Research Results For 'Salts'

ADULTERATION

Adulteration is a term not only applied in its proper sense to the fraudulent mixture of articles of commerce, food, drink, drugs, seeds, etc, with noxious or inferior ingredients, but also by magistrates and analysts to accidental impurity, and even in some cases to actual substitution.

The chief objects of adulteration are to increase the weight or volume of the article, to give a colour which either makes a good article more pleasing to the eye or else disguises an inferior one, to substitute a cheaper form of the article, or the same substance from which the strength has been extracted, or to give it a false strength.

Among the adulterations which were commonly practised around 1905 for the purpose of fraudulently increasing the weight or volume of an article are the following: Bread was adulterated with alum or sulphate of copper, which gives solidity to the gluten of damaged or inferior flour; with chalk or carbonate of soda to correct the acidity of such flour; and with boiled rice or potatoes, which enables the bread to carry more water, and thus to produce a larger number of loaves from a given quantity of flour. Wheat flour is adulterated with other inferior flours, as the flour from rice, bean, Indian-corn, potato, and with sulphate of lime, alum, etc. Milk was usually adulterated with water. The adulterations generally present in butter consisted of an undue proportion of salt and water, lard, tallow, and other fats; when of poor quality it was frequently coloured with a little annatto, and, at times, with the juice of carrots. Genuine butter should not contain less than 80 percent of butter-fat. Cheese was also coloured with annatto and other substances. Tea was adulterated chiefly in China with sand, iron-filings, chalk, gypsum, China clay, exhausted tea leaves, and the leaves of the sycamore, horse-chestnut, and plum, whilst colour and weight were added by black-lead, indigo, Prussian-blue (one of the deleterious ingredients used by the Chinese in converting the lowest qualities of black into green teas), gum, turmeric, soapstone, catechu, and other substances.

Coffee was mingled with chicory, roasted wheat, roasted beans, acorns, mangel-wurzel, rye-flour, and coloured with burned sugar and other materials. Chicory was adulterated with different flours, as rye, wheat, beans, etc, and coloured with ferruginous earths, burned sugar, Venetian red, etc. Cocoa and chocolate were mixed with the cheaper kinds of arrow-root, animal matter, corn, sago, tapioca, etc. Sugar was adulterated to some extent with flour. Tobacco was mixed with sugar and treacle, aloes, liquorice, oil, alum, etc, and such leaves as rhubarb, chicory, cabbage, burdock, coltsfoot, besides excess of salt and water. Snuffs were adulterated with carbonate of ammonia, glass, sand, colouring matter, etc.

Confections were adulterated with flour and sulphate of lime. Preserved vegetables were kept green and poisoned by salts of copper. The acridity of mustard is commonly reduced by flour, and the colour of the compound is improved by turmeric. Pepper was adulterated with linseed-meal, flour, mustard husks, etc. Colour was given to pickles by salts of copper, acetate of copper, etc. Ale was adulterated with common salt, Cocculus Indicus, grains of paradise, quassia, and other bitters, sulphate of iron, alum, etc. Porter and stout were mixed with sugar, treacle, salt, and an excess of water. Brandy was diluted with water, and burned sugar was added to improve the colour; sometimes bad whisky was flavoured and coloured so as to resemble brandy, and sold under its name.

Gin was mixed with excess of water, and flavouring matters of various kinds, with alum and tartar, were added. Rum was diluted with water, and the flavour and colour kept up by the addition of cayenne and burned sugar. For champagne gooseberry and other inferior wines were often substituted. Port was manufactured from red Cape and other inferior wines, the body, flavour, strength, and colour being produced by gum-dragon, the washings of brandy casks, and a preparation of German bilberries. Cheap brown sherry was mixed with Cape and other low-priced brandies, and was flavoured with the washings of brandy casks, sugar-candy, and bitter almonds. Pale sherries were produced by gypsum, by a process called plastering, which removes the natural acids as well as the colour of the wine. Other wines were adulterated with elderberry, logwood, Brazil-wood, cudbear, red beetroot, etc, for colour; with lime or carbonate of lime, carbonate of soda, carbonate of potash, and litharge, to correct acidity; with catechu, sloe-leaves, and oak-bark for astringency; with sulphate of lime and alum for removing colour; with cane-sugar for giving sweetness and body; with alcohol for fortifying; and with ether, especially acetic ether, for giving bouquet and flavour.

Medicines, such as jalap, opium, rhubarb, cinchona bark, scammony, aloes, sarsaparilla, squills, etc, were mixed with various foreign substances. Castor-oil has been adulterated with other oils; and inferior oils were often. mixed with cod-liver oil. Cantharides were often mixed with golden-beetle and also artificially-coloured glass.

