Sow's Ear Silk

Lately Germany announced that it could make silk for a lady's stocking out of the lobster shells left from her supper party (TIME, Dec. 6). Last week Engineer Kurt Gerson of Berlin went further. He said he could make silk purses out of sows' ears, boars' ankles," potato peelings, toothpicks and all manner of garbage. In a large factory now being constructed under his specifications, kitchen refuse will be sifted for the cellulose ingredients of artificial silk or, if desired, gun cotton. The remaining refuse will be distilled for tar, charcoal, acetic acid.

Economists recalled that, before the invention and commercial success of artificial silks in the past few years, abortive efforts to transplant silk production from the Orient to the New World were periodic. Cortes introduced silkworms in Mexico. James I tried to establish them in Virginia in 1609. A law still on the books though long dead requires Virginia farmers to plant six mulberry trees per annum for seven years. Just before .the Revolution a great fever for growing silk swept the colonies. In 1771 President Stiles of Yale and Mrs. Stiles raised 3,000 silkworms and sent their produce to a friend in London; where, with more strands bought of Benjamin Franklin, who kept worms in Philadelphia, 10 1/4 yards of cloth were woven for the friend's wife's dress. In 1791 a Mr. Aspinwall persuaded the New York Assembly to promise a bounty of $3 for every 100 mulberry trees reaching the age of three years in good health. Mr. Aspinwall then rushed out on Long Island and planted 800,000 mulberry trees. Another outburst of silk fever occurred in the 1830's. Daniel Webster bought 5,000 trees for his Massachusetts farm. Farm papers told their readers that five acres of mulberry trees would support a family sumptuously. Nine state legislatures established mulberry and silk-reeling bounties. As always before, the boom languished. The industry stayed where it had started 50 centuries before, in China, where "labor is almost as cheap today as when the first wild silkworms were brought down from the hills."