Paper

a thin, flexible sheet of compacted vegetable fiber such as is used ordinarily for writing, printing, and various other purposes. The gray material with which the wasp builds a nest is genuine paper. An ingenious boy can make paper by grinding a piece of spruce or poplar on a wet grindstone until a handful of fiber has been collected. Boil this fiber for two or three hours; pound it with a hammer until it is fine; then throw a little of it in a kettle of hot water and let it settle until the floating fiber forms a film. The film may be lifted off by means of a sieve or a piece of wire cloth. Place the film between two pieces of blotting paper and run it through a clothes wringer. If the operation is a success the fine fibers of the wood will felt, forming a sheet of coarse paper.

The process thus described is essentially the plan followed in the four thousand or more paper mills of the world. It has been found that almost any vegetable fiber made fine enough will felt and form paper. Cotton, jute, hemp, flax, Spanish esparto grass, straw, and various woods are used. After cotton cloth has been worn out for clothing, the rags still make good paper. The finest writing papers are made from linen.

The newspapers of North America and northern Europe are printed chiefly on paper made from wood pulp. Spruce and poplar are the favorite woods. Timber is cut into sticks or blocks, usually about two feet in length. The sticks are stripped of bark by means of a sharp blade, managed much after the manner of a turning lathe. Knots and imperfections are cut out, usually with an axe. The blocks are converted into pulp by means of a grindstone set in a steel case. A current of water prevents the wood from charring and carries away the fiber as fast as it is torn off. The escaping pulp lodges on a wire sieve through which the water drains off. As fast as the pulp accumulates, it is rolled up into bundles of about twenty-five or fifty pounds. Figures for 1908 indicate that the pulp-makers of the United States made 4,655,688,000 pounds of pulp in that year. They used 3,661,176 cords, chiefly of spruce and poplar wood, valued as wood at $26,000,000 and as pulp at $90,000,000.

A separate supply of pulp is made by a chemical process. Chips are boiled in a solution of sulphurous acid until they are disintegrated. The two kinds of pulp are mixed together in an immense churn or beater in the proportion of about three parts of ground pulp to one of sulphite pulp. To each thousand pounds of pulp, the expert adds some rosin, or similar material, just enough to give the slightest degree of stickiness, and some aniline blue such as the housewife puts into her wash water to make her clothes white. The mass is then churned by powerful machinery and pressed through knives until the fiber is so fine and short as to be hardly recognizable. In this condition, it is mixed with water and passes into a long vat, the longer the better. The content of the vat has the appearance of milky water. An endless sieve or apron, running on bearings, gathers a film of the fiber and carries it out of the vat to a series of rollers. An endless web of paper leaves the apron and passes through almost numberless pairs of rollers. It is compacted, pressed, dried, and polished; and is wound up finally at the far end of a long building in a roll ready for the power press of the newspaper office.

A roll of this sort weighing 4,000 pounds was exhibited at the Buffalo Exposition. It was a continuous sheet of paper, 152 inches wide and six miles in length. A machine manufactured in Edinburgh in 1905 for a Swedish paper mill is designed to produce a continuous web of paper 150 inches wide at a rate of 500 feet per minute. It is estimated that the world's annual product of wood paper is not far from 18,000,000,000 pounds annually.

For small newspaper offices the web of paper is cut into sheets as fast as it comes from the paper-making machines. There are many details relating to the use of chemicals, sizing, the use of clay to fill up the texture of the paper, tinting, water marking, and many devices for cleaning and pulping rags and old rope, which it is unnecessary to describe here. Handmade paper is made in the same way, except that the web is lifted from the vat in small sheets and manipulated by hand. The finest grades are handmade. Tissue paper requires greater skill and care, of course, than wrapping paper, but the processes are practically the same. The paper of which United States currency is made comes from a mill at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Fine silk threads are mixed in the pulp to give strength and prevent counterfeiting.

So far as known, the first people to make paper by grinding up vegetable matter into a pulp and then spreading it on water to form a sheet were the Chinese. This method was in vogue among them two or three centuries at least before Christ. Strangely enough, they have not improved their methods. The printing paper still used by the Chinese court for its official bulletin is very crude indeed. A fine quality of oriental paper is made from the bamboo. It is believed that paper making was brought into the western world by the Saracens. They established a famous paper mill at Damascus. The first paper mill in Europe was built by them in Spain. Paper making began in France about 1189; in Germany about 1380. The English pride themselves on paper made as early as 1330. The first paper mill in the New World was built by William Rittenhouse. It was erected in 1690 at Germantown, now a suburb of Philadelphia.

Egypt, the home of the papyrus which gives its name to paper, has no paper mills. The United States, one of the youngest of nations, makes one-half of the world's paper. Our paper product for 1907 was valued at over $188,000,000. We sell about $7,000,000 worth abroad annually. England and Australia are our best customers. The Sunday morning papers of America require the pulp from sixty acres of forest. Canada has 450,000,000 acres of spruce suitable for pulp, and exports paper to the value of $1,250,000 a year.

Paper pulp is used in the manufacture of car wheels, binder bolts, paper boxes, carpet lining, pressed buckets, tubs, bricks for paving, roofing tile, blackboards, and boards. Telegraph poles made of rolled sheets of paper are light and last well. The Japanese make clothing, parasols, window frames, lanterns, handkerchiefs, and sandals of paper. The Germans make pressed paper barrels, boxes, vases, and milk bottles. In Norway there is a church large enough to seat a thousand people. It is built even to the belfry of compressed paper. Some "straw" hats are made of strips of water-proof paper dyed to imitate straw. It is estimated that the world's consumption of paper is increasing at the rate of 200,000 tons a year. In 1908 the director of the Paper Union of Vienna prepared an address on the paper production and consumption of the world. According to this authority, over 9,000 paper machines are at work. The world's production, all kinds of paper included, for the year named was approximately:

Country. . . . . Tons.

Total. . . . . 8,000,000

So far as the consumption of paper is an index of enlightenment, Canada leads the world. The consumption stated in pounds per person, all kinds of paper counted, is approximately:

Country. . . . . Lbs. per Person.

See Papyrus; Book; Printing Press; Newspaper; Periodical; Parchment