Boas, Isaac (1878-1955), was a scientist who helped pioneer the papermaking industry in Australia. He used native trees for pulp. His work was particularly important for the cheap production of newsprint for newspapers.
Isaac Herbert Boas was born in Adelaide, South Australia. His father, a Jewish rabbi, had immigrated to Australia from the Netherlands. Boas studied chemistry at the University of Adelaide. He held various teaching positions before becoming a lecturer at the Perth Technical School, in Perth, Western Australia. In 1916, he began looking into the possibilities of turning the wood of young karri trees into pulp. The karri is a species of eucalyptus that yields a durable wood. It had previously been considered unsuitable for use in papermaking. Boas showed that it could be used for making paper with the right techniques. See Eucalyptus .
In Perth in 1919, Boas and a fellow researcher, L. R. Benjamin, set up Australia’s first laboratory devoted to research on forest products. Based on the work of the Perth laboratory and on tests at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), commercially manufactured newsprint was produced from various types of eucalyptus in Tasmania beginning in 1929. Boas then became head of the forest products division of the CSIR from 1929 to 1944. In 1949, the CSIR became the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).
Boas’s scientific work meant that Australian paper manufacturers could rely on a native pulp resource rather than importing timber. This allowed for the cheaper production of newsprint and helped the development of newspapers as a medium of mass communication in Australia. Boas died on Oct. 16, 1955.
