When was machine made paper invented

The history of paper is inextricably linked with that of culture and science. The spark that set off the invention of paper was simple but extremely significant. Humans had an urgent need: to communicate certain information to each other in written form.

The information had to be set on a lightweight and durable medium that was easily transportable. The invention of paper allowed papyrus and parchment to be replaced with a material that was easier and, with the advent of new production techniques, cheaper to make. The arrival of digital media has perhaps obscured the fundamental role that paper has played in spreading knowledge : it should not be forgotten that, until a few decades ago, the dissemination of any idea required a sheet of paper.

Over the centuries, paper has made an enormous contribution to progress, from enabling citizen participation in democratic life to raising levels of knowledge and education.

The history of paper has mirrored the evolution of human society over the centuries: from the dissemination of scientific and philosophical knowledge to the spread of education right up to the creation of the kind of political and historical consciousness which gave birth of the modern nation state.

Historical sources credit the invention of paper to Cai Lun, a dignitary serving the imperial Chinese court who, in AD , began producing sheets of paper from scraps of old rags , tree bark and fishing nets.

The Chinese guarded the secret of paper making jealously for many centuries until, in the 6th century, their invention was brought to Japan by Buddhist monk Dam Jing. The Japanese immediately learned papermaking techniques and began using pulp derived from mulberry bark to produce this precious material themselves. The Arab world discovered the secrets of papermaking in AD , when the governor-general of the Caliphate of Bagdad captured two Chinese papermakers in Samarkand and, with their help, founded a paper mill in the Uzbek city.

From here, aided by an abundance of hemp and linen , two high-quality raw materials perfect for making paper, production spread to other cities in Asia, particularly Baghdad and Damascus. The process for making paper employed by the Arabs involved garnetting and macerating rags in water to obtain a homogenous pulp, which was then sifted to separate the macerated fibres from the water.

The sheets thus obtained were subsequently pressed, dried and finally covered with a layer of rice starch to make them more receptive to ink. In the same period, people in Egypt and North Africa also started to make paper using the same techniques employed in the Arab world.

However, paper was quickly considered an inferior-quality material compared to parchment, so much so that, in , Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II prohibited its use for public documents. Rice starch, in fact, was an attractive food source for insects, which meant sheets of paper did not last long. The history of paper owes much to the paper makers of Fabriano , a small town in the Marche region of Italy, who started producing paper using linen and hemp in the 12th century.

Soon the Arabic world embraced it, but Christians in Europe did not. Paper came to Germany only a few decades before Gutenberg's press. They had parchment, made from animal skin.

It was pricey - a parchment bible required the skins of sheep - but since so few people could read or write, that hardly mattered.

But as a commercial class arose, needing contracts and accounts, cheaper writing material looked more attractive. And cheap paper made the economics of printing more attractive too: the cost of typesetting could easily be offset by a long print run, with no need to slaughter a million sheep.

Printing is only the start of paper's uses. We decorate our walls with wallpaper, posters and photographs, we filter tea and coffee through it, package milk and juice in it and as corrugated cardboard, we use it to make boxes.

We use wrapping paper, greaseproof paper, sandpaper, paper napkins, paper receipts and paper tickets. In the s - the same decade that produced the telephone and the light bulb - the British Perforated Paper Company produced a kind of paper that was soft, strong, and absorbent. It was the world's first dedicated toilet paper. In fact, paper is the quintessential industrial product, churned out at incredible scale and when Christian Europeans finally embraced paper, they created arguably the continent's first heavy industry.

Initially, paper was made from pulped cotton. Some kind of chemical was required to break down the raw material. The ammonia from urine works well, so for centuries the paper mills of Europe were powered by human waste. Pulping also needs a tremendous amount of mechanical energy. One of the early sites of paper manufacture, Fabriano in Italy, used fast-flowing mountain streams to power massive drop-hammers. Once finely macerated, the cellulose from the cotton breaks free and floats around in a kind of thick soup.

Thinned and allowed to dry, the cellulose reforms as a strong, flexible mat. Over time, the process saw endless innovation: threshing machines, bleaches and additives helped to make paper more quickly and cheaply, even if the result was often a more fragile product.

By , paper was so cheap, it was used to make a product explicitly designed to be thrown away after only 24 hours: the Daily Courant, the world's first daily newspaper.

And then, an almost inevitable industrial crisis: Europe and America became so hungry for paper that they began to run out of rags. The situation became so desperate that scavengers combed battlefields after wars, stripping the dead of their bloodstained uniforms to sell to paper mills.

An alternative source of cellulose was found - wood. The Chinese had long since known how to do it, but Europeans were slow to catch up. Why the falling cost of light matters. The compiler: Computing's hidden hero. How Ikea's Billy took over the world.

During the 8th century in Samarkand, Muslims created water-powered pulp mills, and they began binding books using silk thread and covered them with leather-covered paste boards. By the 12th century, a street in Marrakech, Morocco was named "Kutubiyyin" or "book sellers street" because it contained over book stores. Thanks to the crusades, the Spanish learned to make paper around A.

The Spanish refined the process, creating paper mills that used waterwheels. The oldest known paper document in Europe is the Mozarab Missal of Silos, dating from the 11th century. France had a paper mill by A. The first paper mill in England was created by John Tate around A. In the Americas, by the 5th century, the Mayans were using a material similar to paper called amate. Made from tree bark, the earliest example of amate was found at Huitzilapa near the Magdalena Municipality, Jalisco, Mexico, dating to 75 B.

European papermaking spread to the Americas, first in Mexico by , and then in Philadelphia by In the s and s, two men on two different continents set out to make paper out of wood. German Friedrich Gottlob Keller and Canadian Charles Fenerty sought to pulp wood, and by , they announced that they had invented a machine that extracted fibers from wood and made paper out of them. Fenerty also bleached the pulp, making the paper white.

By the end of the 19th-century almost all printers in the western world were using wood instead of rags to make paper. The new paper, along with the inventions of the fountain pen, mass-produced pencil, and steam driven rotary printing press caused a major transformation in 19th century life. They allowed for book publishing, schoolbooks, and newspapers. Today, paper is made from trees farmed specifically for that purpose, and from recycled paper. Recycled paper is used in newspapers, notebook paper, grocery bags, corrugated boxes, envelopes, magazines, and cartons.

Paper mills also use wood chips and sawdust left over from industrial processes.