Enjoy Guy Fawkes Night Safely!!
Enjoy Guy Fawkes Night Safely!!
We were discussing Guy Fawkes Night in our office this morning and remarking that it must be the only proper British celebration day we have. Other celebrations are religious (Christmas, Easter etc), imported (Halloween) or confined to one of the countries of the UK or to particular groups of people (mothers). America has Independence Day, France has Bastille Day, Portugal has Portugal Day (not very original, that) and so on. But we have the peculiarly British Guy Fawkes night - a celebration of a day when a terrorist failed to blow up Paliament. So let's make the most of it - even if most of the fireworks now come from China!
And the Link with Adhesives?
OK, I admit, this is a bit tenuous. When I first started in the adhesives business, far too long ago to admit, I was formulating hot melt and solution adhesives based on rubber and acrylic polymers, tackified with various resins. The main supplier of tackifying resins at the time was a company called Hercules based in Erith, Kent. They were part of the US company Hercules Inc, the biggest supplier of Wood Rosin based resins in the world. Wood Rosin was extracted from the stumps of pine trees that remained after felling of the trees for timber.
The tins they provided samples in were labelled "Hercules Powder Company" which was intriguing, as the resins came in the form of large crystals or beads. But Hercules' original business was gunpowder, and at one time they produced black powder here in the UK. The company was formed in 1882 as a spin-off from DuPont, the largest explosives manufacturer in the US, as a result of anti-trust regulation. They remained an explosives manufacturer in competition with DuPont, but later on Hercules looked to diversify, and bought a company that had developed techniques to extract rosin from the millions of pine tree stumps that were left after extensive felling in the US. Rosins were used in adhesives, papermaking and - the largest application - chewing gum. Not as exciting as explosives, but very important in the development of modern adhesives.