(Download) "Notes Upon Indigo" by J Hayes * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Notes Upon Indigo
- Author : J Hayes
- Release Date : January 05, 2020
- Genre: Crafts & Hobbies,Books,Lifestyle & Home,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 5246 KB
Description
PART I.
A publication devoted to the interests of the woollen manufacture, while giving due prominence to its first raw material, wool, cannot neglect the secondary materials which enter into finished fabrics. The attractiveness and utility of the largest class of these fabrics are due to the hue given them by the dyer; and of all the coloring materials one of the most precious is indigo. In former times, as it still does at the East, it occupied with madder the place of one of the two most important of all dyeing materials. Forced of late years to give way to the marvellous products of modern chemistry, it will doubtless resume its place under the influence of a more enlightened economy and a more subdued taste. To contribute to the hastening of this return is one object of this essay. The most usual reproach against American fabrics is the want of stability in our dyes,—a reproach without justice, if applied to American fabrics alone; for the cheapening of dyestuffs is practised in all the so-called manufacturing nations, and is contemned alone in the East, from which we have derived our arts, and by the people whom we despise as barbarous. To remove this reproach from American fabrics would be worthy of no little temporary sacrifice on the part of our manufacturers.
The value of indigo as a dyeing material is due to the great stability of the blue color, and the derivatives from blue, which it gives to fabrics, especially of wool and cotton. It is not sufficient that a dyed fabric should preserve its color when
submitted to violent tests, as when acted upon by vegetable or mineral acids or alkaline or soapy baths: the only stable dyes are those which resist air and light, the two destructive agents of vegetable colors. Indigo, from the remarkable manner in which its color becomes fixed upon a fabric, to be hereafter explained, possesses properties of resistance and stability in a higher degree than any blue dye. And when we consider that this blue has not only its own hue, but is the best foundation for blacks, greens, purples, and even browns, the importance of these properties cannot be over-estimated. Says M. de Kæppelin, a chemist and manufacturer of Mulhouse, in one of a series of articles furnished to the Annales du gênie Civil, 1864: “So high are the properties of resistance and stability which indigo possesses, that it is perhaps to be regretted for the art of the dyer and manufacturer of printed calicoes, that the use of indigo becomes more and more rare, and that the recent discoveries which modern science has placed at the service of industry are daily eliminating it from our factories. I have observed that whenever we have to dye stuffs of a high price, it is indigo which always serves as a base for the foundation of all the blue colors, or of those which are derived from blue. It is the same for the fabrication of printed tissues, which serve for the poorer classes, whose colors should have great stability without much increase of cost. But of late years, especially, we find a tendency to employ colors of little stability, and to prefer them, even in the class of fabrics first referred to, to those which are more fast, on account of their vivacity and freshness of tone. It is this tendency, which the consumer partakes of even while complaining of it, that the textile manufacturers ought to seek to combat. How often have I heard the greatest manufacturers of Alsace deplore the obligation which they felt that they were under of printing their tissues by means of colors so fugacious and so little resistant as those composed from aniline. We must hope, then, in the interest of that industry, that while adopting the marvellous discoveries which science is every day making, there shall be made a less general application of them, and that we shall
return to the fabrication of the styles which necessitate the more constant employment of coloring materials,—less brilliant, it is true, but more adherent to the tissues, and less alterable by air and light. It seems to me, also, that taste would lose nothing; and that printed stuffs, colored in a manner less brilliant, but more harmonious, would be perhaps more appreciated, especially by those who use them.”
 "Notes Upon Indigo" by J Hayes * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}