1939-07-12 — Page 30

THE HONGKONG TELEGRAPH, WEDNESDAY, JULY 12, 1039.

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DEATH

Mrs. Sum Fung Sie Kwan, aged 80 years, (mother of Sum Pak Ming and Sum Chung Hing), at her residence "Ulam Hall", 41, Con- dult Road, on July 11. Funeral will take place on Friday, the 14th July, cortege will leave the residence at 10 a.m. for the Chinese Cemetry, Aberdeen.

The

Thongkong Telegraph.

Wyndham St., Hongkong 'Phone 26615 July 12, 1939

Crisis Arising?

AN

NOBVIOUSLY grave situation is steadily coming to a head in the Far East. It has been created, firstly, by the Japanese nction in Tientsin, secondly, by the illegal blockade of Chinese ports, and, thirdly, by the Japanese-sponsored anti-British movement in the Japan ese occupied areas, culminating in the attacks on British property in Tsingtao yesterday.

"YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE ONE THAT

When there is trouble about

•

THENEVER there is trouble

Wabout we are urged to pray.

And we do pray, even those who never do so at other times.

Yet some of us find the whole thing difficult and unreal, rather like talking down the telephone when you are not sure any one is there.

Some cannot see the sense of pray- In anyway.

Will God take notice of us, alter all His arrangements for us? Does He need us to tell Him what to do?

such questions if you really feel like You will probably not.bolher about praying. The natural thing to do is to pray first, reason afterwards; for prayer is, somehow, instinctive..

Men proyed long before any one Until recently there has been a

asked it' any use?" To feel like disposition in some sections of praying is, in a sense, to believe in British opinion to believe that the prayer. Javanese-actions-nre-excusable--on- the grounds of military necessity, but few people can still hold that belief.

But you cannot be expected to pray if you think there is nothing in it, and have this feeling all the time you are trying to do it. Nor is it, after all, in strict accord. with you want something. Christian teaching to pray only when

Many of us prayed last when we wanted to pass an examination at school, er have a bicycle for our birthday. And that is as far as we ever got.

·

The incitement of Chinese mobs to attack British persons and pro- perty i ercating a situation which may have the most serious reper cussions. The Chinese In the Japanese-occupied arcas, unhappily, must rely exclusively on Japanuse sources of news, and they are dally It is pointed out that if you seldom being fed with information inimical pray you cannot expect to find prayer

real and

ört, satisfying. Like not only to the interests of their music, poetry, you need long and in-

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Making the silk-worm turn

T

HERE ought to be un emply chair marked "The Lady of Si-ling

at the dinner of the Rayon and Silk Association It would be a nice gesture to

one who, for three thousand years, has been the patroness of the silk industry and who has now been deposed.

For the Association, incorporated to-day, is the formal admission that silk must take second place to rayon, the 30-called "artificial

which has supplanted it, and that the chemist has beaten the silk-worm at its own job. It follows the reorganisation of the 52-year- old Silk Association to which rayon was merely a step-chlid,

Queen Mary takes the place of The Lady of S-Hng, wife of the Chinese emperor Huang-li. by be- coming the patroness of the new Association,

UEEN MARY will not be expected to tend with hor own hands the

machines which make rayon. as the Empress once nursed the worns which made alik, or gather fr-trees, as 81-ling gathered mul- berry leaves, or invent, as she did. the loom which gave woven silk to the world. Queen

Mary can leave all that to the scientists and the engineers and to the 100.000 workers who are now employed through the rayon Industry in this country.

Thus has a revolution taken place

in one of the world's oldest textile industries.

In AD. 500 the Roman Emperor Justinian Introduced the Industry to Europe. He did it by briblog priesta who had gone on a pilgrim- age to the East to smuggle slik- worms out of China, where they were as jealously guarded as The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God. For the Chinese were deter- mined to maintain their monopoly of the silk-market. The silk-worms were brought to the West hidden in the hollow bamboo of the pll- grims' staffs.

