On the eve of the Second World War, much of the scholarly and technical research in the field of shellac moved from London to Brooklyn, NY. There it flourished under the watchful eye of the brilliant William Howlett Gardner, perhaps the greatest coatings chemist in history, at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, one of the nation’s great academic centers for materials science. The output of this enterprise was nothing short of amazing as several faculty and numerous undergraduate and graduate students conducted what is in my opinion the finest research ever executed on the subject.
One of my lifelong goals is compile a complete archive of their work, but for now I must content myself with merely having the most complete record of their work in existence. (Remind me to tell you the story of how their archive was simply discarded years ago because they felt there would not be any more interest in the subject of shellac, and the heroic archivist who saved some of it.)
You might think an “Annual Report” would be sleep inducing. Au contraire! Each of the BPI/SRB Annual Reports is filled with impressive accounts of research I wish we knew better, glimpses into the possibilities for my own research, and nuggets of solid gold scattered throughout.
Here’s the Annual Report for 1937-1938. Enjoy!
Back in the day the London Shellac Research Bureau produced a lot of literature, sometimes in concert with shellac researchers in or from India. Such is the case here with their Technical Paper No. 16 from 1938, “Fractionation of Lac” by R. Bhattacharya and G.D. Leach. I presume them to be researchers or scholars but do not know exactly.
It is worth noting, as the authors do, that as a biological material shellac is not homogenous, and they describe methods of separating out various fractions of the lac, and some very useful implications about the performance of coatings formulated with the differing fractions.
Enjoy.
This week’s addition to the Shellac Archive is a portion of an 1874 Calcutta-published small book by J.E. O’Connor, about whom I know nothing. The full title of the little book, and I’ll be you can deduce the portion I omitted here, is “Note on Lac and Vanilla.” I have no idea why the two were lumped together in this delightful natural history and commerce account of the bug and resin. I note with interest that in the decade of the 1864-1873 India was exporting 5 ½ million pounds of shellac per year. Clearly I have some catching up to do.
Enjoy.
PS I had never encountered the word “ebullition” before and had to look it up.
My name is Don, and I’m a shellacaholic. The topic of shellac and its uses and performance has been a near-constant focus of mine for the past four decades. One result of this interest has been my compilation of hundreds of documents with thousands of pages dealing with those very same topics, ranging from manufacturer’s brochures to articles in the popular press to arcane monographs so esoteric that their audience has been nearly invisible over the decades.
One great advantage (?) to electronic self-publishing like blogging is that there is no governor on the enterprise beyond one’s own energies. That capacity allows me or anyone else to go anywhere their ideas take them. Which of course brings me to the topic of this blog – my shellac literature archive. In recent years I have been scanning and digitizing these files, and I am not close to being finished yet!
With Jason’s help I have established a special section within the Writings section to house this archive. Over the coming few dozen months I will be uploading my shellac archive, one document per week or so. Some weeks it will be a stand-alone document, some weeks it will be a consecutive series of chapters from shellac treatises. This will be the shellac world’s analog to the old-time serialized novels. All tolled I think I have about 200 things to post (if stacked up it would be about a four-foot-tall pile), but the final number will depend on how I chop them up.
The first entry is, appropriately in this centennial year, the 1913 trade brochure, “The Story of Shellac.”
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