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The Invention of Paper
Written communication has been the center of civilization for
centuries. Most of our important records are on paper. Although writing
has been around for a long time, paper hasn't.
In fact, putting thoughts down in written form wasn't always easy or
practical. Early people discovered that they could make simple drawings
on the walls of caves, which was a great place for recording thoughts,
but wasn't portable.
For centuries, people tried to discover better surfaces on which to
record their thoughts. Almost everything imaginable was tried. Wood,
stone, ceramics, cloth, bark, metal, silk, bamboo, and tree leaves were
all used as a writing surface at one time or another.
The word "paper" is derived from the word "papyrus," which was a
plant found in Egypt along the lower Nile River. About 5,000 years ago,
Egyptians created "sheets" of papyrus by harvesting, peeling and slicing
the plant into strips. The strips were then layered, pounded together
and smoothed to make a flat, uniform sheet.
No major changes in writing materials were to come for about 3,000
years. The person credited with inventing paper is a Chinese man named
Ts'ai Lun. He took the inner bark of a mulberry tree and bamboo
fibers, mixed them with water, and pounded them with a wooden tool. He
then poured this mixture onto a flat piece of coarsely woven cloth and
let the water drain through, leaving only the fibers on the cloth. Once
dry, Ts'ai Lun discovered that he had created a quality writing surface
that was relatively easy to make and lightweight. This knowledge of
papermaking was used in China before word was passed along to Korea,
Samarkand, Baghdad, and Damascus.
By the 10th century, Arabians were substituting linen fibers for wood
and bamboo, creating a finer sheet of paper. Although paper was of
fairly high quality now, the only way to reproduce written work was by
hand, a painstaking process.
By the 12th century, papermaking reached Europe. In 1448, Johannes
Gutenberg, a German, was credited with inventing the printing press. (It
is believed that moveable type was actually invented hundreds of years
earlier in Asia.) Books and other important documents could now be
reproduced quickly. This method of printing in large quantities led to a
rapid increase in the demand for paper.
3000 BC
Of all the writing and drawing materials that people have employed down
the ages, paper is the most widely used around the world. Its name
derives from papyrus the material used by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks
and Romans. Papyrus, however, is only one of the predecessors of paper
that together are known by the generic term ‘tapa’ and are mostly made
from the inner bark of paper mulberry, fig and daphne.
Tapa has been found extensively in nearly all cultures along the
Equatorial belt and is made by what is possibly the oldest papermaking
technique – one still practised in some parts of the Himalayas and South
East Asia. Indeed, recent archaeological excavations in China have
revealed some of the oldest ‘tapa’ paper ever found which shows that
paper was being produced in China before western records began.
The tapa technique involves cooked bast, which is flattened with a
wooden hammer to form a thin, fibrous layer and then dissolved in a vat
with water to make a pulp. A screen consisting of a wooden frame with a
fabric base is then laid in a puddle or big basin and floats with the
fabric just under the surface of the water. The papermaker then pours
the quantity of pulp needed to make one sheet into this ‘floating mould’
and spreads it evenly, by hand, across the surface. The screen is then
carefully lifted out of the water, allowed to drain off and a sheet of
paper forms on the wire. Once the water has dripped off, the screen is
placed in the sun or near a fire to dry. When dry, the sheet easily
peels off and, apart from possible smoothing, requires no further
treatment. This technique has two basic drawbacks. Firstly, a separate
screen is needed for each new sheet, and is only available for use again
after the last sheet has dried. And secondly, an increase in production
can soon lead to a shortage of raw material, since fresh bast is not
always available everywhere in the required quantity.
The fibres normally used for textiles, like flax and hemp, also served
as substitutes for bast. In later times, the fabric was replaced by fine
bamboo sticks, which freed the papermaker of the need to let the paper
dry naturally in the mould, since the poured or ladled sheet could be
‘couched’ off.
AD 105
In AD 105, the Chinese court official, Ts'ai Lun, (if we are to believe
the chronicle recording the claim) invented papermaking from textile
waste using rags. This can be considered as the birth of paper as we
know it today.
Later, Chinese papermakers developed a number of specialities such as
sized, coated and dyed paper, and paper protected against ravages by
insects, but they had great problems satisfying the growing demand for
paper for governmental administration. They also used a new
fibre-yielding plant - bamboo - which they de-fibred by cooking in lye.
AD 610
Chinese papermaking techniques reached Korea at an early date and were
introduced to Japan in the year 610. In these two countries, paper is
still made by hand on a large scale in the old tradition, preferably
from the fresh bast fibres of the mulberry tree (kozo in Japanese).