T

also to Western Powers. The type full understanding and appreciation. This seems reasonable enough, and of war propaganda Japan has been

"talking perhaps explains the feeding the Chinese in the occupied nothing" feeling some of us get. arca is similar in many respects to

To return to the other difficulties: the type they are attempting to Even the fervent bellever will admit that prayer is something mysterious, food 138 regarding the border beyond his understanding. Yet he operations at Outer Mongolia. This can point out that it helps him in the type of propaganda is comparatively troubles of Life, enables him to be innocuous in its effect, since the happy, strong and unafrald,

And not only he himself, but most timo must come when even the of the big figures in history.

the most illiterate person must wonder people who have really achieved great at repeated "victory" claims. Since things, have found this too.

An alternative to prayer seems to the beginning of the Tientsia

be a belief in blind fate. This in blocknde, however, a new type of turn will very likely lead you to propaganda, which first made its superstitions, charms, and restless appearance at Tientsin, has spread nightmare, and on the face of it

Prayer fear. over North China. It is propaganda seems less futile and fantastic, openly directed against Great Bri- Probably we make the mistake of tain, who is blamed us the country worrying overmuch about the responsible for the prolongation of known. Instead of dealing with the We know that prayer works hostilities, as the Power for evil known.

our end, so to speak; how it operates responsible for the hardships those at the other is, surely, of secondary Chinese in the occupied, areas importance. Auffer. Constant repetition of this The religious man cannot possibly know, and he most often ceases to theme, especially when there are no care. He just prays. means of contradiction or of making The theologiana have puzzled known the truth, may lead to in themselves all down the centuries But the and have their theories, cidents of n type which may make

man who feels impelled to pray can- Tsingtao n. minor affair. Many not whit for theories. Chinese in the occupied area must Certainly, prayer teema like nsk- Indeed believe that Chinese resisting God to change His mind, or not the Deity are probably Inadequate. ance has collapsed: that Chinng to forget us, or to let us off lightly wide of the mock. But they Kal-slick has beon

to when we have done wrong. Sommu-natural to us; they are our own. reduced

You could as well explain away banditry, since this is the type of times it even appears as if we were

your own existence as explain away news that has been constantly disfelling Him what to do.

But these crudities, it is answer- this Instinct to pray. seminated by the Japanese for the ed, are only aims of your weakness. past twelve months. From that be They merely prove how little

We pray because we cannot help wo praying. lief it is but a slop to the bellef know and how helpless we are. that the oppressors now are not the

Japanese,

HE guile was repented by an Englishman, in the 18th Century. Britain's slik industry had been started by refugees from the Netherlands, who fled, during the reign of Henry VI, from the perse- cutions of the Spaniards. It had grown through the influx of an- other food of refugees, the Huguenots, necing from the MaE- ancre of St. Bartholomew's. EvL.

But at the beginning of the 18th Century, the Italians still controlled the secrets of one of the most dimcult processca, So

A

טות

-by. RITCHIE

CALDER

Derbyshire

manufacturer, Lombe, went to Lombardy dis- guised as a workman, He obtained work in one of the silk factories, He studied the devices. He made drawings of them and then bolted for home.

farther. riously

The Italians discovered the trick. They sent warships to pursue him on his voyage home. He escaped. And, in Derbyshire, he recon- structed-the-plant.-Legend-goes-

It says he was myste- poisoned by Italians who to England to avonge the theft of thoir

Artificial silk"

cecret.

had equally romantic origins. It is linked with Pastour and with the invention of the electric lamp.

the

tho

was

to make weavable threads and been discouraging. But Swan's other Assistant, Topham, the glass- blower who helped him with his bulbs, had been experimenting, He invented the "spinning-box," which is the key to the spinning process, His first spinning-box was made out of a blacklead tin.

Early years were full of dis- appointments.

It looked ns

12 rayon was going to be useful only for making artificial Dowers and hat ornaments, although it used for golf-jackets.

