Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A Brief History of Paper

Starting point is 00:00:00 There are four things that are considered to be the great inventions of ancient China, gunpowder, the compass, the printing press, and paper. Despite the incredible impact that all four things have had on the world, the greatest cultural and social impact may very well be paper. Even in a world to wash in digital information, paper can still be found all around us for a wide variety of uses. Learn more about paper and how it changed the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep,

Starting point is 00:00:42 only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. and millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep.

Starting point is 00:01:16 If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. When humans first developed systems of writing, it necessitated the creation of things to write on. The first writing surfaces were rocks and cave walls, which were a pretty finite resource. Eventually, clay tablets were used, which was bad. but not really by much. They were heavy, cumbersome, and extremely fragile. About 6,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptians developed a substitute for clay tablets called papyrus. Papyrus was an improvement

Starting point is 00:01:57 over clay tablets in many ways. It was lighter, easier to transport, and it wasn't quite as fragile. However, papyrus wasn't easy to make. It required harvesting, thin strips from the inside of papyrus plants, which were then glued together. There was a great deal of demand for papyrus around the Mediterranean world. Demand for papyrus was so great at one point that the papyrus plant was almost over-harvested to extinction. However, papyrus too had its problems. For starters, it was glued together and would often fall apart over time. And second, it became very expensive because production was monopolized by the city of Alexandria. This led to the development of another writing surface, parchment. Partiment came from the skins of animals, usually sheep and goats. Parchment was much more

Starting point is 00:02:43 durable than papyrus, but given how it was made, too, is very expensive. Partchement became the go-to material for writing for centuries in the ancient Western world. Over in China, they had the same problem of finding surfaces to write on. The original solution used in ancient China was animal bones and bamboo. Sometimes the bamboo would be cut into strips to allow for longer documents, but that became heavy and unwieldy. Silk was also used sometimes, but just like with parchment, it was too expensive for regular use. The Chinese solved the problem of a writing surface in a totally different way than they did in the West, and quite frankly, a better way. It was more durable than papyrus and cheaper than parchment. We know it as paper. Paper, in its simplest definition, is just sheets of dried cellulose pulp.

Starting point is 00:03:32 Cellulose is the extremely tough material that is found in the cell walls of most plants. We don't really know exactly when paper was invented or who the inventor was. In China, it's traditionally attributed to a court eunuch by the name of Kai Lund, who lived in the late 3rd century BC during the Han Dynasty. It said he made the first paper with mulberry bark, hemp, and rags. While early forms of paper probably existed several centuries before Kailun, Kailun did create a written recipe that could be followed by later generations. The oldest samples of paper which have been found date back to 175 to 145 BC in northwestern China.

Starting point is 00:04:13 Before I go any further, I should provide a brief explanation as to roughly how paper is made. Minking paper actually isn't that hard. You could make it at home if you wanted to go through the effort of doing so. The key is to break down the cellulose fibers. Let's say you had some plant-based. material you want it to use as your base. The first thing you do is soak the fibers in water to soften them up. Then you would beat the fibers to break them down. And this could be done with a mallet or a mortar and a pestle. You then add it back to the water to make it more liquid and then

Starting point is 00:04:44 pour it onto a flat surface. Press out the excess water and then when it gets solid, hang it up to dry and align. You can then finish by potentially rubbing it with a stone to smooth out any rough spots. Obviously, modern paper is a bit more of a complicated process, but that is the basics of it. Create a wet slurry of fibers, spread it out, and let it dry. Paper in the Han dynasty was primarily made from the bark of the mulberry tree, but later on it was predominantly made from hemp. Believe it or not, one of the most early popular uses for paper in China wasn't for writing, but as wrapping paper. However, its obvious use for writing soon made the literary culture in China explode. Paper allowed for longer written text to be created. Instead of piles of bamboo

Starting point is 00:05:28 strips that were tied together, you could have a much lighter scroll that could contain more text and could be transported easier. Paper began to spread through China and it began to be used more extensively by the 4th and 5th centuries. It arrived in Korea sometime around the 5th century and then Japan after that. Paper is believed to have arrived in the Indian subcontinent in the 7th century. Despite the recipe for paper leaking out to other countries in Asia, it was still considered a closely guarded secret in China. People outside of China knew about paper. paper, especially in the Islamic world, but they didn't know how to make it. The secret to paper making arrived in the Islamic world at some point in the 8th century,

Starting point is 00:06:07 possibly at the Battle of Talas, which took place in 751 in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tang Dynasty. It might have been Chinese prisoners from that battle who took the secret with them to the city of Samarkand. When papermaking came to the Islamic world, it started spreading westward throughout all of the Muslim-controlled lands. Paper mills arrived in Baghdad by 793, Egypt by 900, and Morocco by the year 1100. Muslim papermakers made many improvements to paper making, including the ability to create

