Paper greatly influenced Chinese written culture. By the early 5th century CE, individuals owned personal libraries containing several thousand scrolls. Between the 9th and early 12th centuries, libraries in Cairo, Baghdad, and Cordoba, Spain, contained more books than those in China, and dwarfed European collections. But, after the introduction of the printing press in the mid 15th century, European collections became larger than those in China. (The Bibliotheca Augusta, a public library in Perugia, Italy, opened in 1623 CE, contained 120,000 books by 1666 and in Britain the Cambridge University had 40,000 by 1715. In America Thomas Jefferson's private collection totalled 4,889 titles in 6,487 volumes).
By the 15th century, paper was much cheaper than parchment which was typically used only for luxury manuscripts. With the introduction of Chinese printing techniques in the later 15th century, the demand for parchment far exceeded the supply of animal skins, so printers used high quality paper made from textile rags.
For a short period vellum, parchment and paper were used at the same time. Although most copies of the Gutenberg Bible were printed on paper, some were printed on vellum parchment, the more expensive luxury option.
The bark of fig trees, flax, cotton, and old rags and ropes with were the main ingredients of Oriental Paper. These went through frequent cycles of soaking and repeated pounding in stone vats. A square screen was then lifted out of the vat containing the pulp, the water was drained off and the paper, pressed, coated with size (starch obtained from rice, katira, wheat or white sorghum) and then dried and polished. Paper makers preferred coloured papers over lead oxide white and added up to seventy colours ranging from brown and bright red to onion pink, green, saffron yellow and lime.
Gradually, less labour intensive methods of papermaking were devised. Machinery was used for bulk manufacturing of a thicker sheet of paper, which transformed papermaking from an art into a major industry.
The use of chlorine for bleaching was discovered in 1744 and by the end of the 18th century bleached cotton was the raw material for paper. In 1806, animal gelatine and starch sizes were replaced with aluminium sulphate and resin.
Although cheaper than vellum, paper remained relatively expensive until the 19th century invention of steam-driven paper making machines that used wood pulp fibres.
Nicholas Louis Robert was granted a French patent for a continuous paper making machine in 1799. In London, Henry Fourdrinier, agreed to finance the project and a British patent was granted in October 1801. An improved version of Robert's original design was installed at Frogmore Paper Mill, Hertfordshire, in 1803. It produced paper continuously with a forming section (wet end), a press section and a dryer section.
The increased demand for paper and an inadequate supply of rags drove the need to find alternatives. However, experiments with wood fibre were not successful until in 1844 when Friedrich Gottlob used a grinding wheel to free the fibres from wood. Also in 1844, Canadian Charles Fenerty and F.G. Keller improved the machines to use wood pulp in papermaking. These developments started a new era for the production of newsprint and by the end of the 19th-century almost all paper was made out of pulped wood, usually tree branches and waste wood from the timber saw mills.
The modern paper mill produces a continuous roll of paper rather than individual sheets. Some produce paper 150 metres in length and 10 metres (400 inches) wide at a speed of 100 km/h. (60 mph). Pulp is refined and mixed in water with additives to make a pulp slurry. The head-box of the paper machine distributes the slurry onto a moving, continuous sieve-like screen belt. Water drains from the slurry (by gravity or under vacuum), so that the pulp becomes a mat of randomly interwoven fibres. More water is removed by pressing rollers, aided by suction or heating. Once dry, a strong, flat, uniform sheet of paper is wound onto drums for printing or further processing. These large rolls of paper often weigh several tons.
The invention of the steam driven, rotary printing press, the fountain pen, the mass-produced pencil and an increase in literacy at that time transformed 19th century economies. With the introduction of cheaper paper, schoolbooks, fiction, non-fiction and newspapers became gradually more in demand by 1900. Wood based paper also meant that keeping personal diaries and writing letters became more common.
There were problems with paper made from stone ground-wood pulp. It tended to yellowing due to the presence of lignin and the original paper was prone to disintegrate over time, through processes known as slow fire, caused by the use of alum. So quality paper continued to be produced from more expensive but stable rag paper.
Modern, mass-market paperback books continue to use the cheaper mechanical papers but book publishers also now use acid-free paper for hardback and trade paperback books.
At the end of the 19th century a bleaching process was developed in Scandinavia, which made it possible to remove lignin from stone ground-wood. This greatly decreased the yellowing of paper with age so that cotton fibre from rags was no longer needed as a raw material. In 1985, bleaching with chlorine was replaced with bleaching with chlorates and chlorine dioxide.
The twentieth century saw the introduction of plastic "paper", paper-plastic laminates, paper-metal laminates, and paper infused with chemicals to provide special properties.
Corrugated (or pleated) paper was patented in England in 1856, and used as a stiffening liner for tall hats. Corrugated boxboard was patented in 1871 by Albert Jones of New York City for single-sided (single-face) corrugated board used for wrapping bottles and glass lantern chimneys. The first machine to produce large quantities of corrugated board was built in 1874 by G. Smyth, and in the same year Oliver Long improved upon Jones' design by inventing corrugated board.
Corrugated fiberboard, is made by sandwiching a fluted or corrugated sheet of containerboard between two flat linerboards. The corrugated sheet and the linerboards are made of kraft containerboard, a material usually over 0.01 inches (0.25 mm) thick. Double or triple (tri-wall) corrugated fiberboard is also made for larger or more easily damaged products.
The kraft paper (or kraft) or paperboard (cardboard) process removes most of the original lignin present in the wood which makes it stronger than most other papers and therefore more suitable for packaging material.
Sack kraft paper, or just sack paper, is a porous kraft paper with high elasticity and high tear resistance, designed for packaging products requiring strength and durability.
The Kellogg brothers were among first to use paperboard cartons to hold their corn cereal about 1900 CE. Another American packaging industry pioneer, the Kieckhefer Container Company, began making paper board shipping containers and paper milk cartons.
Robert Gair invented the pre-cut paperboard box in 1890 when he accidentally discovered that by cutting and creasing in one operation he could make prefabricated paperboard boxes. Applying this idea to corrugated boxboard was a simple development.
The corrugated box was first used for packaging glass and pottery containers and by the mid-1950s, these boxes allowed fruit and vegetables to be shipped without bruising, improving the return to producers and opening export markets. The use of paperboard quickly spread to almost every type of product.
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Middle Era
Non-FictionJesus and Muhammad adopted the Hebrew's belief in one God and Christianity and Islam spread throughout the world. The Chinese were using gunpowder in the 9th century and, by the 13th , cannon dominated the battlefields. Paper money appeared in China...
