based on high-pressure gassing with nitrogen or air of the liquid concentrate just before spray drying, which results in more rapid and efficient drying, with attendant economic advantages. Product quality is excellent, and the use of nitrogen provides a means of lowering the oxygen content of unstable food products such as dry whole milk. 17. Progress on dry whole milk.-An instant whole milk powder of ready dispersibility and having flavor very close to that of fresh fluid milk appears to be practicable. Research workers in the Department have produced experimental dry whole milk powders that, with special gas-packing, have maintained this quality 4 to 6 months at temperatures up to 70° F. Cost estimates indicate a retail price of 16 to 18 cents per quart of reconstituted milk. 18. Methods to prevent meat deterioration during frozen storage developed.-Maintenance of the quality of meat during frozen storage is an important problem of the meat industry. A large part of the deterioration that occurs in frozen storage is due to fat decomposition. The Department has shown that enzyme action is a principal factor in causing this decomposition. This discovery indicates why deterioration can occur when actual bacterial growth is inhibited. These enzymes originate from bacteria which may multiply because of poor initial sanitation or during periods of defrosting. By improving initial sanitation and by continuous maintenance of low temperature during storage this source of deterioration can be largely eliminated. 19. New chemical tannage developed.-A new tanning process using glutaraldehyde has been developed which produces leather with increased resistance to deterioration from perspiration, chemicals, and washing. Four tanners have put this development in commercial use for the production of sheepskin garment leather and shoe upper leathers from cattle hides. Perspiration-resistant workshoes are now being manufactured and marketed. At least three other firms are conducting plant tests. Improving the properties of leather through developing this new tannage affords a sound basis for creating new products that will expand markets for animal hides and skins. Dr. IRVING. We propose to discuss with you the items that appear on the chart at the left of the screen. I have a few slides on each of these. If any should become uninteresting to you, we can jump to any item you would prefer or eliminate any of them you find of no interest. The chart lets you know how much I intend to cover. CEREAL PULPS FOR BOXBOARD The first item concerns a discussion of our current progress on cereal pulps in boxboard. This item was mentioned last year and Dr. Shaw mentioned it in the statement he presented a short time ago. The principle, you will recollect, involves chemically treating cereal starches or cereal flours to produce a xanthated starch, which, when added to ordinary pulp in papermaking, becomes an integral part of the paper and adds to it properties which pulp paper alone does not possess. Chief among these is increasing the strength of the paper. As Dr. Shaw mentioned, we have successfully applied this process to increasing the strength of paper bags, an advantage which would be obvious. We would like to discuss today how this research has culminated in the demonstration that the addition of 4 percent cereal pulp, will produce boxboard containers that have greater strength at high humidity than conventional pulp paper boxes. You will be interested to know that 35 million tons of paper and paperboard are manufactured each year in the United States, 13 million tons of which go into boxboard containers. Almost all of the freight that is being carried on our railroads today is carried in paper boxboard containers. There is one difficulty, however, in that their strength at high humidities is lower than the industry would like, and they have been seeking, unsuccessfully, means for improving that 95547-63-pt. 27 strength. We think we have found the means to do so by the addition of 4 percent cereal pulp. You will see in the next slide [indicating] a test. Test strips of paper, made for this purpose, show that the control on the left, made of wood pulp alone, will stand, without crushing, only 20.4 pounds of weight. But by adding approximately 4 percent of cereal pulp-the specimen on the right-the paper will withstand up to 31.5 pounds without crushing. The next slide [indicating] shows this in greater detail. The top figure, 31.6 pounds for the wood pulp control, shows that at 50 percent relative humidity, it will withstand up to 31.6 pounds before crushing. When the humidity is increased to 90 percent, the capacity to resist crushing decreases to 20.4 pounds, as you can see. But if about 4 percent of cereal pulp is added the last three items on the slide strength at 90 percent relative humidity is about the same as that of conventional paper at lower humidity. (The chart referred to follows:) Effect of Cereal Xanthide in Improving Mr. WHITTEN. What is the base for cereal pulp? Dr. IRVING. Corn or wheat flour which has been chemically treated, to produce the cereal pulp. Mr. WHITTEN. Corn or wheat? Dr. IRVING. Yes, or the starch therefrom. Mr. WHITTEN. How does the cost of this process compare with similar wood materials? If Dr. IRVING. It is. Actually the cereal pulp is no more costly, and in some respects may be less costly, than pulp-6 or 7 cents a pound or less. The use of 4-percent pulp in boxboard would require the use of some 520,000 tons of cereal or about 16 million bushels. starch should be used, and starch can be used economically as well as flour, it would require about double this amount-in other words, over 30 million bushels. We feel that this process is going to be adopted sufficiently to provide a large industrial use for cereal. COTTON STRETCH TEXTILES Our next item concerns cotton. You are all familiar, I am sure, with stretch textiles and the wide acceptance that stretch and bulky textiles are finding in the market today. From about a consumption of 1 million pounds of all kinds of stretch textiles in 1957, we now have a situation where some 85 million pounds are being used, and cotton is involved in about 10 million pounds of this market now. The National Cotton Council believes there is great potential for cotton to assume a major share of the expanding market for stretch textiles, provided research can develop fully competitive products. There are three kinds of stretch textile products on the market now. There are those that have stretch fibers in the warp, those that have it in the filling fibers, and those that have it in both. This provides two kinds of one-way stretch materials, as well as materials capable of two-way stretch. There are three major methods of producing stretch textiles. The first is based on mechanical processing of the yarn and chemically cross-linking it. The second is a process known as slack mercerization. The third depends on the heat plasticity of fibers. Two of these I want to discuss with you briefly, because they concern work we have done on cotton at our Southern Laboratory in New Orleans. The first of these methods involves the mechanical processing of yarn, plus chemical cross-linking of the yarn. Cross-linking