Then about 1908 It began to prove a commercial possiblity and. up to the war, grew modestly.

D

URING the war cellulose acetate, on which the brothers Dreyfus, had concentrated, was produced as "dope" for aeroplane wings.

After the war they turned their attention to producing a textil yarn, and the result was British Celanese.

"silks

510

Since the war rayon has worked Pastour was called in to investi- miracles. In our mothers' day Sato

plague which

wero Bunday best. They were dear and had to last destroying the French silk-worms.

long His discovery of the germ-origin.

time. Fashions could not change. They had to be enduring and ser- of disease was responsible for sav ing

viceable. French slik industry. But, working with him, was a young assistant, Count de Chardonnet, who was more interested in the living-mechanism by which the werms manufactured silk than in the death-mechanism of the disease.

E began to experiment and to try to reproduce

the process artificially,

He tried to make silk by pulping the mulberry leaves on which the worms fed.

At this me, Joseph Swan, the English rival of Edison in the race to produce an electric lamp, was trying to find a filament which would become incandescent inside the bulb. He hit upon the device of producing. by squirting cellu- lose acetate. through jets, an aril- nciál Dore, which when burned would become a carbon flament.

me did Ho vinde his filament, but he not realise that he had found a new textile thread as well. . Char* donnet jumped in and patented the making of artificial threads In 1884. A year later, Swan's wife. as an afterthought, exhibited fab-. rics which she had crocheted from her husband's, filaments at the London Inventions Exhibition.

W

Now silks," in the form of rayon, are the ever-changing fancy of the women. It has given us glamour-girls." It has given every work-giri the right to elegant silk stockings and fashions which alter with the seasons or with their whims. The silk of Bociety has become the dress of the millions.

The world produces a thousand million lb. of rayon a year, of which Britain accounts for a tenth. Forests melt into a shimmering sea of "alik."

Except that nowadays "ok" ja a misnomer. Rayon is no longer merely "artificial silk," Indeed. in France and America it is lilegal to call it so,

Nu

TOR is it just a substitute fur silk. In the form of staple fibre, which is rayon in short lengths instead of continuous threads, it is spun in combination with cotton and. wool. In Germany, searching for self-sufficiency, they are trying to replace, completely, natural tex- tites by staple Abro,"

Even in this country, men's suite: often contain a large proportion of rayon,

And

TORKING with Swan were three men, Cross. Bovan and Topham, They saw that "the Old Man was on to something" in his artißcial fibre.

Cross and Bevan left Swan and,, began to experiment. They pro- duced the first viscose, which now accounts for nearly 90 per cent, of. the world's production of rayon. They were still thinking in terms of electric filaments. But Court- That is what we nearly all feel aulds, in the silk trade sinco 1700 when we come to the point. And and famous for their mourning that is why, in these worrying times, crope, popularised by Queen Vic-wonen

toria na "The Widow of Windsor." saw other possibilities.

"Britain is being provoked now to

It appears inevitable to think of we turn to prayer as the one thing a moro dangerous extent than here God in human termena a Father, that will calm us, help us. tofore. If it continues, it is un- listening to His chuldren. No doubt, likely that the British Government with even the best of us, our prayers will content itself with protesta. are feeble, poor things. Our idens of}

Cecil Clark

now,

made from coal, air and water, a new product," Nylon," which is said to be as strong as: steel and finer than slik, has been discovered.. Du Ponts, the big- Amorican chemical combine, are. building a £2,000,000 plant to pro- dugo it.” Imperial Chemical Indus- trics and Courtaulds are combine. ing to create a firm to manufacture' it for the whole, textile industry here. It will come under the sogla. of the new Rayon and Silk Aasoci- ation.

From the trees of the forest, from: the coal in the bowels of the earth

and monaro being. clothed in elegance.

And, the time-honoured'; allk÷ worm,, farmed now on mass-pro-- duction lines, carries on Naturo's Meanwhile, the results of trying competition with the chemist

They bought the rights of the proccas.

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