Following the cooking process, the long, uncut fibres are merely
prepared by beating, which gives the paper its characteristic look and
excellent quality. The latter is due, among other things, to multiple,
rapid immersions of the mould, which results in a multi-layer fibre mat.
Very soon, knowledge of papermaking spread to Central Asia and Tibet and
then on to India. When the Arabs, in the course of their eastern
expansion, neared Samarkan they too became acquainted with the
production of paper and paper mills were subsequently set up in Baghdad,
Damascus and Cairo, and later in Morocco, Spain and Sicily. Owing to the
lack of fresh fibres, the raw material used by the Arabs was made almost
entirely from rags: however, their defective and poorly designed
processing equipment (such as breaker mills) produced a rather inferior
ground pulp. But, by using this method, with screens made of reeds, thin
sheets were made and then ‘coated’ with starch paste. This gave Arabian
paper its good writing properties and fine appearance.
The export of Arabian-made paper, along with the secrets of its
production, to Europe, especially to Italy, has been well documented.
From the 13th century onwards, papermakers at two early Italian centres,
Fabriano and Amalfi, tried to improve the Arabian technique. Their
efforts focused not on the raw material but on its preparation and the
actual papermaking process was improved. The Italian papermakers
developed:
- the use of water power
- the stamping mill (derived from the stampers and milling machines used in textile handicrafts)
- the mould made of wire mesh (as a result of progress in wire production), which triggered the introduction of couching on felt
- the paper press (screw press) with slides for feeding in the material
- drying the sheets on ropes
- dip sizing
14th CENTURY
In the course of the rapid expansion of trade in the late Middle Ages,
more and more merchants dealt in the commodity called ‘paper’ that was
growing in importance for public and intellectual life. The Nuremberg
councilor Ulmann Stromer (Stromeir) mulled over the advantages of making
his own paper and, with the help of skilled workers from Italy,
transformed the ‘Gleismühle’ by the gates of his home town into a paper
mill. The dates noted in his diary, 24 June 1390 (start of work on the
waterwheel) and 7 and 11 August 1390 (oaths sworn by his Nuremberg
foremen), are the first assured records of papermaking on German soil.
The wording of Stromer's diary entries suggest that he regarded
papermaking as a largely unknown and secret art, that he had to prevail
against the clan of immigrant Italians, and that he had to overcome many
technical difficulties. Stromer’s mill - illustrated in the world
chronicle of Hartmann Schedel in 1493 - was initially designed with two
waterwheels, 18 stamping hammers (i.e. six holes) and 12 workers using
one or two vats.
16th CENTURY
The advantages of this mill-based papermaking technique, which spread
throughout Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries far outweighed the
disadvantage of considerable outlays of time and capital for building
and fitting out with new machinery and equipment. However, the change in
the production process, thanks to the division of labour, boosted output
and improved quality. And it could certainly generate a profit, as some
examples prove. On the other hand, there was a growing risk of an
imbalance between costs and earnings, a state of affairs noted in the
numerous reports of business failures among papermakers.
Later, many paper merchants took over the mills as owners, while the
master papermakers practised their trade as lessees. This trend was
stepped up by the special conditions prevailing in the book sector,
where a book printer or publisher had to fund the production costs
(paper, composition, printing) of a work before the sale of the print
run generated revenue. The result was that he was often indebted to the
paper suppliers.
Work at the vat normally involved four people: the vatman, who made the
sheet using a mould; the couch squirt, who worked in time with the
vatman and placed the sheet on felt; the layman, who drew off the still
moist sheets from the felt after pressing; and the apprentice, who had
to feed material to the vat and provide for vat heating. The press was
operated jointly by the team. Depending on format and basis weight, up
to nine reams (4,500 sheets) of paper could be made in the course of a
working day of around 13 hours.
17th CENTURY
Technical progress continued in the 17th century. Smoothing the
sheets by hand, using a creasing knife or ‘blood stone’, was
supplemented by the use of a smoothing hammer (similar to a forging
hammer). This led to a split in the craft between the
tradition-conscious ‘smoothers’ and the modern ‘stampers’ who refused to
recognise one another as fully-fledged papermakers. Towards the end of
the 17th century, a new and much more efficient beater, called a
‘hollander’, was invented. This supplemented, or even replaced the
stamping mill and further divided papermakers into two new camps.
