Paper

Papermaking Fact and History

First Known Paper

Because earlier paper-like remnants have been found in China resently, the date of paper's invention has been moved a least two centuries earlier by some historians. At what point the first paper was made will probably never be known, but Ts'ai-Lun most likely deserves recognition at least as one who refined and/or popularized paper as a material for writing

The invention of paper is usually attributed to Ts'ai Lun, an official in the Chinese royal court, in A.D. 105. The invention of paper solved a pressing problem of the time. Back then, scrolls of silk were being used as books. But the development of calligraphy and the animal hair brush, and the resulting proliferation of literature, created the need for a writing material that was cheaper and more practical than pure silk. In fact, part of the Chinese ideogram character for "paper" means "silk." Ts'ai Lun's paper was made from rags, used fishing nets, hemp and China grass. The invention of paper was so important to China that the Emperor made Ts'ai Lun a noble.

The Arabs got papermaking 600 years later as one of the spoils of war. The Central Asian city of Samarkand was fighting the Chinese and captured a number of prisoners, two of whom were papermakers who were released in exchange for teaching the Arabs how to make paper. The Arabs wasted no time in improving papermaking techniques - they were probably the first to make paper from linen - and they spread the techniques throughout the Middle East and into Spain.

Europe, however, didn't start papermaking until several centuries after the Arabs began making paper. The Christians who took over the Arab paper mills after driving the Moors from Spain were far less skillful and made inferior papers. And although trading cities such as Venice imported paper from the East and some mills in Italy produced outstanding rag papers, the rest of Europe was slow to embrace the new technology.

Papermaking

Papermaking was introduced to the North American colonies by William Rittenhouse and William Bradford. they founded the first North American paper mill in 1690 at Wissahickon Creek, near Philadelphia. By successfully collecting, separating, cleaning, and recycling old cloth rags they make America's first writing papers more than 500 years after the Arabs had brought the craft from Europe. The paper-mold--the principal tool of hand-papermaking--was the sieve-like frame in which each sheet was formed. A removable wooden border or "deckle," made a shallow wall around the frame. To produce a sheet of paper, a papermaker dipped the mold into a vat filled with liquid paper pulp, let the water drain away, lifted the deckle off, and then "couched," or transferred the fresh sheet from the mold onto a felt blanket. A stack of alternating sheets and felts was called a "post." After pressing the sheets together to squeeze out more water, the papermaker hung each sheet up to dry. The traditional laid mold consisted of a wooden frame crossed in one direction with closely set brass wires and with wooden ribs for support in the other direction. In the 1750s, the English printer John Baskerville introduced the wove mold, which has a mesh of woven wire. Wove molds were less expensive to make than laid moles and produced equally fine paper, but for some years laid paper with its characteristic pattern of lines remained very popular. A watermark is the impression made in paper by a wire design sewn onto the of the mold. Paper mills used watermarks to identify their products. They can be seen by holding the paper up to the light.

In the early 1800s, Nicholas-Louis Robert of France invented the Fourdrinier, a machine that produces paper on an endless wire screen. Fifty years later, papermakers began successfully using wood fiber to make paper, a process that was introduced in the United States in the early 1900s.

In 1866, an American named Benjamin Tilghman developed the sulfite pulping process. The first mill using this process was built in Sweden in 1874. This was the dominant pulping process until 1937. At that time, kraft pulping became the dominant chemical pulping process and still is today. A German chemist, C. F. Dahl, developed the kraft (from the German word meaning "strong") pulping process in 1879. The first kraft mill in the United States was built in 1911 in Pensacola, Florida. The kraft process had several distinct advantages: the chemicals used to dissolve the lignin were recoverable and tremendous amounts of energy were produced during the recovery process, and the process could pulp pine trees, a predominant forest species in the United States. The Kraft process allowed the United States to become a major producer of paper products.

The development of paper signaled the beginning of the modern communication era. Later innovations incorporating paper would include the development of the Gutenberg Press, which allowed for mass production of printed materials thus increasing the demand for and production of paper.

Nicholas-Louis Robert's Paper Machine

In 1798, Nicholas-Louis Robert, an employee of the French publishing company of Leger Didot, devised his first machine for making paper by the roll. Perhaps it was intended for making wallpaper, the only use at that time for long lengths of paper. The quality of the paper, though, was inferior to handmade paper, and the machine was far from perfect. In 1801, Robert and his brother-in-law John Gamble patented the machine in England. They divided the patent rights with their financial backers, Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier. The Fourdriniers' engineer, Bryan Donkin, built an improved machine. The "fourdrinier," as it was soon known, made high-quality paper and by 1807, with further improvements, it was put on the market. The Fourdrinier brothers went bankrupt in 1810, but Donkin continued to manufacture the machine. In 1827, the first two fourdrinier-style paper machines in the United States were set up at Henry Barclay's mill in Saugerties, NY. Another type of paper machine, the cylinder mould, was introduced by the Gilpin brothers in Delaware in 1817.

Industrial Hubris: A Revisionist History of the Papermaking Machine by John Bidwell
Presented at the Book & Paper Group Session, AIC 28th Annual Meeting, June 8-13, 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Received for publication Fall 2000

Between 1801 and 1810, the London stationers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier organized and financed the development of the first viable papermaking machines on the basis of a crude prototype patented by Nicolas Louis Robert in 1798. Although the Fourdriniers did not invent the machine, they deserve the credit for introducing it in the English market at prices papermakers could afford. Historians of technology admire their achievements but never question their motives or methods, which were irregular at best, if not plainly fraudulent at times when they were running low on funds. Like many early industrialists, they tried to accomplish too much too soon, yet they did manage to remain solvent and discourage competition long enough to be singled out for recognition by the public and by the British government. Most papermaking machines are called Fourdriniers in their honor. This revisionist history reveals their less honorable business practices and shows how their schemes influenced the diffusion of machine technology both in Britain and America.