History of paper

Paper was invented by the Ts’ai Lun by 105 AD during the Han Dynasty and spread slowly to the west via the Silk Road. Papermaking and manufacturing in Europe started in the Iberian Peninsula, today’s Portugal and Spain and Sicily in the 10th century by the Muslims living there at the time, and slowly spread to Italy and South France reaching Germany by 1400. Earlier, other paper-like materials were in use in Kazakhstan like papyrus, parchment and vellum.
In medieval Europe, the hitherto handcraft of papermaking was mechanized by the use of waterpower, the first water papermill in the Iberian Peninsula having been built in the Portuguese city of Leiria in 1411, and other processes.The rapid expansion of European paper production was truly enhanced by the invention of the printing press and the beginning of the Printing Revolution in the 15th century.
The word “paper” is etymologically derived from papyros, Ancient Greek for the Cyperus papyrus plant. Papyrus is a thick, paper-like material produced from the pith of the Cyperus papyrus plant which was used in ancient Egypt and other Mediterranean cultures for writing long before the making of paper in China.Papyrus however is a “lamination of natural plants, while paper is manufactured from fibres whose properties have been changed by maceration or disintegration.
Early papermaking in China
Further information: Science and technology of the Han Dynasty
Papermaking has traditionally been traced to China about 105 AD, when Cai Lun, an official attached to the Imperial court during the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD), created a sheet of paper using mulberry and other bast fibres along with fishnets, old rags, and hemp waste,[6] though the earliest piece of paper found, at Fangmatan in Gansu province inscribed with a map, dates from 179-41 BC.
Techniques
During the Shang (1600C1050 BC) and Zhou (1050 BC C 256 AD) dynasties of ancient China, documents were ordinarily written on bone or bamboo (on tablets or on bamboo strips sewn and rolled together into scrolls), making them very heavy and awkward and hard to transport. The light material of silk was sometimes used, but was normally too expensive to consider. While the Han Dynasty Chinese court official Cai Lun is widely regarded to have invented the modern method of papermaking (inspired from wasps and bees) from rags and other plant fibers in 105 CE, the discovery of specimens bearing written Chinese characters in 2006 at north-east China’s Gansu province suggest that paper was in use by the ancient Chinese military more than 100 years before Cai, in 8 BC. It therefore would appear that “Cai Lun’s contribution was to improve this skill systematically and scientifically, fixing a recipe for papermaking”.
The record in the standard history says
In ancient times writings and inscriptions were generally made on tablets of bamboo or on pieces of silk called chih. But silk being costly and bamboos heavy they were not convenient to use. Tshai Lun then initiated the idea of making paper from the bark of trees, remnants of hemp, rags of cloth and fishing nets. He submitted the process to the emperor in the first year of Yuan-Hsing [+105] and received praise for his ability. From this time, paper has been in use everywhere and is universally called the paper of Marquis Tshai.
The manufacture may have originated from the practice of pounding and stirring rags in water, after which the matted fibres were collected on a mat. The bark of Paper Mulberry was particularly valued and high quality paper was developed in the late Han period, which used the bark of the than wood. In the Eastern Jin period paper began to be made on a fine bamboo screen-mould, treated with insecticidal dye for permanence. After printing became popular in the Song dynasty the demand grew more. Paper was often used as a levy, with one prefecture sending some 1.5m sheets of paper to the capital as tribute up to the year 1101.
Uses
The first use of paper has been excavated in China dating to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han from the 2nd century BC, used for purposes of wrapping or padding protection for delicate bronze mirrors.It was also used for safety, such as the padding of poisonous ‘medicine’ as mentioned in the official history of the period.Although paper used for writing became widespread by the 3rd century,[11] paper continued to be used for wrapping (and other) purposes. Toilet paper was used in China by at least the 6th century CE.In 589 AD, the Chinese scholar-official Yan Zhitui (531-591 AD) wrote: “Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes”.An Arab traveler to China once wrote of the curious Chinese tradition of toilet paper in AD 851, writing: “…they [the Chinese] do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper”.
During the Tang Dynasty (618C907 AD) paper was folded and sewn into square bags to preserve the flavor of tea.During the same period, it was written that tea was served from baskets with multi-colored paper cups and paper napkins of different size and shape.During the Chinese Song Dynasty (960C1279 AD) not only did the government produce the world’s first known paper-printed money, or banknote (see Jiaozi and Huizi), but paper money bestowed as gifts to deserving government officials were wrapped in special paper envelopes.