The tremendous upsurge in papermaking during the Reformation in the 16th
century, coupled with the introduction of printing with movable type,
soon led to a serious shortage of raw materials and to regulations
governing the trade in rags. The systematic search for substitute
materials met with little immediate success. In the early 18th century
straw was certainly used as a raw material but failed to make headway on
quality grounds. Only the invention of groundwood pulp by Saxon Keller
(1843) and of chemical pulp (first patented in 1854 by Mellier Watt)
solved this problem.
18th CENTURY
During the 18th century there had been some concentration of craft
activities in large operations, the ‘manufactories’, which were
dependent on skilled papermakers organised into craft groups. The
efforts made to step up production as much as possible and to have many
of the jobs done by machine (partly to get round the constraining rules
of papermakers' craft ‘usages’) culminated in the design and
construction of paper making machines. The initial model was the vat
that was used by J.N.L. Robert, who built the first flat-screen
papermaking machine in 1798. This was further developed in England,
mostly by Donking and the Fourdrinier brothers.
Shortly afterwards other types appeared, like the Dickinson’s cylinder
machine, and machines which filled wire moulds transported on an endless
chain and couched the sheets on an continuous felt. Flat screen and
cylinder machines, which were first seen in the 19th century, were
continually improved and extended to include a dryer section. This soon
led to a considerable widening of the paper web and to an increase in
production speeds.
It also heralded industrialisation. In this new era, the small operators
who were unable or unwilling to afford machines sought to survive with
piece-work or by producing special grades, but they were sooner or later
compelled to discontinue their activities. Others had to adapt their
existing buildings or set up new mills elsewhere.
19th & 20th CENTURY
The history of the paper industry in the 19th and 20th centuries can be
broken down into five partly overlapping periods, each marked by
definite trends.
In the first stage (from about 1800 to 1860), all work sequences
previously performed by hand were mechanised. This included the rag
preparation, the use of fillers, pulp beating, the paper machine with
its various parts, and the machines required for finishing the paper
(the headbox, wire section, press section, dryer section, units for
reeling, smoothing and packaging).
During the second stage (about 1840 to 1880), efforts were made to
obtain rag substitutes on an industrial scale (groundwood pulp and
chemical pulp) and appropriate industrial plants (groundwood and
chemical pulp mills) were developed.
The third stage (1860 to 1950) was marked by the enlargement of the web
width, an increase in working speeds, the introduction of electric drive
and further improvements to various machine parts. Machines designed
specifically for the production of particular paper and board grades
(for example the Yankee cylinder and multi-cylinder machines) were also
developed. The web working width grew from 85 cm (1830) to 770 cm
(1930), while production speeds rose from 5 m/min. (1820) to over 500
m/min. (1930).
The fourth stage (1950 to 1980), which was still dependent on the old
methods as far as the mechanics were concerned, brought unprecedented
changes in papermaking. Alongside further increases in web width and
working speeds, there was the use of new materials (thermo-mechanical
pulp, deinked recovered paper, new fillers, processed chemicals and
dyes), new sheet forming options (e.g. by twin-wire formers), neutral
sizing, greater stress on ecology (closed loops) and, most of all,
automation. The operational impact of these changes was: specialisation
in certain paper types; development of new paper grades (LWC -
lightweight coated paper); corporate mergers; company groups with their
own raw material supply and trading organisations; closure of
unprofitable operations.
1980 onwards
The fifth stage leads into the future. The evolution of new
sheet-forming principles (with fluid boundaries between paper and
non-woven fabrics) and chemical pulp processes have been the main
process improvements. However, the situation on the global market
(increased demand, above all in the Third World, trends in chemical pulp
prices, problems of location), are again raising capital intensity and
encouraging the formation of big company groups with international
operations. At the same time there are definite opportunities for
smaller, local firms satisfying specific needs.
2000 & BEYOND
The new Millennium will be dominated by the tremendous progress that has
been made in computer science, thus triggering a complete change in our
commercial and private communication and information behaviour.
Does this mean that the paper era will come to an end? The answer is
most definitely "No".
Clearly there will be a huge amount of data being generated
electronically, but the issue is how to preserve it. The difficulties of
data storage over a long period of time are well known (for example, the
durability of disks; frequent changes of hard and software, electronic
breakdowns etc.). Once again, paper offers the most convenient and
durable storage option. The advance in technology will affect only the
printing of items like short-lived handbooks and encyclopedias.
Reading a book will remain a great pleasure into the future and paper,
as a ubiquitous material with its many uses, will continue to play an
influential role. Many artists will continue to express themselves by
using this most versatile material.
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