True tales from Dales
QUESTION Was the eccentric Siegfried Farnon in All Creatures Great And Small a real person?
The main characters in the James herriot books, films and TV series are based on real people.
Veterinary surgeon Alf Wight (James herriot) arrived at 23 Kirkgate, Thirsk, in July 1940 to assist Donald Sinclair (Siegfried Farnon) and his brother Brian (Tristan) then still at veterinary college.
he met his wife Joan Danbury (helen Alderson) when she was a secretary at Rymer’s corn mill in Thirsk. Their first date was at a village dance.
Being a Scot and a football fan, he took the pen-name James herriot after seeing the Birmingham City and Scotland goalkeeper play on television.
Wight wrote his early manuscripts under the pseudonym James Walsh, but had to change it as there was already a James Walsh on the veterinary register. Needless to say there was no one named James herriot on that list.
Incidentally, none of his eight books was entitled All Creatures Great And Small, but this was the title of the first omnibus including If Only They Could Talk, It Shouldn’t happen To A Vet, and three chapters of Let Sleeping Vets Lie.
Reading the books, watching the TV series and the films is a wonderful account of bygone times in the Yorkshire Dales. Clive Paish, Chigwell, Essex. When was bleach invented and how
QUESTION
is it produced? SWeDISh chemist Carl Scheele discovered chlorine in 1774; dissolved in water it produced an acidic solution with bleaching properties, although other bleaches had been known before this.
Chlorine reacts with water to produce a solution containing hydrochloric and hypochlorous acid. It was found that by adding sodium carbonate a solution would be produced from which the chlorine escaped less readily. It is this that has been used as bleach since the 1780s.
Today it is a product of the chlor-alkali process which passes DC current through salt solutions.
In the Castner-Kellner process, the cathode is mercury. Sodium is produced as a mercury amalgam, reacted with water to make sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) solution with chlorine produced at the anode. These products are used to make bleach.
Traces of mercury can get into the product, which can be a problem as water treatment companies will not allow mercury to get into the environment. Another process using inert electrodes has a membrane separating the anode and cathode compartments, this time producing hydrogen at the cathode and caustic soda plus chlorine at the anode, which can be mixed to create bleach.
A plant just for bleach can dispense with the membrane and allow the anode and cathode products to mix in situ.
Bleach is not totally stable and has a limited shelf life.
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