The adulteration of seeds was largely practised also, the seed which forms the adulterant being of course of the most worthless kind that can be had. Thus turnip-seed was mixed with rape, wild mustard, or charlock, which are steamed and kiln-dried to destroy their vitality, so as to evade detection in the progress of growth; old and useless turnip-seed was also used fraudulently mixed with fresh seeds. Clover was also much mixed with plantain and mere weeds.

Acts against adulteration have been passed in various countries and at various times. In Britain there was a law against it as early as 1267.
Research Adulteration

DYEING

Dyeing is the art of giving colour to textile and other articles in such a way that the colours are more or less permanent, and not readily affected by the action of light, washing, etc. Like spinning and weaving it was originally a home industry, as it still is in many places. Until about 1850 natural dye-stuffs alone were employed, but the discovery of dyes of all colours that can be obtained from coal-tar products revolutionized dyeing as an industry, and the vegetable dye-stuffs were gradually superseded by the newer colours.

Before dyeing, the materials have generally to be cleansed or bleached to get rid of undesirable colouring matters or impurities; and frequently a textile material is subjected to some subsidiary treatment in order to obtain special effects. For example, cotton yarn may be subjected to the action of strong caustic soda ('mercerizing' process) while in a state of great tension, in order to give it a permanent silky lustre.

Dyeing is not only an art, it is also a branch of applied chemistry. One fundamental principle is, that the colouring matter and other necessary substances must be applied in a state of solution, and while in direct contact with the fibre they must be rendered insoluble, so that they are precipitated within or upon the fibre and thus permanently fixed. The method of effecting this varies greatly according to the fibre and the colouring matter employed. As a rule the vegetable and the animal fibres are dyed by very different methods. The affinity of the animal fibres for certain colouring matters is often so great that they are readily dyed by simple immersion in hot colour solutions;
but this simple process is not generally sufficient. According to the method of their application in dyeing the following groups: of dye-stuffs may be distinguished: Avid Colours, Basic Colours, Direct Colours, Developed Colours, Mordant Colours, Miscellaneous Colours, Reactive Colours.

The acid colours are so called because they are of an acid character and are applied in an acid dye-bath. As a rule, they are only suitable for dyeing the animal fibres, e.g. wool and silk, also leather, horn, feathers, etc. Only a few vegetable dye-stuffs belong to this class, for example, the purple colour orchil and the blue colour indigo extract. On the other hand, the acid colours derived from coal-tar - and increasingly petroleum - are very numerous and yield a great variety of hues - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black, each with its particular name.

The basic colours are so called because their essential constituents, to which they owe their dyeing power, are organic bases. The bases themselves are colourless and too insoluble in water to be of use, hence they are employed in the form of their soluble coloured salts, usually the hydrochlorides of the colour-bases. Their solutions are precipitated by tannic acid, because it combines with the colour-bases to form insoluble tannates. Wool, silk, and animal substances generally have a direct attraction for colour-bases, and hence these fibres are readily dyed by simple immersion in hot aqueous solutions of the basic colours. Cotton and linen, on the other hand, are not dyed so readily; they need first to be prepared or impregnated with tannic acid, and thus prepared are said to be mordanted, the tannic acid in this connection being styled the mordant. Most of the colours of this class are fugitive to light, and all but one, barberry root, are derived from coal-tar products.

The direct colours are so called because they dye cotton direct, that is, without the aid of any mordanting process. The first of this class derived from coal-tar was congo red, discovered in 1884; this group includes a very great variety of fast colours, and forms, indeed, one of the most important and valuable series of dye-stuffs employed. Cotton, linen, and the vegetable fibres generally are dyed in the simplest possible manner by merely boiling them in a solution of the dye-stuff, with or without the addition of a little soap, carbonate or sulphate of soda, etc. Wool and silk are frequently dyed in the same manner as cotton. Very few vegetable dye-stuffs belong to the direct colours, e.g. Safflower, Turmeric, Saffron, Annatto. They are all fugitive, and have been of little or no importance to the dyer since the end of the 19th century. The coal-tar colours of this class, on the other hand, are extremely numerous.

The developed colours include a variety of colours which are formed in situ upon the fibre by the successive application of two or more substances. These colours are all of coal-tar origin. A number of them belong to the so-called azo colours, derived from compounds containing nitrogen.

