When was modern paper invented

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. How economics killed the antibiotic dream. In , a French biologist, Rene Antoine Ferchault De Reaumur, wrote a scientific paper pointing out that wasps could make paper nests by chewing wood, so why couldn't humans? When his idea was rediscovered years later, paper makers found that wood is not an easy raw material and contains much less cellulose than cotton rags.

It was the midth century before wood became a significant source for paper production in the West. At first American paper mills used the Chinese method of shredding old rags and clothes into individual fibers to make paper.

But, as the demand for paper grew, the mills changed to using fiber from trees because wood was less expensive and more abundant than cloth. Today, paper is made from trees grown in sustainably managed forests and from recycled paper.

When you recycle your used paper , paper mills will use it to make new notebook paper, paper grocery bags, cardboard boxes, envelopes, magazines, cartons, newspapers and other paper products. The forest products industry is circular by nature. Creating books was labor-intensive; they were hand-printed and dictated to scribes. This made them expensive, a problem that was compounded by a tendency to dress them up with heavy jeweled covers.

The fourteenth-century Italian scholar Petrarch almost had his leg amputated after dropping one of these books on it. Still, the demand for books only grew. By the fourteenth century, papermaking was a common industrial activity in Europe, which gave rise to printing, another great innovation that fueled the engines of human civilization—religion, business, art, and empire—for centuries to come. As far back as the eighth-century, Chinese poet Tu Fu groused that more paper led to more writing, which created more bureaucracy.

Later, because books at first were rare and thereby held a unique power, upstart printers with the ability to produce them en masse were suspected of harboring treacherous political agendas; when Johann Fust, an associate of Johannes Gutenberg, went to Paris to sell books, he was chased out of town as an agent of the devil.

Scribes saw their jobs threatened when books took off, and many of the aristocrats who hired them saw printed alternatives as sleazy imitations. They feared that a new style would completely overtake the old. These kinds of worries often represent a commonly held fallacy about technology: Once a new way is invented it is unstoppable. Kurlansky illustrates his points with journalism, an industry whose fate is tied to the history of paper more than any other.

In , when Franklin and a colleague were jointly named deputy postmaster general, inter-colony correspondence increased, which was good for the newspaper trade.

In the next decades, cheaper paper meant a transition from broadsides to pamphlets, which were longer and more reflective. 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.