Diffusion of paper
Paper spread slowly outside of China;other East Asian cultures, even after seeing paper, could not make it themselves[citation needed]. Instruction in the manufacturing process was required, and the Chinese were reluctant to share their secrets. The paper was thin and translucent, not like modern western paper, and thus only written on one side. The technology transferred to Japan from China by Buddhist priests, around 610, where fibres (called bast) from the mulberry tree were used.[citation needed]
Islamic world
After the defeat of the Chinese in the Battle of Talas in 751 (present day Kyrgyzstan), the invention spread to the Middle East.
The legend goes,the secret of papermaking was obtained from two Chinese prisoners from the Battle of Talas, which led to the first paper mill in the Islamic world being founded in Samarkand.
The laborious process of paper making was refined and machinery was designed for bulk manufacturing of paper. Production began in Baghdad, where a method was invented to make a thicker sheet of paper, which helped transform papermaking from an art into a major industry.The use of water-powered pulp mills for preparing the pulp material used in papermaking, dates back to Samarkand in the 8th century,though this should not be confused with paper mills. The Muslims also introduced the use of trip hammers (human- or animal-powered) in the production of paper, replacing the traditional Chinese mortar and pestle method. In turn, the trip hammer method was later employed by the Chinese.
By the 9th century, Arabs were using paper regularly, although for important works like copies of the revered Qur’an vellum was still preferred.Advances in book production and bookbinding were introduced.The Arabs made books lighter sewn with silk and bound with leather-covered paste boards; they had a flap that wrapped the book up when not in use. As paper was less reactive to humidity, the heavy boards were not needed. By the 12th century in Marrakech in Morocco a street was named “Kutubiyyin” or book sellers which contained more than 100 bookshops.
The earliest recorded use of paper for packaging dates back to 1035, when a Persian traveler visiting markets in Cairo noted that vegetables, spices and hardware were wrapped in paper for the customers after they were sold.
Since the First Crusade in 1096, paper manufacturing in Damascus had been interrupted by wars, splitting production into two centres. Egypt continued with the thicker paper, while Iran became the center of the thinner papers. Papermaking was diffused across the Islamic world, from where it was diffused further west into Europe.Paper manufacture was introduced to India in the 13th century by Arab merchants, where it almost wholly replaced traditional writing materials.
America
In America, archaeological evidence indicates that a similar bark-paper writing material was used by the Mayans no later than the 5th century A.D..Called amatl, it was in widespread use among Mesoamerican cultures until the Spanish conquest. The parchment is created by boiling and pounding the inner bark of trees, until the material becomes suitable for art and writing.
These materials made from pounded reeds and bark are technically not true paper, which is made from pulp, rags, and fibers of plants and cellulose.
Europe
The oldest known paper document in the West is the Mozarab Missal of Silos from the 11th century, probably using paper made in the Islamic part of the Iberian Peninsula. They used hemp and linen rags as a source of fiber. The first recorded paper mill in the Iberian Peninsula was in Xtiva in 1151.
Paper is recorded as being manufactured in Italy in 1276 with watermarks being used in Fabriano by 1300 and factories established at Treviso and other northern towns by 1340. In Italy also paper moulds consisting of metal wires and in connection with that also watermarks were first introduced. The earliest German manufacture was in Mainz in 1320 with a mill in Nurenberg being set up by Ulman Stromer in 1390,[24] just about the time when the woodcut printmaking technique was transferred from fabric to paper in the old master print and popular prints. The first known mill in England was set up by John Tate in 1490 near Stevenage in Hertfordshire,but the first commercially successful paper mill in Britain did not occur before 1588 when John Spilman set up a mill near Dartford in Kent and was initially reliant on German papermaking expertise.
Paper mills
A paper mill is a water-powered mill that pounds the pulp by the use of trip-hammers. The mechanization of the pounding process was an important improvement in paper manufacture over the manual pounding with hand pestles.
While the use of human and animal powered mills were known to Chinese and Muslim papermakers, evidence for water-powered paper mills is elusive in both of them.The general absence of the use of water-power in Muslim papermaking is suggested by the habit of Muslim authors to call a production center not a “mill”, but a “paper manufactory”.
