VACUUM PANS OF THE AMERICAN SUGAR REFINERY COMPANY
In these air-tight vats the water is boiled off from the cane juice
under diminished atmospheric pressure until the sugar crystallizes out]
Sugar is not a synthetic product and the business of the chemist has
been merely to extract and purify it. But this is not so simple as it
seems and every sugar factory has had to have its chemist. He has
analyzed every mother beet for a hundred years. He has watched every
step of the process from the cane to the crystal lest the sucrose should
invert to the less sweet and non-crystallizable glucose. He has tested
with polarized light every shipment of sugar that has passed through the
custom house, much to the mystification of congressmen who have often
wondered at the money and argumentation expended in a tariff discussion
over the question of the precise angle of rotation of the plane of
vibration of infinitesimal waves in a hypothetical ether.
The reason for this painstaking is that there are dozens of different
sugars, so much alike that they are difficult to separate.
Pages:
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273