Books › The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904 › scan 60
Scan 60
The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1by the adhesion of parts of their membranous walls.
3Now a still more remarkable phenomenon has to be observed: If the alternate saturation and desiccation of the rope and of the wood be indefinitely repeated, it will be found that the intensity of the effects described grows gradually less and less—the longitudinal contraction of the rope, the lateral expansion of the wood, slowly but perceptibly, decreases; the rope becomes old, the wood becomes seasoned.
5How is this interesting phenomenon to be explained? Have the ultimate cells of the hemp and of the wood gradually lost the property of turgescence, of acquiring increased rigidity from the absorption of water? This seems inconceivable: fortunately we possess means of proving, beyond all doubt, that such is not the case. We take parts of the old rope and of the seasoned wood; by suitable chemical means we deprive the cells, of which these substances are mainly composed, of all extraneous matter until membranes of practically pure cellulose remain. These purified cells are suspended in sufficient water to constitute a conveniently diffuse magma; paper is made from it by two different methods, the one process being known as hand-making, the other as machine-making. In the first process, the workman dips a rectangular form (covered on the under side with fine wire gauze) beneath the surface; he raises it; as the water escapes through the gauze, by a dexterous shake he causes the fibres to cross each other or interlace at the moment when they are forming a sheet of paper. In the second process, the mixture of cellulose and water is caused to flow, in a wide, thin stream, on to a
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