The mordant colours form one of the most important classes of colouring matters, for they include not only most of the vegetable dye-stuffs, e.g. madder, logwood, fustic, etc, but also many valuable fast coal-tar colours, commonly known as the alizarin colours, after their typical representative, alizarin. These mordant colours have by themselves very little colouring power, as a rule, and if employed alone in dyeing give little or no result. If applied, however, in conjunction with metallic salts, notably those of chromium, aluminium, iron, tin, and copper, they each yield a variety of colours, according to the metallic salt employed. In employing them usually two distinct operations are involved: first, that of applying the metallic salt or mordant, called the mordanting process ; and second, that of dyeing proper, in which the mordanted material is boiled in a solution or decoction of the dye-stuff. During the dyeing operation the colouring principle of the dye-stuff combines with the metallic salt already upon the material, and the colour is thus produced and fixed upon the fibre. The method of mordanting varies with the fibre and the metallic salt employed. The vegetable dye-stuffs of this class include Madder, Sapanwood, Camwood, Barwood, Old Fustic, Young Fustic, Quercitron Bark, Persian Berries, Weld, Logwood. Madder was formerly the most important and highly valued of the dye-stuffs of this class, being especially employed to produce the fine 'Turkey-red' dye; but was entirely superseded by the coal-tar colour alizarin towards the end of the 19th century.

Reactive colours combine directly with the fibre being dyed through a chemical reaction and result in a fast colour. The first ranges of reactive dyes for cellulose fibres were introduced in the mid-1950s.

Similarly, the employment of cochineal (an insect dye) has also greatly diminished through the introduction of the cheaper colours. Camwood and barwood are almost entirely used in wool-dyeing, either in conjunction with the indigo-vat or for the purpose of dyeing various shades of brown. Old fustic is the most important of the yellow mordant dye-stuffs, and the colours are fast although not very brilliant. Young fustic yields fugitive colours, and has been little used since 1900. Quercitron bark is an excellent dye-stuff employed by wool-dyers for the production of bright orange and yellow colours. Persian berries and weld, a species of wild mignonette, are both excellent dye-stuffs, but their employment is now limited. Logwood is largely employed by wool, silk, and cotton dyers for dyeing black and dark-blues, which, although fast to washing, are only moderately so towards light. During the 20th century dyewoods were gradually replaced by coal-tar colours.

Among miscellaneous colours are several dye-stuffs applied in a distinct manner. Indigo is a dark-blue powder quite insoluble in water, but can be rendered soluble for dyeing purposes by two methods. The first method converts the indigo into so-called indigo extract, which is sold as a blue paste and applied as an acid colour in dyeing wool and silk. In the second method the indigo-blue is converted into indigo-white, which readily dissolves in the alkali present, the solution thus obtained being called an indigo-vat. If cotton, wool, or silk is steeped for some time in the clear yellow solution of such a vat, and then exposed to the oxidizing influence of the air, they are dyed a permanent blue. The indigo-white absorbed by the fibre loses its acquired hydrogen, and thus insoluble indigo-blue is regenerated within and upon the fibre. Aniline black is a valuable colour, produced direct upon the fibre by the oxidation of aniline, and remarkable for its extreme permanency.

Catechu is a vegetable dye-stuff used in dyeing cotton and woollen brown. On wool, catechu yields khaki browns in single bath by using copper sulphate as the mordant. On silk it is largely employed for weighting purposes in the process of dyeing black. Chrome Yellow, Iron Buff, Prussian Blue, and Manganese Brown, employed in cotton dyeing, are frequently classed as mineral colours. Chrome yellow is obtained by immersing cotton successively in solutions of acetate of lead and bichromate of potash, whereby the yellow precipitate of chromate of lead is fixed upon the fibre. Iron buff is obtained in a similar manner by the successive application of iron sulphate and carbonate of soda, and finally developing the full colour by washing with water and exposure to air. The buff colour is really due to the precipitation of oxide of iron on the cotton. Prussian blue is at once developed by passing the buff-dyed cotton through an acidified solution of potassium ferrocyanide. The production of manganese brown on cotton is similar to that of iron buff. The brown colour ultimately produced upon the fibre is an oxide of manganese. The mineral colours are very useful for certain purposes, and are to be regarded as very fast to light.
Research Dyeing

