Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1884 — A Wonderful Substance. [ARTICLE]

A Wonderful Substance.

Among the moat interesting developments which have followed in the wake of the discovery of petroleum, is the immense trade which has sprung up in ozokerite, or ozocerite, as Webster has it. No fairer substance ever sprang from most unpromising parentage than the snowy, pure, tasteless, opalescent wax which is evolved from the loudsmelling, pitchy dregs of the petroleum still. The Mining Review thus sums up the many uses to which this remarkable substance is applied. This comely, impressionable article, with all its smooth, soft, snowy beauty, defies agents which can destroy the precious metals and eat up the hardest steel as water dissolves sugar. Sulphuric and other potent acids have no more effect on ozokerite than spring water. It is alike impervious to acid and to moisture. Its advent seems to have been a special dispensation in this age of electricity. Every overhead electric-light cable or underground conduit, or slender wire, cunningly wrapped with cotton thread —ail these owe their fitness for conducting the subtile fluid to the presence of this wax. And in still more familiar forms let ns outline the utility of ttiis substance. Every gashing school-girl who sinks her white teeth into chewing gum chews this paraffine wax. Every caramel she eats contains this wax, and is wrajiped in paper saturated with the same substance. The gloss seen upon hundreds of varieties of confectionery is due to the presence of this ingredient of petroleum, used to give the articles a certain consistency, as the laundress uses starch. So that a product taken from the dirtiest, worstsmelling oi tar finds its way to the millionaire’s mansion, an honored servitor. It aids to make possible the electric radience that floods his rooms; or,,in the form of wax candles, sheds a softer luster over the scene. It polishes the floor for the feet of his gnests, and it melts in their mouths in the costliest candies. For the insulation of electric wire, paraffine wax has no successful rival, and the growth of the demand for this purpose keeps pace with the rtiarvelous growth of the eleotric lighting system. A single Chicago firm bays paraffine wax by the car load. Its prico is but half that of beeswax, and yet the older wax yields readily to sulphuric or other acid, this being a test for the presence of beeswax in paraffine. The demand for paraffine for candles as yet heads the list. Then comes the needs of the paper consumers. In 1877 a single firm in New York handled 14,000 reams of waxed paper. Not only for wrapping candy s this paper valuable, but fine cutlery, hardware, etc., incased in waxed paper, .s safe from fust and dampness. Fish and bqjter and a score of other articles are also thus wrapped, and there seems literally no end to the ntes found for the paper saturated with this pure hy-

(liocarlon. In the chemist’s laboratory it is invaluable as a coating exposed to all mannerfof powerful dissolvents ; brewers find it an excellent tfiing for coating the interior of barrels; and the maker of wax flowers simulates nature in sheets of paraffine. And vet, until Drake drilled his oil well ia 1»59, the existence in this country of this “boon to civilization" was unsuspected and it lay in the depths of Pennsylva-i nia rocks, where thousands, possibly millions, of years ago it was stord by the hand of an all-wise Creator "