Читать книгу Sticking Together - Steven Abbott - Страница 12

Civilizations can get by without large-scale adhesive use. We know this because although the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Chinese had large-scale adhesive industries for, say, furniture making, medieval Europe coped OK for centuries without them, having lost many of the technologies and not having an urgent need to re-create them. You can make timber structures with holes and pegs, you can melt, hammer and weld metal components together, you can sew, lace, hook and tie clothing together. For decorations you can probably make some small amounts of sticky stuff that do the job, without the need for a significant industry.

It wasn't until the 16th century that European princes wanted fancy cabinet making and laminated woodwork, and musicians wanted large, delicate instruments. The demand from the elite ensured that the art and science of adhesives was redeveloped. The first large glue factory (with horses as a key raw material) was founded in Holland in the late 17th century. In the 18th and 19th centuries patents for fish and casein glues were published.

A kind researcher at the British library tracked down for me the earliest known British patent for a glue. The inventor, Peter Zomer, was from the Netherlands, and the patent is really about getting both the “train oil” (whale oil; the drops are seen as being like tears, which are traane in Dutch) and a fish glue from the Greenland whaling industry:

British Patent #691. Whereas His most Sacred Majesty George the Second … bearing the date at Westminster, the Twenty-third of May [1754] I Peter Zomer by petition humbly represent to His Majesty that I had found out and invented “A Method of Extracting and Making from the Tails and Finns of Whales, and from such Sediment Trash and Undissolved Pieces of the Fish as were usually thrown away as useless and of little or no Value by the Makers of Train Oil, after the Boiling of the Blubber of such Fish, a Sort of Black Train Oil, and afterwards of Making from the Remains of such Tails, Finns, Sediments, & Undissolved Pieces a Kind of Glue called Fish Glue.”

Not long after, the relatively sophisticated nature of the French adhesives industry was described by M. Duhamel du Monceau in The Art of Making Various Kinds of Glues, 1771. This fascinating book was translated into English in 1905 by the J. Paul Getty Museum and is easily found on the internet. Of special interest is that a particularly high-class fish glue (as opposed to the rather poor stuff made by Zomer) was available only from Russia and M. du Monceau took the trouble to find out what it was. In modern language, it was the swim bladders – rather, pure collagen – of beluga sturgeon.

There is also an example of how a good source of glue (collagen) became a poor one through market forces. Those who fancy any form of “good old days” using “natural” adhesives produced by happy artisans may not enjoy this little snippet from the book:

“The feet of oxen, formerly esteemed, are now looked on as one of the bad materials that can be employed, & especially since the Butchers have begun to carefully remove a tendonous part of them, called the small nerve, or the shin nerve, that they sell by weight, & rather dearly for the production of a kind of oakum which is useful for caulking the panels of carriages, or to make suspension straps for carriages. When the feet are thus stripped of this tendonous part, they produce only a mucilaginous substance which is not suitable for making good glue; & if anyone makes use of them, it is because of their low price.”

As M. du Monceau's book indicates, by the early 19th century, we enter the world of industrial adhesives that take up the rest of the book.