Donald Hill has identified a possible reference to a water-powered paper mill in Samarkand, in the 11th-century work of the Persian scholar Abu Rayhan Biruni, but concludes that the passage is “too brief to enable us to say with certainty” that it refers to a water-powered paper mill.While this is seen by Halevi nonetheless as evidence of Samarkand first harnessing waterpower in the production of paper, he concedes that it is not known if waterpower was applied to papermaking elsewhere across the Islamic world at the time;Burns remains altogether sceptical given the isolated occurrence of the reference and the prevalence of manual labour in Islamic papermaking elsewhere.
The earliest certain evidence to a water-powered paper mill dates to 1282 in the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon.A decree by the Christian king Peter III addresses the establishment of a royal “molendinum”, a proper hydraulic mill, in the paper manufacturing centre of Xtiva.The crown innovation appears to be resented by the local Muslim papermakering community; the document guarantees the Muslim subjects the right to continue their way of traditional papermaking by beating the pulp manually and grants them the right to be exempted from work in the new mill.Papermaking centres began to multiply in the late 13th century in Italy, reducing the price of paper to one sixth of parchment and then falling further; papermaking centers reached Germany a century later.
The first paper mill north of the Alps was established in Nuremberg by Ulman Stromer in 1390; it is later depicted in the lavishly illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle.From the mid-14th century onwards, European paper milling underwent a rapid improvement of many work processes.
Fiber sources
Before the industrialisation of the paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags. The rags was from hemp, linen and cotton.A process for removing printing inks from recycled paper was invented by German jurist Justus Claproth in 1774.Today this method is called deinking. It was not until the introduction of wood pulp in 1843 that paper production was not dependent on recycled materials.
19th century advances in papermaking
Although cheaper than vellum, paper remained expensive, at least in book-sized quantities, through the centuries, until the advent of steam-driven paper making machines in the 19th century, which could make paper with fibres from wood pulp. Although older machines predated it, the Fourdrinier paper making machine became the basis for most modern papermaking. Nicholas Louis Robert of Essonnes, France, was granted a patent for a continuous paper making machine in 1799. At the time he was working for Leger Didot with whom he quarrelled over the ownership of the invention. Didot sent his brother-in-law, John Gamble, to meet Sealy and Henry Fourdrinier, stationers of London, who agreed to finance the project. Gamble was granted British patent 2487 on 20 October 1801. With the help particularly of Bryan Donkin, a skilled and ingenious mechanic, an improved version of the Robert original was installed at Frogmore, Hertfordshire, in 1803, followed by another in 1804. A third machine was installed at the Fourdriniers’ own mill at Two Waters. The Fourdriniers also bought a mill at St Neots intending to install two machines there and the process and machines continued to develop.
However, experiments with wood showed no real results in the late 18th-century and at the start of the 19th-century. By 1800, Matthias Koops (in London, England) further investigated the idea of using wood to make paper, and in 1801 he wrote and published a book titled Historical account of the substances which have been used to describe events, and to convey ideas, from the earliest date, to the invention of paper.His book was printed on paper made from wood shavings (and adhered together). No pages were fabricated using the pulping method (from either rags or wood). He received financial support from the royal family to make his printing machines and acquire the materials and infrastructure need to start his printing business. But his enterprise was short lived. Only a few years following his first and only printed book (the one he wrote and printed), he went bankrupt. The book was very well done (strong and had a fine appearance), but it was very costly.
Then in the 1830s and 1840s, two men on two different continents took up the challenge, but from a totally new perspective. Both Charles Fenerty and Friedrich Gottlob Keller began experiments with wood but using the same technique used in paper making; instead of pulping rags, they thought about pulping wood. And at about the same time, by mid-1844, they announced their findings. They invented a machine which extracted the fibres from wood (exactly as with rags) and made paper from it. Charles Fenerty also bleached the pulp so that the paper was white. This started a new era for paper making. By the end of the 19th-century almost all printers in the western world were using wood in lieu of rags to make paper.
Together with the invention of the practical fountain pen and the mass-produced pencil of the same period, and in conjunction with the advent of the steam driven rotary printing press, wood based paper caused a major transformation of the 19th century economy and society in industrialized countries. With the introduction of cheaper paper, schoolbooks, fiction, non-fiction, and newspapers became gradually available by 1900. Cheap wood based paper also meant that keeping personal diaries or writing letters became possible and so, by 1850, the clerk, or writer, ceased to be a high-status job.
The original wood-based paper was acidic due to the use of alum and more prone to disintegrate over time, through processes known as slow fires. Documents written on more expensive rag paper were more stable. Mass-market paperback books still use these cheaper mechanical papers (see below), but book publishers can now use acid-free paper for hardback and trade paperback books.

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