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. Wheatflour 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, Chinaclay, 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.
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 champagnegooseberry 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, cinchonabark, 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
China Wax is a sort of wax deposited by insects on a deciduous tree with light-green ovate, serrated leaves, cultivated in the province of Sichuen in South-western China. The insects, a species of Coccus, are bred in galls which are formed on a different tree, an evergreen (a species of Ligustrum or privet), and these galls are transported in great quantities to the districts where the wax trees are grown, to the branches of which they are suspended. Having emerged from the galls the insects spread themselves over the branches, which gradually become coated with a white waxy substance, reaching in 90 or 100 days the thickness of a quarter of an inch. The branches are then lopped off and the wax removed. It is white in colour and is chiefly made into candles; it melts at 160 degrees whereas tallow melts at about 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Research China Wax
The Tallow Chandlers' Company was a London city livery company founded in 1426. It was granted arms in 1456 and obtained its first charter in 1462. The company's hall in Dowgate Hill was destroyed in the Great Fire, and was rebuilt in 1672 and restored in 1871. The Tallow Chandlers' Company had special privileges in the city and suburbs with regard to tallow, oils &c. Research Tallow Chandlers' Company
The candleberry, candleberey myrtle, waxmyrtle, etc (Myriad cerifera), is a shrub of the natural order Myricaceae, growing from four to eighteen feet high, and common in North America, where candles were made from its drupes or berries, which are about the size of peppercorns, and covered with a greenish-white wax popularly known as Blayberry tallow. The wax was collected by boiling the drupes in water and skimming off the surface. A bushel of berries yields from 4 to 5 lbs. of wax. Another plant belonging to the same genus is the sweet-gale (MyricaGale), which grows abundantly in bogs and marshes in Scotland. It is a small shrub, with leaves somewhat like the myrtle or willow, of a fragrant odour and bittertaste, and yielding an essential oil by distillation. Research Candleberry
The tallow tree (Pentadesma butyracea) is a tree native of tropical Africa from whence it was introduced into Britain in 1822. It is a member of the family Guttiferae and bears large brilliant red flowers, followed by edible, buttery berries. It is so called on account of a kind of tallow-like oil obtained from the seeds.
The tallow tree (Excaecaria sebifera) is a tree of the natural order Euphorbiaceae native of China It has alternate, oval leaves with a pair of prominent glands at the top of the leaf stalk, and the rudimentary greenish-flowers are massed in catkin-like spikes. The largish capsules contain three seeds coated with a substance like tallow which was used by the Chinese for making candles. The seeds yield an oil when pressed, the leaves a black dye, and the timber is hard and used for engraving printing blocks. Research Tallow Tree
Benjamin Franklin was an American statesman and scientist. He was born in 1706 at Boston and died in 1790. The son of a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler, he was apprenticed to his elder brother, a printer, and developed an eager fondness for books and writing.
At seventeen he ran away to Philadelphia, where, in 1729, he established a newspaper. His public spirit, his talents as a writer and the fame of his scientific discoveries advanced him in prominence. In 1753 he was appointed deputy postmaster-general of the British colonies. In 1754, being a member of the Albany Convention, he proposed an important plan for colonial union.. From 1757 to 1763, and again from 1764 to the American War of Independence, he was agent of Pennsylvania in England; part of the time, also, for Massachusetts, New Jersey and Georgia.
In 1773, acting as agent for the political leaders in Massachusetts, he sent over to them the correspondence of Hutchinson, Oliver and other Massachusetts loyalists with a confidant of the British Ministry. The publication of the letters aroused great excitement in the colonies, and brought down upon Benjamin Franklin violent abuse on the part of the ministerialists, and dismissal from his office of postmaster-general.
In 1775 seeing that reconciliation was impossible, he returned to Pennsylvania, and was at once chosen a delegate to the Continental Congress. In 1776 he was one of the committee of five who drew up the Declaration of Independence,, and in the autumn was sent to join Arthur Lee and Silas Deane in the mission to France. In Paris he was received with great enthusiasm. He succeeded in obtaining from the French Government not only the treaty of 1778, but also large sums of money supplied in secret before that government declared war on England and openly afterward. Benjamin Franklin had a leading part in the beginnings of negotiation with Great Britain for peace and independence. In respect to the actual manner in which the treaty was concluded, he was overruled by John Adams and Jay, who deemed it best, contrary to the instructions of Congress, to negotiate apart from France and make separate terms. Benjamin Franklin played an important part in the arrangements of the treaty, especially those respecting the loyalists. After the Treaty of Versailles had thus been signed on September the 3rd, 1783, Benjamin Franklin negotiated a favourable treaty with Prussia.