you have heard of before, of course, because that is one of the ways in which wash-wear properties are given to cotton. The top of this slide [indicating] shows a conventional cotton yarn. This cotton yarn is twisted further, in other words, overtwisted and chemically treated with a cross-linking agent to fix the twist. Then this same yarn is back-twisted to the original twist and is woven into fabric. The yarn seeks to return to the cross-linked twist condition and that produces the springlike coils you see in the bottom part of the slide. I have a sample [demonstrating] of stretch yarn made by this process, which you may like to handle. You can see how closely this yarn simulates the picture in the slide. And here [demonstrating] is a piece of fabric made from mechanically processed and chemically crosslinked stretch cotton, a one-way stretch fabric, where the stretch yarn comprises only one of the elements of the woven fabric, to give stretch in one direction and rigidity in the second. The next slide [indicating] shows the second method for producing stretch cotton products. This is the one that is known as slack mercerization. It takes advantage of the fact that cotton fibers themselves are elastic, that they can be elongated slightly due to the internal spiral structure of the fibril elements within the fiber. It is also true that if you swell a cotton fiber by mercerization, the fiber shortens as it swells, thus compressing the internal spiral structure to produce, in effect, an internal coiled spring. Practical application of the slack mercerization process is very simple. A fabric like the sock at the top of this slide [indicating], is knit very loosely, and then is treated with alkali-the mercerization process. This swells and shortens the cotton fibers, and in the shortening process they become elastic to give the conventional size stretch sock you see in the lower part of the slide (indicating]. There are nine firms now making stretch cotton material by the slack mercerization process. HIGH AMYLOSE CORN The next item I would like to discuss concerns high amylose corn. This is an effort on our part to change or improve an old crop, namely corn, which is commonly a feed crop, and to adapt it for industrial purposes. Mr. WHITTEN. I think corn, under present conditions, has about as tough a problem as any agricultural commodity. So many sections of the country are dependent upon it. We haven't had the foreign markets for corn as we have for many other things. So it intrigues me that you can find a use in the production of boxboard. A few years ago, at the invitation of a major cardboard manufacturing company, I spoke at the Washington Parish Fair in Louisiana. That company had the foresight 30 years ago to shift into cardboard manufacturing. Their very large timber holdings were thus diverted into the specialized use of cardboard manufacture. If the cardboard business could use even 3 to 6 percent of this cereal pulp made of corn and wheat, it would be a tremendous help. Dr. IRVING. We believe it would, too. Cornstarch is mainly composed of two different kinds of molecules; one kind consists of straight chain, unbranched molecules (amylose), and the other of branched chain molecules (amylopectin). From the first-the straight chain starch molecules-we can produce fibers and films and industrial products generally. From the branched chain molecules you cannot. The trick here has been to find or produce strains of corn that contain relatively greater amounts of amylose starch. This program of ours started back many years ago, and as a matter of fact it was only in the late 1940's that we found by painstakingly analyzing corn samples, a single sample that contained significantly more amylose than the 27 percent normally present in corn. We have been building upon that finding ever since. The next slide [indicating] summarizes the results to date. You can see that in 1958 some 70 to 75 of the samples that we analyzed out of 10,000 or so in that year contained as much as 40 percent of the amylose fraction. That number has been steadily increasing since, as you can see. In 1959, we found several samples that contained 70 to 80 percent amylose and in 1962, five that contained as much as 80 to 85 percent. So we are on the way, through biochemical genetics, to developing a new, industrially important crop-a corn that will have industrial uses rather than primarily feed uses. There are now strains containing about 60 percent amylose available for commercial planting. About 4 million pounds of high amylose starch was produced and marketed in 1961. We expect 5 million pounds from the crop of last year. Most of this is now going into the sizing of glass fiber fabrics. (The chart referred to follows:) Progress of High-Amylose Corn Breeding Total Samples Number with Apparent Amylose, % Dr. IRVING. We feel sure that once high amylose corn has been established as a crop, our research on amylose itself will have shown there are many other industrial uses that will make this crop worthwhile for the farmer to grow to supply these markets. WURLANIZED WOOL The next item is Wurlanized wool. This process, we have mentioned before, but not by this name. The name derives from "Western Utilization Research" and "lan" for sheep or wool. It involves the treatment of wool fibers chemically to place on them a very thin layer of polyamide resin, and by so doing, endowing the fiber with characteristics that prevent it from shrinking when wet. This process has moved now into industrial application. In the next slide [indicating] you can see that we are experimenting with the process at all stages in the processing of the wool, but work on woven fabrics has been through the research and development stage and is now at the stage of commercial production. Dr. IRVING. We expect from contact with industry, that Wurlanized fabrics will be announced shortly, particularly for women's and children's apparel. These fabrics can be machine-washed and dried without shrinkage and without damage to appearance and hand. This we feel is a great advance for wool, equivalent to what the wash-and-wear development has been in the cotton industry. We feel the potential is great as is indicated in the next slides [indicating]. In the case of men's sweaters, wool is still the predominant fiber and we seek to maintain it so. But in women's and children's sweaters and other garments, a large part of the market has already been lost to synthetics. We believe the greatest immediate promise of use is in the latter field, primarily because in women's and children's garments, they wish to have something that can be home laundered and preferably machine washed with water. Dr. IRVING. In the production of men's slacks we have a market to expand into also, because in this particular garment synthetics again have made sharp inroads into a market that was held previously almost entirely by wool. I have here samples [demonstrating] of Wurlanized wool, which I believe you can examine and identify from the labels. There are samples of untreated wool, and of Wurlanized wool, both before and after washing for 75 minutes in a home washer. The washed, untreated wool clearly shows the shrinkage and fuzzi |