Paper

As a writer (and reader), I have always had a deep affection for a pretty mundane material: paper. After all, making black marks on paper is how I make a living.

Our society seems to have a similar affection (or maybe addiction!) to the stuff, because for all our talk of civilization being built on oil or other resources, any office worker will tell you it’s really built on paper. Even with computers, ultimately all important information (and lots of unimportant information) ends up on paper. It’s a great data storage medium: lightweight, inexpensive, able to store large amounts of information in a small space, and requiring no special equipment to use. Sounds high-tech, doesn’t it? But paper has been around for at least 1,900 years.

Paper is simply a sheet of interlaced fibers, usually from plants. It’s formed by pulping the fibers and then causing them to mat together on a solid surface.

Its invention is usually credited to a Chinese court official, Tsai Lun, in about 105 A.D. The Chinese may have been making paper out of silk fibers before that, but Tsai Lun made it from vegetable fibers: tree bark, rags, old fish netting, that kind of thing. The Chinese kept the papermaking process secret for 500 years, but the Japanese learned it in the seventh century and immediately improved on it (gee, why does that sound familiar?), in 770 producing the first mass publication: one million copies of a Buddhist prayer paper.

That same century the Arabs learned the secret from prisoners captured during a Chinese attack on an Arab city, and from them papermaking spread west. The first European paper mill was built in Spain in 1150. By the 1500s, everyone in Europe was doing it (making paper, that is).

Trouble was, they were still doing it by hand, the same way Tsai Lun had done it 1500 years before: they shredded vegetable fibers, reduced them to a pulp in water, dipped a screen into the pulp to remove a thin layer of it, then pressed and dried the matted sheet of fibers that formed as the water drained off.

A Frenchman, Nicolas Louis Robert, invented the first mechanical papermaker in 1798. In his machine an endless wire-mesh web dipped into a vat of pulp, lifting out a layer. The mesh vibrated, shaking off excess water and locking the fibers together, then the pulp layer was squeezed through rollers and dried. He sought backers in England, and a commercially practical machine resulted, built by Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier and Bryan Donkin. Fourdrinier-style papermaking machines are still in use today.

Modern papermaking begins with trees, although only a little more than half of the fiber comes from trees cut for that purpose: the rest is from recycled waste paper. For some kinds of paper other vegetable fibers, from grass to crushed sugarcane, may also be added.

Logs are either mechanically ground into pulp (for cheaper grades of paper) or chipped and then cooked into pulp in a chemical solution that dissolves lignin, the stuff that holds wood cells together. Then the pulp is washed and screened to get rid of knots and other unwanted materials, bleached (for some kinds of paper), and beaten (pounded and squeezed to make the fibers more flexible, which makes them mat together better).

While taking its beating, the pulp may be dyed, or other substances may be added: clay or chalk, used as filler, or rosins and gums to make the paper water resistant.

Modern papermaking machines can produce up to 800 metres of paper per minute, which is wound onto large reels, then cut to fit its intended purpose. Finally, it may be coated with various substances to make it glossy, waxy, or whatever .

Papermaking has its down side, of course: it eats trees (though recycling helps), and the process, requiring lots of water and chemicals, can also produce a lot of pollution.

Yet it’s hard to imagine a world without paper. It’s used not only for books, magazines and newspapers, but to make cardboard boxes, egg cartons, electrical insulation, disposable diapers, acoustic tiles and more.

My favorite kind of paper? Newsprint.

As long as it has this column printed on it, anyway.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/1992/10/paper/

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