When is paper invented

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.

By using new equipment and production techniques, these papermakers introduced important innovations :. Watermarking involved using metal wires to add decorations to paper which became visible when the sheet was held up to the light, allowing hallmarks, signatures, ecclesiastical emblems and other symbols to be inserted. From the 14th century, papermaking began to spread to other European countries and, at the end of the 15th century, with the invention of movable-type printing , production really took off.

The discovery of America and the subsequent European colonisation brought papermaking to the New World. The industrial manufacture of paper began in the 19th century with the expansion of mass-circulation newspapers and the first best-selling novels, which required enormous quantities of cheap cellulose.

In , Louis Nicolas Robert created the first Fourdrinier machine, which was able to produce a cm-long sheet. As demand for papermaking rags outstripped supply, alternative materials were sought, like wood pulp. With the development of new techniques for extracting fibres from trees, the price of paper fell dramatically, and paper soon became a product of mass consumption.

In Britain alone, paper output soared from 96, tonnes a year in to , tonnes in Once again, the history of paper and the history of humankind were closely intertwined: with the spread of cheap paper, books and newspapers became accessible to all, leading to an explosion of literacy among the middle classes. Paper manufacturing uses significant amounts of natural resources : between 2 and 2.

Sustainable paper is made out of wood cellulose originating from Forest Stewardship Council-certified forests , where strict environmental, social and economic standards apply. Recycled paper , on the other hand, is made out of recovered paper. However, the chlorine used to bleach it, as well as other chemical additives used, mean that recycled paper is often not as environmentally friendly as commonly thought.

To be sure that you are choosing a genuinely eco-friendly product, opt for paper with the Ecolabel certification , the European ecological quality label awarded to environmentally sustainable products. An excellent alternative to traditional paper is Crush paper, produced by venerable Italian papermakers Favini, made out of fruit and vegetable by-products.

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. Today, paper is increasingly made out of paper itself, often recycled - appropriately enough - in China. A cardboard box emerges from the paper mills of Ningbo, miles km south of Shanghai, and is used to package a laptop.

The box is shipped across the Pacific, the laptop is extracted and the box is thrown into a recycling bin in Seattle or Vancouver. Then it's shipped back to Ningbo, to be pulped and turned into another box.

When it comes to writing, though, some say paper's days are numbered, believing the computer will usher in the "paperless office". But this has been predicted since Thomas Edison, in the late 19th century, who thought office memos would be recorded on his wax cylinders instead.

The idea really caught on as computers started to enter the workplace in the s and it was repeated in breathless futurologists' reports for the next decades. Meanwhile, paper sales stubbornly continued to boom. Yes, computers made it simple to distribute documents without paper, but printers made it equally easy for recipients to put them on paper anyway. America's copiers, fax machines and printers continued to spew out enough sheets of paper to cover the country every five years.

After a while, the paperless office became less a prediction, more a punchline. But perhaps things are finally changing: in , the world hit peak paper. Many of us may still prefer the feel of a book or a physical newspaper to swiping a screen, but the cost of digital distribution is now so much lower that we are increasingly choosing the cheaper option.

Finally, digital is doing to paper what paper did to parchment with the help of the Gutenberg press: outcompeting it, not on quality, but on price. Paper may be on the decline, but it will survive not only on the supermarket shelf or beside the lavatory, but in the office too. Old technologies have a habit of enduring.

We still use pencils and candles and the world still produces more bicycles than cars. Paper is in shopping bags, money, store receipts, cereal boxes, and toilet paper. We use paper in so many ways every day.

So, where did this marvelously versatile material come from? The historian Fan Hua CE recorded this version of events, but archaeological finds from western China and Tibet suggest that paper was invented centuries earlier. Samples of even more ancient paper, some of it dating to c. The dry climate in these places allowed the paper to survive for up to 2, years without entirely decomposing.

Amazingly, some of this paper even has ink marks on it, proving that ink was invented much earlier than historians had supposed. Of course, people in various places around the world were writing long before the invention of paper. Materials such as bark, silk, wood, and leather functioned in a similar way to paper, although they were either much more expensive or heavier.

In China, many early works were recorded on long bamboo strips , which were then bound with leather straps or string into books.

People world-wide also carved very important notations into stone or bone, or pressed stamps into wet clay and then dried or fired the tablets to preserve their words. However, writing and later printing required a material that was both cheap and lightweight to become truly ubiquitous.

Paper fit the bill perfectly. Early paper-makers in China used hemp fibers, which were soaked in water and pounded with a large wooden mallet. The resulting slurry was then poured over a horizontal mold; loosely-woven cloth stretched over a framework of bamboo allowed the water to drip out the bottom or evaporate, leaving behind a flat sheet of dry hemp-fiber paper.

Over time, paper-makers began to use other materials in their product, including bamboo, mulberry and different types of tree bark. They dyed paper for official records with a yellow substance, the imperial color, which had the added benefit of repelling insects that might have destroyed the paper otherwise.

One of the most common formats for early paper was the scroll. A few long pieces of paper were pasted together to form a strip, which was then wrapped around a wooden roller. The other end of the paper was attached to a thin wooden dowel, with a piece of silk cord in the middle to tie the scroll shut. From its point of origin in China, the idea and technology of paper-making spread throughout Asia.

In the s CE, artisans on the Korean Peninsula began to make paper using many of the same materials as Chinese paper-makers.

The Koreans also used rice straw and seaweed, expanding the types of fiber available for paper production. This early adoption of paper fueled the Korean innovations in printing, as well.