JANUARY, 1944
THE ECHO
PAGE FIVE
Members Of Family Of President H. H. Straus
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Shown above are membeirs of President Harry Straus’ family. In the ceinter at the top is Mrs. Harry Straus. On the right is Mrs.
Roger King and to the left is Harry Straus, Jr. At the bottom Is his grandson, Tommy King.
Much Has Been Written About Mr. Straus And Ecusta
ONE ARnCLE IS
REPRINTED HERE
Much has been written about
Straus and'the Ecusta Paper
P^oration in newspapers, maga-
and in books.
.. this special anniversary edi-
the editors of The Echo in-
nded carrying right much of
tiom
ttiaterial, but due to limita-
ns of space and various fea-
decided to reduce
, is to a minimum. They selected,
^owever, one of the most sig-
j. articles and it is being
below. The article is en-
“America’s White Paper”.
Was written ai^d copyrighted
^ovember 15, 1940, by B. C.
orbes Publishing company and
It in The Reader’s Digest,
j bas also been printed in book
tiJi^ on cigarette paper. The ar-
® is as follows:
AMERICA’S WHITE PAPER
H. Straus, a six-foot-one
en of physical and mental
came to this country when
Of years old. But he is one
^at whatever their
be ^ were really born to
Americans.
eno ^®^^^ned English quickly
but he never went back,
as his contribution to his
a created
industry which makes jobs
legion where there were few
gives farmers a new cash
turns waste into wealth,
frees America of dependence on
precarious imports and points to
ward further industrial develop
ments of high importance.
He makes cigarette paper. The
United States uses $10,000,000
worth a year, and has been buy
ing virtually all of it from France.
On the very day this war began,
Harry Straus’s Ecusta mill in the
Blue Ridge Mountains of North
Carolina began to make a domes
tic supply. The precise date was
a mere coincidence; for seven
years, Straus had been engaged in
a heart-breaking struggle toward
his goal.
Heart-breaking because of all
papers ever developed, the cigar
ette wrapper is about the hardest
to make. It must be thinner than
the diameter of a human hair, yet
it must be elastic and strong to
withstand the pull of cigarette ma
chines. A strip the width of your
unrolled cigarette will support a
weight of eight pounds. It must
fold without tearing; it must not
stick to the lips; it must burn at
the same rate as tobacco (this is
regulated by the amount of chalk
included); it must be opaque,
pure white and, above all, taste
less.
French mills make it from old
linen rags. New linen cloth won’t
do; by the time it is rags, it has
been washed and dried a thousand
times at no cost to the paper-
maker. For old linen, the indus
try was dependent on the rag
pickers of Poland, Russia and the
Balkans. Thus the huge American
cigarette industry, the American
farmer, whose tobacco crop is
second only to his cotton crop in
value, and the U. S. Government
which collects $500,000,000 in
taxes a year on cigarettes, were
at the mercy of the French mills,
which were at the mercy of the
rag-pickers, who, as events prov
ed, were at the mercy of Hitler.
When Harry Straus decided,
very soon after his arrival in 1902,
that America was where he be
longed, he found work with a com
pany that supplied cork tips for
cigarettes. Later, he. became a
salesman for cigarette paper. After
a while, he' controlled a French
mill. He was doing well, but he
didn’t like being dependent on
the rag-pickers of Europe. Why,
he wondered, couldn’t cigarette
paper be made from domestic raw
materials?
America’s supply of linen rags,
it developed, was wholly inade
quate. And anyway, our linen
cloth is imported. Why not skip
the spinning and weaving and
make paper direct from flax fiber?
The flax plant yields straw
which consists of long, strong fi
bers sheathing a woody core.
Linen manufacture has remained
in Europe because separating
fibers from the core has been a
tedious hand process, done on
peasant farms and uneconomic
when wages have to be paid. The
problem, then, was to devise a
chemical or mechanical process to
produce clean flax fibre cheaply.
Hundreds of highly trained tech
nicians had made thousands of
experiments and spent hundreds
of thousands of dollars doing it.
Perhaps if Mr. Straus had been
a Ph.D. in chemistry, too, he
would have known it couldn’t be
done. But he’s never been to col
lege, so he hired chemists and
mechanical engineers and told
them to get busy.
The Bureau of Standards in
Washington, the Government’s
Forest Products Laboratory at
Madison, Wis., several universi
ties and at least one paper com
pany had. come to a dead end.
They could remove the woody core
by chemicals, but chemicals that
would do that job damaged the
fibers. They could combine me
chanical and chemical means and
get undamaged fibers, but at the
cost of wasting a large proportion
of them.
Mill And Laboratory Clash
Straus’s engineers, too, had bit
ter disappointments. It was one
thing to succeed in the laboratory,
another to succceed in the mill
where time and money count.
They would develop a process that
accomplished wonders on five-
pound lots, and carry it hopefully
to France, only to see it fizzle
when used on a 500-pound,batch.
Then they would come home and
start all over.
One highly promising combina
tion tested in a mill worked in a
100-pound batch, but failed when
tried on a commercial scale. This
time, however, the Straus engi
neers got a clue; they began con
centrating on the simple fact that
in water-logged flax straw, the
density of wood is greater than the
density of the fibers. Why not
separate the two by flotation?
The difficulty was that the fibers
and the wood were locked in such
tight embrace that the fibers act-
—Turn To Page Twelve