Madder s. 324-327 (View of the Russian Empire. Improving Industry. Dye-houses.)

View of the Russian Empire, During the Reign of Catharine the Second, and to the Close of the Eighteenth Century.
By William Tooke, F. R. S.
Member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and the Free Economical Society at St. Petersburg. In three volumes. Vol. III.
The Third Edition.
Dublin: Printed by P. Wogan, No. 23, Old-Bridge.
1801

¹ Rhus cotinus. Nyk. Cotinus coggygria, peruukkipensasThe genuine dye that is given to cotton at Astrakhan with madder, a business mostly carried on by the Armenians, deserves to be noticed here. They get the madder from Ghilan and about the Terek, where it grows wild. It is put in a brick oven sunk in the ground, heated very hot, and covered with earth, where it must lie sweating till the oven is cold, when the roots are taken out the second or third day and spread asunder in order to dry. They are then dried in the sun and ground to a fine dust in a horse-mill, as well as the leaves, necessary to this dye, of the sumack-tree¹. Besides these two materials this red dye requires galls, alum, domestic soda, which is burnt in the steppes of Kitzliar and Astrakhan, and fish-grease. This latter is prepared from the beluga, the sturgeon, and the sudak. The cotton yarn is first clean-rinsed in a running stream, and hung out on a fine day to dry on poles. If it be not dry by the evening, it is taken in to avoid the nitrous dew, and the following morning it is hung out again. The yarn is then laid in a tub, and fish-grease poured on it till it is quite covered with it. Here it must lie the whole night; but in the morning it is hung across poles for the entire day, and this is repeated for a week, that the cotton may lie seven nights in the grease, and seven days imbibe the grease in the air, and can be properly ventilated. The yarn is now brought again to the river, cleaned thoroughly, and left to get completely dry on clean poles.

After this preparation they make use of the following infusion: they first boil the pulverized leaves of the sumack-tree in copper-kettles, and when these have sufficiently difcharged their colour, pounded galls are added, with which the composition must be boiled again, and thus acquires a turbid dirty colour. When sufficiently boiled the fire is taken from under the kettle, and, while the concoction is still hot, alum is thrown in, which immediately dissolves. Galls and alum are in proportion of five pound to every pood of cotton. The composition must be sufficiently yellow, strong, and astringent.

When the alum is once dissolved no time is to be lost. For imbuing the yarn with it hollowed blocks of wood or mortars stand ready; in each of which a good ladle-full of the concoction is poured, sufficient for a piece of yarn to imbibe, without leaving any to remain.

As the workman pours the concoction into the mortar, he at the same time puts in a piece of the yarn, presses it down with his hand till it is uniformly wet and has soaked up all the concoction; having squeezed it out, he lays it aside, and proceeds in like manner with another piece till all the cotton yarn has the liquor. It receives from it only a pale yellow colour, but which is not transient; and, having this, it is hung out to dry in the sun on poles, then clean-rinsed in the river and dried again. By this yellow dye, that of the madder is more bright and lively; but the galls damp the superfluous yellow, and prepare with the alum the yarn for dyeing.

Some manufacturers, however, omit entirely the sumack leaves, and make the concoction only of galls and alum, in such manner that the galls first boil in due proportion with the necessary quantity of water, and the alum dissolves in a separate vessel with boiling water, when both waters are poured together into a tub, and the cotton laid in it for an hour or an hour and a half, whereupon it is gently dried, washed, and dried again. By which treatment the yarn gets a dirty reddish colour.

Now the madder-dye must be prepared. Large troughs are placed ready, in which the madder, crushed to a fine red-brown dust, is scattered, and in each trough a large bowl of sheep's blood, which the dyer may have in plenty, is poured. With this the madder is well worked together by the hands, and must thus stand for a few hours, that it may be thoroughly wet, as then this mixture acquires a dark - red appearance, and the madder yields more red by boiling.

After this preparation, water is made hot in a large kettle fet in masonry, and as soon as it is warm, the prepared madder is infused in such proportion, that for each pound of cotton one pound of madder enters the kettle. With this the dye must be made to boil strongly; and when it is fine enough, which may be tried upon the cotton-threads, the fire is removed from beneath, and all the prepared cotton is brought to the kettle. The dyer seats himself on the brick-work brink of the kettle, dips the cotton-yarn by pieces in the dye, waving it about to and fro, pressing it somewhat with the hands, and lays it piece after piece in troughs standing by.

When the cotton has got the first dye, it is hung out to dry: but, as the red is still too dingy, the yarn now once dyed and dried, is put in the dying-kettle and must boil in it over a strong fire for three hours, by which it then quires that beautiful deep red so particularly admired in the turkish yarn. It does not however always turn out equally fine.

² Pallas, in Pet. journ. tom. ii. p. 18.The yarn is now taken with sticks out of the dye, the adhering madder is shaken off, the threads are disentangled, reduced to order, and hung piece by piece to dry. When thoroughly dried it is all washed clean in the river and again dried. The whole operation terminates by dissolving the above-mentioned soda, kolakar, with boiling water in tubs prepared for that purpose, of which to a pood of cotton twenty pound, and therefore half the weight, is usually reckoned. Then they have pans of an enormous size, which in Persia are made of a very good strong clay, above one and a half arshines in height, in the belly about five spans over, and terminating at top with a neck of only about a span and a half: these are kept over a furnace inclosed in brick, or done round with mud, so that only the neck is to be seen. They are then filled with the coloured cotton yarn, and the lye of the dissolved soda, which is blackish and very acrid, is poured in till the jar is filled, in the mouth of which clean rags are stuffed, that the uppermost pieces of the yarn may not miss. This done, the fire is kindled below, and kept under the jar for 24 hours, on which the steam rising from the jars is seen to collect in the rags in red drops. By this boiling the dye is heightened, soaked in, the superfluities removed, and all the grease adhering to the yarn lixiviated from it; and nothing farther is necessary to the perfection of the yarn, than once more to rinse it clean in the river, and to dry it well ².