IVORY

Ivory is an opaque, creamy white, hard, fine-grained, modified dentin that composes the upper incisor teeth of an elephant. Ivory is composed of curved layers of dentine alternating in shade, that intersect one another; the resulting lozenge-shaped structure is elastic and finely grained. The layers of a tusk are deposited from the central pulp, so that the innermost layer is the newest. Most commercial elephant ivory is obtained from the tusks of the African elephant, mainly from eastern and central Africa. (Most of the ivory of the western half of Africa is hard, whereas that from the eastern half is soft. Hard ivory is glassier in texture, harder to cut and more likely to crack than soft ivory.)
Fossil ivory, called odontolite, is a blue variety that is found in small quantities in the frozen soil of northern Siberia. Odontolite was produced by the mammoths of the Pleistocene geological epoch; its blue colour results from saturation by metallic salts. Carved ivory has been used for decorative purposes since the time of the ancient Egyptians. Small pieces of ivory are used for high-quality furniture inlays, chess pieces, and small jewellery. Larger pieces of ivory sometimes have been used in the manufacture of billiard balls, piano keys, and toilet articles.
During the late 1980s, as Africa's elephant herds declined, environmentalists led a world-wide effort to shut down the ivory trade; in 1989 the USA and the European Union banned all ivory imports. Tusks of several other animals such as hippopotamuses, narwhals, sperm whales, and walruses are commonly called ivory and have similar physical properties, and many plastic substitutes for ivory have been developed. Several ivory-like vegetable parts are also used in imitation of ivory; the ivory palm, for example, produces large, white, hard seeds, called ivory nuts, the endosperm of which is commonly known as vegetable ivory. In painting, ivory is a delicate colour deeper in tone than off-white, but not so deep as cream.
Research Ivory

TOILETRIES

Toiletries is a general term for articles, cosmetics, or products used in washing, dressing, etc. The term generally includes soaps, bubble-bath, body lotions, deodorants, anti-perspirants, bath salts and the like.
Research Toiletries

VEGETABLE

In its narrow, everyday use, vegetable is a word indicating any herb that is cultivated specially for table use in whole or part, such as the turnip (root), cabbage (leaves), broccoli (flowers), peas and beans (fruit). In its widest sense it includes all living things that are not animals - trees, shrubs, herbs, ferns, mosses, seaweeds, fungi, and the microscopic diatoms.

The unit of structure, the cell, is essentially the same in both animals and plants, but the combination of the cells into tissues and organs shows marked differences.

All animals depend for their food upon material originally elaborated by plants. The green plants alone have the power to construct this basic food material from elemental substances, and physiological processes different from those of animal assimilation are rendered necessary. The fungi approach the animals in this respect: they must feed upon material that has already done service as part of the structure of other plants or of animals.

The fine divisions of roots explore the soil in search of water in which are dissolved the salts of sodium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, calcium, sulphur, etc. The hairs with which the rootlets are clothed absorb this fluid by osmosis, and it is passed upward through the long vessels of the wood bundles until it reaches the cells of the leaf. These cells contain green bodies (chloroplasts) in their protoplasm, and it is these that impart the green colour to leaves and soft shoots. In the leaf-skin (epidermis) there are innumerable pores or stomata through which surplus water from the roots is evaporated and through which atmospheric air is admitted to the spaces between the leaf-cells.

The chloroplasts in these cells have the power to utilise solar energy in decomposing the carbon dioxide of the air, and the cells retain the carbon, setting free the oxygen. Water from the roots is broken up also into its elements, hydrogen and oxygen, and with these plus carbon starch is formed. This, converted into grape sugar, is passed from cell to cell to parts of the plant whore it is needed for the production of new cells, wood, bark, leaves, or fruit. Starch is the material from which are made all the organic substances produced by the plant.

The surplus over present requirements is stored up as reserves in seeds, enlarged roots or stems, bulbs, or tubers for renewed growth or floral display at a later season. Waste products are converted into resins, oils/wax, or alkaloids - many of these being of considerable economic value to man. Part of the water stream from the roots passes by osmosis from cell to cell, where it is necessary in order to keep the protoplasm in an active condition; any insufficiency is followed by a flagging of the tissues, the drooping of leaves and young shoots. In addition to the absorption of carbon by the protoplasts for building purposes, the leaf-cells also take up oxygen from the atmosphere and give off carbon much as animals do.

As the plant respires without lungs and assimilates without digestive organs, so also it can effect movements without a muscular system and react to external stimuli without a nervous system. It is sensitive to light and heat; many plants have distinct night and day positions for their leaves. It responds positively and negatively to the force of gravity, the root going down into the earth and the stem rising into the air. The growing tip of a stem or shoot commonly nutates, i.e. moves from side to side or in a circle or ellipse. The plant can orientate itself, i.e. take up a definite position in regard to the incidence of light or other external stimulus. These movements appear to be controlled largely by alterations in the position of the mobile chloroplasts.