In 1785 Benjamin Franklin returned to America, and was chosen president of Pennsylvania, and again in 1786 and 1787. He was an influential member of the Convention of 1787, and died at Philadelphia a few years later. Beside his eminence as a statesman and as a philosopher and scientific discoverer, Benjamin Franklin was noted as a shrewd and practical philanthropist, and was one of the best of English writers. He was renowned for his identification of lightning with electricity, but also wrote widely criticising corruption, philosophising and even describing Harvard College as a place where money was valued above intelligence. Research Benjamin Franklin
John Stow was an English historian. He was born in 1525 at London and died in 1605 of stone colic. The son of Thomas Stow, a tallowchandler, John Stow became a tailor at Aldgate but from about 1560 devoted himself to antiquarian research and book collecting. In 1569 he was reported to the authorities for posessing 38 dangerous works of superstition. His chief works include notable summaries of old English chronicles and a valuable survey he conducted of London between 1598 and 1603. Research John Stow
Alum is a crystalline, astringent substance with a sweetish taste. It is a double sulphate of potassium and aluminium with water of crystallization. It crystallizes in colourless regular octahedra. Its solution reddens vegetable blues. When heated, its water of crystallization is driven off, and it becomes light and spongy with slightly corrosive properties, and is used as a caustic under the name of burnt alum.
Alum is prepared in Great Britain at Whitby from alum-slate, where it forms the cliffs for miles, and at Hurlet and Campsie, near Glasgow, from bituminous alum shale and slate-clay, obtained from old coal-pits. It is also prepared near Rome from alum stone. Common alum is strictly potash alum; other two varieties are soda alum and ammonia alum, both similar in properties. Iron alum (pale mauve) and chrome alum (deep purple) are compounds containing iron and chromium in place of aluminium.
Alum is employed to hardentallow, to remove grease from printers' cushions and blocks in calico manufactories; in dyeing as a mordant. It is also largely used in the composition of crayons, in tannery, and in medicine (as an astringent and styptic). Wood and paper are dipped in a solution of alum to render them less combustible. Research Alum
A candle is a solid cylindrical rod of some fatty substance, with a small bundle of loosely-twisted threads placed longitudinally in its centre, used for a portable light.
The chief material traditionally used for making candles was tallow, either in a pure state or in mixture with other fatty substances, as palm-oil, spermaceti, wax, etc. Since about 1900 paraffin (wax) candles have been made in considerable quantities also.
Ordinary tallow candles are either dipped or moulded. The former, generally composed of the coarser tallow, are made by attaching a number of separate wicks to a frame and dipping the whole into a cistern of melted tallow as often as may be necessary to give the candle the required thickness.
Moulded candles, as their name implies, are formed in moulds. These, made generally of pewter, are hollow cylinders of the length of the candle, and open at both ends, but provided at the upper end with a conical cap, in which there is a hole for the wick. A number of these moulds are inserted in a wooden frame or trough with their heads downwards; the wick is then drawn in through the top hole by means of a wire and kept stretched while the moulds are filled by running melted tallow from a boiler into the trough. Considerable improvements were made in the manufacture of candles during the 19th century. One of the most important of these consisted in not employing the whole of the fatty or oily substances, but in decomposing them, and then using only the stearin of the former and the palmitine of the latter class of substances.
Early wax candles were formed by wicks, properly cut and twisted, being suspended by a ring over a basin of liquid wax, which was poured on the tops of the wicks until a sufficient thickness was obtained, when after, the candles, still hot, were placed on a smooth walnut table, kept constantly wet, and rolled upon it by means of a flat piece of boxwood. Research Candle
The Probert Encyclopaedia was designed, edited and programed by
Matt and Leela Probert
Abbreviations
Research Adulteration
