of iron and were "detachable," so that the sections could be removed and laid on the deck. This was done when it was desired to proceed under canvas exclusively and was also a precaution in rough weather.

In short, the Savannah was an auxiliary steamer, a combination of steam and sail that later became well known in shipping. This is much like the early development of the gasoline marine engine, which was an auxiliary to the sail, a combination that is still used.

Capt. Rogers took the boat from New York to Savannah in eight days and 15 hours, using steam on this trip for 41½ hours. On May 26, 1819, under Capt. Rogers, the Savannah set sail from her home port for Liverpool and made the trip in 25 days.

As long as the trip took, the voyage was considerably shorter than the average for the sailing ship in 1819, and this reduction in time was accomplished in spite of the fact that the Savannah ran into much unfavorable weather. Capt. Rogers used steam on 18 of the 25 days and doubtless would have resorted to engine power more of the time except for the fact that at one stage of the voyage the fuel was exhausted.

It was natural that the arrival of the steamer in English waters should not have been looked upon with any great favor by the Englishmen. In addition to the jeers of the sceptical, the presence of vessels was accompanied by suspicion on the part of the naval authorities, and the merchants were not favorably impressed.

When the Savannah approached the English coast with her single stack giving forth volumes of dense black smoke, it was thought by those on shore that she was a ship on fire, and British men-of-war and revenue cutters set out to aid her. When the truth was known, consternation reigned among the English officers. They were astonished at the way the craft steamed away from them after they had rushed to assist what they thought was a ship in distress.

The reception of the Savannah at Liverpool was not particularly cordial. Some of the newspapers even suggested that "this steam operation may, in some manner, be connected with the ambitious views of the United States."

A close watch was kept on the boat while she lay in British waters, and her departure was welcome. In the second volume of "Memoranda of a Residence at the Court of St. James," Richard Rush, then American Minister in London, includes a complete log of the Savannah. Dispatch No. 76 from Minister Rush reports the arrival of the ship and the comment that was caused by its presence as follows:

London, July 3,1819.

Sir—On the 20th of last month arrived at Liverpool from the United States the steamship Savannah, Capt. Rogers, being the first vessel of that description that ever crossed the sea, and having excited equal admiration and astonishment as she entered port under the power of her steam.

She is a fine ship of 320 tons burden and exhibits in her construction, no less than she has done in her navigation across the Atlantic, a signal trophy of American enterprise and skill upon the ocean.

I learn from Capt. Rogers, who has come to London and been with me, that she worked with great ease and safety on the voyage, and used her steam full 18 days.

Her engine acts horizontally and is equal to a 72 horsepower. Her wheels, which are of iron, are on the sides, and removable at pleasure. The fuel laid in was 1500 bushels of coal, which got exhausted on her entrance into the Irish Channel.

The captain assures me that the weather in general was extremely unfavorable, or he would have made a much shorter passage; besides that, he was five days delayed in the channel for want of coal. I have the honor to be, etc.,

RICHARD RUSH.

To have made the first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean under steam was a great accomplishment and brought no little credit to Capt. Rogers and the United States. Pioneers in many ventures, the American people had added another honor to their record. And this was even more of a credit because in those early days skilled workmen were comparatively few on these shores and the machine shops had not reached a stage of efficiency that came a short time later.

There were, of course, in 1819 men who had developed into mechanics and there were shops of some account, as the steamboat for short trips had been in existence for some years. But the whole enterprise of planning a steam voyage in which the boat should be headed due east was characteristic of the boldness and bravery of the Americans.

The Savannah did not return to the States directly from England. It steamed from Liverpool to St. Petersburg and brought forth further comment from the Old World. She proved that the marine steam engine and side-wheels were practicable for deep-sea navigation. The idea of transatlantic travel under steam had been born and it was only necessary to develop the idea to "shorten the distance" between the two continents.

This pioneer voyage, however, was then looked upon more as a novelty than as the inception of a new method of long-distance travel. The trip had failed to demonstrate that steam was an entirely adequate substitute for the mast and sail in regular service.

Since the Savannah was primarily a sailing vessel, the loss of steam power by the crippling of the engine would not be serious, as she could continue on her way with paddle-wheels removed and under full sail.

It was 19 years later that the idea of employing vessels propelled by steam in trade between the United States and England came under the serious consideration of merchants and ship builders. In the interval the marine boiler and the engines had been improved until they had passed the stage of experiment, and coasting voyages had become common on both sides of the Atlantic.

The beginning of real transatlantic steam voyages was made by the Sirius and the Great Western. The latter boat had been built especially for trips across the ocean and the former was taken from the Cork and London line. The Sirius started from Liverpool on April 4, 1838, and the Great Western four days later. They arrived in New York within 24 hours of each other, the Sirius at 10 p.m. on April 22 and the Great Western at 3 o'clock the following afternoon. Neither of the vessels carried much sail.

These boats gave more or less irregular service until withdrawn because of their failure to pay expenses. In 1839 the Cunard Company was formed and the paddle steamers Britannia, Arcadia, Columbia, and Caledonia were put into service.

From that time on the steamer developed with great rapidity, the value of which was never more demonstrated than at the present time. It will always be remembered, however, that this Capt. Rogers with his crude little Savannah was the man whose bold enterprise gave birth to the idea of transatlantic travel under steam.

