Business: Lanital

In Renaissance Florence the Antinori family were the leaders of the silk weavers guild. A present day Antinori is chic Princess Caetani (née Cora Antinori), who is also a granddaughter of Egisto P. Fabbri, partner of the first J. P. Morgan. It was not inappropriate, therefore, last week when Princess Caetani appeared at Manhattan’s St. Regis Hotel with Mrs. Harrison (“World’s Best Dressed Woman”) Williams in tow, to display unique yarns and fabrics developed in Italy by the great firm of Snia Viscosa and soon to be offered in the U. S.

Snia Viscosa (Societa Nazionale Industria Applicazioni Viscosa) is one of the world’s great makers of synthetic fibres, employs 14,000 workers in 16 factories scattered over Italy. Long a rayon producer, Snia Viscosa also markets Snia-fiocco, fibre made from wood pulp (TIME, Nov. 5, 1934). Snia Viscosa’s newest concoction is fibre made from milk, which it calls lanital and claims is equal in appearance and quality to wool. Princess Caetani calls herself lanital’s “social representative” in the U. S. A familiar milk product is casein, of which in the U. S, alone 46,140,000 pounds were produced last year, mostly for the paper industry. Some 20 years ago a German chemist named Todtenhaupt made a weak wool-like cloth from casein. In 1935 an Italian, Commendatore Antonio Ferretti, improved the process, which was promptly commandeered by Mussolini as one way of combatting sanctions. Snia Viscosa is now turning out almost 10,000,000 pounds of lanital a year. Having practically the same chemical composition as wool, it is made by mixing acid with skim milk. This extracts the casein, which looks like pot cheese. Evaporated to crystals, it is pulverized and dissolved into a molasses consistency, then forced through spinnerets like macaroni, passed through a hardening chemical bath, cut into fibres of any desired length. From 100 pounds of skim milk come 3.7 pounds of casein which converts to the same weight of lanital.* Readily dyed, it can be distinguished from wool only by experts, is mothproof.

Having sold lanital patents to German, English, French and Belgian concerns, Snia Viscosa, which always has been internationally minded, is now intent on moving into the U. S., plans to begin by sending its fibres to the U. S., eventually will build U. S. factories. U. S. representatives are the big New York firm of Meyer & Marks Yarn Co. Inc., whose president, Jack W. Block, likes to assert that lanital will do to the wool business what rayon had done to the silk. U. S. woolmen, absorbed with more immediate troubles (see p. 75) last week produced no retort to this other than the findings year and half ago published in the bulletin of the National Association of Wool Manufacturers by Chief Chemist Von Bergen of the Forstmann Woolen Co.—that casein-wool “resembles a highly damaged wool and its main disadvantages are a very low tensile strength and its reaction to acid.”

* Skim milk residue is suitable for cattle fodder.