Thursday 21 December 2006

Courtaulds Viscose Rayon Plant, Coventry - 1939-45

Rayon made by the viscose process was the first commercially successful man-made fibre and in staple form it was the first fibre to be used in disposables by the emerging nonwovens industry, cotton being too hydrophobic before it was bleached and too hard to process afterwards. The Courtaulds plant in Coventry UK was the first in the world to produce viscose filament yarn, starting production in 1905. The photos below record the devastation of the plant in the air raid of April 1941.



Courtaulds Coventry in 1939

Courtaulds Coventry after the April 1941 air raid


Rebuilding after the war

For more photos of this original route from natural cellulose to man-made fibre, click on the link for the 1948 photographs from "The Story of Rayon" . This covers the batch process used to make textile filament yarn and the newly developed tyre yarn at that time.

The link will take you to the Technical Papers section of old Nonwoven.co.uk. (Please use the browser back button to return here.)

Click Here for a view of the Coventry Rayon site today, courtesy of Google Earth

Click Here to read about the development of another fibre in the buildings now visible in the link above - soon to be historic for its contribution to sustainable textiles in the 21st Century.  We're talking Tencel.

4 comments:

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