(A syndicate Sunday magazine section of the Harrisburg Patriot)

SEARCHING FOR THE LOST ATLANTIS

By GROSVENOR A. PARKER

Not so long ago a stubby tramp steamer nosed its way down the English Channel and out into the Atlantic. Her rusty black bow sturdily shouldered the seas aside or shoved through them with an insistence that brought an angry hail of spray on deck. The tramp cared little for this protest of the sea or for the threats of more hostile resistance. Through the rainbow kicked up by her forefoot there glimmered and beckoned a mirage of wealthy cities sunk fathoms deep and tenanted only by strange sea creatures. For the tramp and her crew there was a stranger goal than was ever sought by an argosy of legend. The lost cities of Atlantis and all the wealth that they contain was the port awaiting the searchers under the rim of the western ocean.

It's no wild-goose chase that had started thus unromantically. The men who hope to gain fame and fortune by this search are sure of their ground and they have all the most modern mechanical and electrical aids for their quest. On the decks of their ship two submarine boats are cradled in heavy timbers. One of them is of the usual type, but the other looks like a strange fantasy of another Jules Verne. A great electric eye peers cyclops-wise over the bow and reaching ahead of the blunt nose are huge crab-like claws delicate enough to pick up a gold piece and strong enough to tear a wall apart.

These under-water craft are only a part of the equipment that Bernard Meeker, a young Englishman, has provided to help him in his search for the lost city. There are divers' uniforms specially strengthened to resist the great pressure under which the men must work. Huge electric lamps like searchlights to be lowered into the ocean depths and give light to the workers are stacked close beside powerful generators in the ship's hold. In the chart room there are rolls of strange maps plotting out the ocean floor, and on a shelf by itself rests the tangible evidence that this search means gold. It is a little bowl of strange design which was brought up by a diver from the bottom of the Caribbean. When this bowl first came to light it was supposed to be part of loot from a sunken Spanish galleon, but antiquarians could find nothing in the art of the Orient, or Africa, or of Peru and Mexico to bear out this theory. Even the gold of which it was made was an alloy of a different type from anything on record.

It was this that gave Meeker his first idea that there was a city under the sea. He found out the exact spot from which the divers had recovered the bowl, and compared the reckonings with all the ancient charts which spoke of the location of fabled Atlantis. In one old book he located the lost city as being close to the spot where the divers had been, and with this as a foundation for his theories he asked other questions of the men who had explored that hidden country. Their tale only confirmed his belief.

"The floor of the sea is covered with unusual coral formation," one of them told him, "but it was the queerest coral I ever saw. It looked more like stone walls and there was a pointed sort of arch which was different from any coral arch I had ever seen."

That was enough to take Meeker to the Caribbean to see for himself. He won't tell what he found, beyond the fact that he satisfied himself that the "coral" was really stone walls pierced by arched doors and windows.

Meeker kept all his plans secret and might have sailed away on his treasure hunt without making any stir if he had not been careless enough to name one of his submarines "Atlantis." He had given out that he was sailing for Yucatan to search for evidence of prehistoric civilization. It is true that the shores of Yucatan are covered with the remnants of great cities but the word "Atlantis" awoke suspicion. Questions followed and Meeker had to admit the bare facts of his secret.

"Only half a dozen men know the supposed location of Atlantis," he said, just before sailing, "and we don't intend to let any others into the secret. Those who have furnished the money for the expedition have done so in the hope of solving the mystery of the lost continent, and without thought for the profit. The divers and the other men of the crew have the wildest dreams of finding hoarded wealth. It is not at all impossible that their dreams will come true, and that they will be richly rewarded. At any rate they deserve it, for the work will be dangerous.

"Our plans are simple enough. With the submarine of the usual type we will first explore that part of the sea bottom which our charts cover. This vessel has in its conning tower a powerful searchlight which will reveal at least the upper portions of any buildings that may be there. For work in greater depths we will have to depend on the 'Atlantis' with its special equipment of ballast tanks and its hatch-ways for the divers.

"You see, we do not plan to lower the divers from the steamer or from a raft. Instead they will step directly out on the sea floor from a door in the submarine which opens out of an air chamber. In this the diver can be closed and the air pressure increased until it is high enough to keep out the water. All that he has to do then is to open the door and step out, trailing behind him a much shorter air hose and life line than would hamper him if he worked from the surface. The air hose is armored with steel links so that there will be no danger of an inquisitive shark chopping it in two."

Previous to the diver's exploration the claws of the "Atlantis" will search out the more promising places in the ruins. These claws work on a joint operated electrically, and on the tip of each is a sensitive electrical apparatus which sets off a signal in the conning tower of the submarine. Crawling over the bottom like a strange monster, the claws will also help to avoid collisions with walls when the depths of the water veils the power of the searchlight.

There is, in addition, a small electric crane on the nose of the submarine so that heavy objects can be borne to the surface. Meeker does not expect to gain much in the way of heavy relics of the lost city, for certain parts of the sea bottom are so covered with ooze that he believes it only possible to clear it away through suction hose long enough to make quick observation possible. The subaqueous lights which will help this work are powerful Tungsten lamps enclosed in a steel shell with a heavy prismatic lens at the bottom. These lamps are connected to the power plant on the steamer by armored cables and will develop 5,000 candle power each.

The generating station on the parent ship of the expedition, as the rusty tramp is known, is as extensive as those on a first class liner or a dreadnought. Little of the power will go for the benefit of the steamer though. Its purpose is to furnish the light for the swinging Tungstens and to charge the great storage batteries of the submarines. These batteries run the many motors on which depends the success of the work. If it were not for electricity, the searchers would be handicapped. As it is they call to their aid all the strong magic of modern days.