The reproductive process is, in essentials, similar to that of animals, the ovules or seed-eggs in the ovary requiring to be fertilised by male sperms represented by the pollen grains produced in the anthers. The result of such fertilisation is to cause the ovule to develop into an embryo capable of further development under suitable conditions into a plant resembling the parent.
Research Vegetable

JONS JAKOB BERZELIUS

Baron Jons Jakob Berzelius (John James Berzelius) was a Swedish chemist. He was born in 1779 and died in 1848. He studied medicine at Upsala, and after holding one or two medical appointments was appointed lecturer in chemistry in the Stockholm military academy in 1806, and the following year professor of pharmacy and medicine. In 1808 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, in 1810 director, and in 1818 its perpetual secretary. In 1818 the king made him a noble, and in 1835 a baron. He was also a deputy to the National Assembly.

He discovered selenium and thorium, first exhibited calcium, barium, strontium, tantalum, silicium, and zirconium in the elemental state, and investigated whole classes of compounds, as those of fluoric acid, the metals in the ores of platinum, tantalum, molybdenum, vanadium, sulphur salts, etc, and introduced a new nomenclature and classification of chemical compounds. In short, there was no branch of chemistry to which he did not render essential service. His writings comprise an important Text-book of Chemistry, View of the Composition of Animal Fluids, New System of Mineralogy, Essay on the Theory of Chemical Proportions, etc. He was the founder of electrochemical theory and designed the system of chemical symbols still in use.
Research Jons Jakob Berzelius

RICHARD ZSIGMONDY

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy was an Austrian-born German chemist. He was born in 1865 at Vienna and died in 1929. He studied at Munich, staying in Germany, becoming professor at Gottingen in 1908. Working at the Glass Manufacturing Company in Jena from 1897 to 1900, Zsigmondy became concerned with coloured and turbid glasses and he invented a type of milk glass. This aroused his interest in colloids, because it is colloidal inclusions that give glass its colour or opacity. His belief that the suspended particles in gold sols are kept apart by electric charges was generally accepted, and the sols became model systems for much of his later work on colloids. He devised and built an ultramicroscope in 1903. The microscope's illumination was placed at right angles to the axis. Zsigmondy's arrangement made it possible to observe particles with a diameter of 10- millionth of a millimetre. Using the ultramicroscope Zsigmondy was able to count the number of particles in a given volume and indirectly estimate their sizes. He showed that colour
changes in sols reflect changes in particle size caused by coagulation when salts are added, and that the addition of agents such as gelatin stabilizes the colloid by inhibiting coagulation. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1925.
Research Richard Zsigmondy

THOMAS GRAHAM

Thomas Graham was a Scottish chemist. He was born in 1805 at Glasgow and died in 1869. Educated at Glasgow and Edinburgh, in 1827 he commenced teaching private mathematical classes in Glasgow, and in 1829 succeeded to the lectureship of chemistry in the Mechanics' Institution. 1830 he was appointed professor of chemistry in the Andersonian University. In 1831 he established the law that gases tend to diffuse inversely as the square root of their specific gravities. He afterwards made a series of investigations into the constitution of ar-seniates, phosphates, and phosphoretted hydrogen, and into the function of water in different salts.

In 1837 he was appointed professor of chemistry at University College, London, , and soon after settling in the metropolis he was appointed assayer to the mint, holding the post at University College until 1855 when he became master of the Mint. Thomas Graham was the first president of the Chemical Society, founded in 1841.

In 1846 he assisted in founding the Cavendish Society, over which be presided. He read the Bakerian lecture in 1849 and in 1854, the subject of both being the diffusion of liquids, which he further treated before the Eoyal Society in 1861. He distinguished the crystalloids and colloids in liquid solutions, and gave to their separation the name of dialysis, In a subsequent paper, Philosophical Transactions, 1866, he applied these discoveries to gases, under the name of atmolysis. The passage of gases through heated metal plates and the occlusion of gases were also ably investigated by him.
Research Thomas Graham

ASTRINGENT

An astringent is a substance which contracts tissues, chiefly by coagulating albumin. When applied in the form of lotions or ointments, they reduce the congestion of mucous membranes and thus assist in the healing of wounds and ulcers. The chief natural astringents are the mineral acids, alum, lime-water, chalk, salts of copper, zinc, iron, lead, silver; and among vegetables catechu, kino, oak-bark, and galls.
Research Astringent

CEMENTUM

The cementum (substantia ossea) is the third hard tissue of the tooth. Periodically secreted by specialized cells (cementoblasts) in the periodontal membrane, the cementum is a coarse material which binds and anchors the tooth to the periodontal ligament. The cementum is composed of about 50% organic tissue, with the rest being water and inorganic (mostly calcium) salts. If the periodontal membrane is damaged, the cementum may be reabsorbed back into the membrane.
Research Cementum

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