Starting point is 00:06:39 thicker sheets of paper, and they also mastered the art of making books out of paper. Previously, books or codexes were made out of parchment and were rare and expensive. Cheaper paper allowed for bookbinding to develop into its own art form. Paper also allowed Islamic scholars and artists to further develop Arabixtable. calligraphy. It wasn't a coincidence that papermaking coincided with the Islamic golden age. Papermaking became big business. There were entire sections of cities such as Baghdad, Samarkhan, and Cairo that were dedicated just to paper making. The Baghdad paper market, for example, had over a hundred stores selling just papers and books. In the 11th century,

Starting point is 00:07:20 a Persian traveler in Cairo noted that food and other goods were actually sold wrapped in paper. It was Muslims who brought papermaking to Europe through the lands that they controlled in Sicily and Spain. Papermaking in Europe spread slowly. It started in Spain and Italy and then went north. England didn't have a successful paper mill until 1588, and it didn't reach Scandinavian countries like Sweden until the early 17th century. With the explosion of printing presses in the 15th century, the demand for paper increased dramatically, which increased the number of paper makers all throughout Europe. Through the 19th century, paper making was mostly still an artisan process. Paper was still made with old rags and linen, and mostly done by hand, individual sheets at a time.

Starting point is 00:08:05 Paper was still cheaper than the alternatives like parchment, but it was still pretty expensive. The thing which radically changed the paper-making process was the development of the creation of a machine that could create one continuous sheet of paper. The machine was known as a forgerneer, named after its inventor Henry Fordronier. The forgerneer could create giant rolls of paper, which not only increased the amount of paper that was produced, but allowed for new uses for large pieces of paper, such as wallpaper. At this point, you might have noticed that there's one word that I haven't mentioned yet. I have not mentioned the very substance of which most paper today is made out of, wood. One of the reasons why rags and other fibers such as hemp mulberry and flax were used in paper making for so long is that they were easy to work with.

Starting point is 00:08:54 A tree has a lot of cellulose, but it's very difficult to turn into pulp. You would have to hammer wood for a very long time for it to turn into pulp. It wasn't until the late 18th century that the first paper made out of wood pulp was produced, and it wasn't until the 1840s that wood began to be used on a regular basis in the production of paper. Fiedrich Gottlub Keller in Germany and Charles Fennerney in Nova Scotia, both simultaneously created mechanical processes for creating wood pulp. Mechanical wood pulping worked, but it was improved upon with chemical wood pulping. The first chemical used was sulfuric acid, but that process was eventually replaced with calcium bysulfite in 1867. The industrial production of paper in the

Starting point is 00:09:40 19th century allowed for increased newspaper and book printing, as well as paper packaging for mass-produced consumer products. One problem was that wood-based paper wasn't as robust as paper made from linen, so it deteriorated more rapidly. Official documents still used paper made from rags and linen. The sulfide process was the dominant pulping process entering the 20th century, but it was later replaced by the craft process. The craft process was developed in Germany in 1879, and the first paper mill to use the process was built in 1890. The craft process used sodium sulfate, and it was possible to recover almost all of the chemicals used in the pulping process. As well, it could be used on a wider variety of trees,

Starting point is 00:10:23 which made it overtake the cell-fite process by the 1940s. Much of the paper produced in the 20th century was very acidic due to the use of alum in the paper-making process. In the second half of the 20th century, there was a shift to acid-free paper for higher-quality uses like hardback books. The 19th and 20th centuries also saw an increase in the diversity of types of paper based on composition and coatings. Thicker paper cardboard was developed in the 1860s for packaging, and corrugated cardboard

Starting point is 00:10:52 was developed in 1871. Its original use was to provide a liner for stovepipe hats. The use of paper in the bathroom dates back almost as far as the invention of paper itself. As early as the 6th century in China, there were reports of the use of paper for bathroom usage. In 14th century China, an estimated 10 million packages of toilet paper were produced annually, with special perfumed versions created for the Emperor and his family. The true mass production of paper for bathrooms started in 1857, when Joseph Gaietti of New York marketed a product that he called a, quote, medicated paper for the water closet. He sold packages of 500 sheets for 50 cents. The rise of computers and the Internet has changed the paper industry.

Starting point is 00:11:39 Paper such as newsprint has decreased, but has been offset by an increase in packaging material and cardboard. The largest paper producer in the world today is China, which regained its status as the world's largest paper maker, which it held over a thousand years ago. Globally, there's over 400 million metric tons of paper produced annually. Today, there's a mind-boggling amount of various papers which are produced. There are different sizes, weights, colors, and coatings, which can be used for a wide variety of purposes. The odds are that almost everyone listening to this episode will use several different types of paper every single day. And there's probably some paper product within your immediate vicinity right now. Given the importance and ubiquity of paper

Starting point is 00:12:23 across the world over the last 2,000 years, it certainly has earned the distinction as one of the four great inventions of China. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Superman, 123, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,000, exclamation point, exclamation point, over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, Amazing Podcast. I would give it six stars if I could. I discovered this podcast right around December 1st with the Vasa,

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Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A Brief History of Paper

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