How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 53

The superintendent of a big machinery concern found that his expense for cutting oils was constantly rising. Salesmen had followed salesmen, recommending magic brands of the stuff; yet each new barrel of oil seemed to do less work than the last--and cost more in dollars.

One day a new kind of visitor showed up and sent in the card of a large oil company. He was not a salesman, but an investigator of oil problems.

The superintendent took him through the plant. He studied the work being done by screw-cutting machines, lathes and other equipment operated with cutting oil. Where salesmen had recommended brands without technical knowledge of either the work to be done or the composition of the oil, this stranger wrote specifications that cut down the percentage of costly lard oil used on some work; and he eliminated it altogether on others.

Moreover, he pointed out sheer losses of oil by picking up a handful of metal cuttings from a box, letting them drip, measuring the oil that acc.u.mulated and recommending a simple device for reclaiming that oil before the waste metal was sold.

This new viewpoint in selling is developing in so many lines that to enumerate them would be to make a national directory of business concerns manufacturing milling machinery, office devices, manufacturing and structural materials, equipment for the farm and the mine.

People who purchase such products have been accustomed to meeting two different representatives of manufacturers: First, the salesman skilled in selling, but deficient in technical knowledge.

"This chap is here to see how much he can get out of me," said the prospective consumer to himself; and he was on his guard to see that the visitor got as little as possible, either in the way of orders or information.

The other representative came from the mechanical department to see how present equipment was running, or perhaps to "shoot trouble." He was long on technical knowledge, but probably dumb when it came to salesmans.h.i.+p.

"This fellow is here to help me out of my troubles," said the customer.

"I'll see how much I can get out of him."

Presently manufacturers of equipment woke up to the fact that their mechanical men--inspectors and trouble shooters--had a basis of confidence which the salesman pure and simple was rapidly losing.

Moreover, the technical man gained a knowledge of the customer's requirements that furnished the best foundation for selling new equipment.

The salesman discovered the technical man and went to him for tips on new equipment needed by customers whose plants he had visited. The technical man also discovered the salesman, for it was plain enough that equipment well sold--skillfully adjusted to the customer's needs--gave the least margin for trouble shooting.

So there has been a meeting of minds; and to-day the salesman studies the technicalities, and the technical man is learning salesmans.h.i.+p, 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 salesmans.h.i.+p 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 a.s.set 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 circ.u.mstances?

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 r.e.t.a.r.dation 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 larvae. 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 b.u.t.terfly 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 pa.s.sed 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 subst.i.tute for the wasp's salivary juices.

Their first attempts gave them a pulp astonis.h.i.+ngly 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 circ.u.mstances? 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 s.h.i.+pping 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, Ma.s.sachusetts. 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, Ma.s.sachusetts, 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, publis.h.i.+ng, and distributing trades. Then hark back to the accident that put the wasp's nest under the toe of Gottfried Keller!

(_Providence Journal_)