Laboratory decolorizing carbon

Schleicher and Schuell No. 410 filter paper is particularly suited to most organic laboratory applications. It is not sufficiently retentive to hold decolorizing carbon, and for this purpose, Whatman No. 1 paper is very satisfactory. 

During the nineteenth century a number of attempts were made to prepare decolorizing carbons from other source materials. In 1822, Bussy,6 heating blood with potash, produced a carbon that had from twenty to fifty times the decolorizing power of bone char. Blood char so prepared was extensively used in laboratory studies until the introduction of modem activated carbons. Bussy also enhanced the adsorptive power of other chars by various methods, some of which were rediscovered years later by others. 

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