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V A HISTORY OF PAPER ITS klENE ; S.l£N 1 ITS REVELATIONS. Origin and Manufacture, Utility and Commercial Value an Indisi'ensahle Staple of the Com- mercial World. Holyoke, Mass., U. S. A. : CLARK W. BRYAN & COMPANY. 18S2. Copyrighted, 1881. Pater World Press. 1882. THE GTTTY CHtfTEB UBRARY AND ITS REVELATIONS. 25 number of bodies buried in these caverns must have been may be estimated by the fact, that, after thus being drawn upon for centuries, they still supply the Arabs with articles of sale eagerly bought by Europeans, and also fuel, and some- times clothing, for themselves. Is the papyrus — the final product, and not the plant — a true paper ? Some good recent writers use expressions from which we can only infer that they so consider it, and yet they often compare it with paper as now made in terms which leave a wide distinction between the two, distinguishing the former as a natural and the latter as a manu- factured paper. The writer upon this subject in Knight's Mechanical Dictionary defines paper as " a material made in thin sheets from a pulp of ground rags or other fiber, and used for writing or printing upon or for wrapping. ' Further on, he gives a fuller definition of " true paper " as " made of rags or other vegetable fiber, reduced to a pulp, gathered into a sheet, felted in setting, and dried." Worcester and Webster, among the uses to which paper may be applied, add to "writing, printing or wrapping," " various other purposes." Webster, correctly as it seems to us, omits the 26 PAPER: ITS GENESIS condition that the pulp must be obtained by grinding rags or other fiber. And although, as we well know, paper, either in its completed state, or in the various stages preceding that, may be, and constantly is, employed for other important purposes than that of a writing or printing ma- terial, do we not daily see true paper that can be used for no other purpose than a writing mate- rial without a total change in its character ? The definition of a thing is strictly the descrip- tion of that thing as it is, without reference to the process by which it may become so, or any other by which it may be transformed to some- thing else. When we go beyond that we trench upon the province of the encyclopaedist, or the essayist. Paper would be paper if we found it growing in leaves upon the trees, as it would be paper still although it could not be, by any pres- sure, changed into papier mache. We do not mean to say that it is not a uniform and valuable quality of paper as we have it, that it can be so transformed and also used for many purposes aside from its original one, but only that this is not an essential property in its character, not a necessary element in the definition of the word. AND ITS REVELATIONS. 2 7 We may therefore safely follow Webster in eliminating from the definition of a true paper, the requirement that the pulp from which it is made shall be artificially prepared by grinding, or otherwise. With this variation from the old authorities, the writing material which the old world obtained from the papyrus plant must be recognized as a genuine paper. In the folds of that wonderful reed the old Egyptian paper man- ufacturers found a pulp sufficient for their pur- pose and abundantly supplied with a natural size. Beyond that their processes were coincident with our own, however much they differed in the de- tails of their application. To be sure, with all the beating and pressure it received, the original form of the plant's fiber was not destroyed, but, after thousands of years, may be now plainly seen in the earliest specimens of papyri roll extant. But we do not now destroy the fiber of the sub- stance from which we make paper for the sake of destroying it, but because it is necessary in order that it may become a pulp at all, and thus be ready for a new arrangement of its particles. Paper must be in " thin " sheets. This is a somewhat indefinite requirement. The papyri 28 PAPER: ITS GENESIS were so bulky that a copy of Ovid's Metamor- phoses, which in modern print and paper fills only a very small duodecimo volume, covered eighteen papyri rolls, occupying the space upon a library shelf of as many octavo volumes. A copy of the works of Homer, Virgil, Livy, Sallust, or similar authors, would have filled more than ten times as many rolls. And this fact we must take into consideration when we read of the large number of volumes in the Alexandrian and other ancient libraries ; for a volume meant simply a roll. And yet the papyri rolls were so flexible that, with some little re-moistening, they may, after their immensely prolonged drying, to-day be rolled and unrolled. They had no such thickness as would exclude them from the list of true papers. The papyrus was, then, in our estimation, a true paper ; while it still, as we shall presently show, differed widely in some respects from the true paper of to-day. We speak familiarly of paper as being used for various purposes which do not come within the definition we have given ; meaning, not that finished paper is so used, but that its fiber in dif- AND ITS REVELATIONS. 2 9 ferent stages of preparation may be turned to those purposes, as the manufacture of papier mache and other articles which are certainly not " thin," and in this respect the papyrus is its equal, for Herodotus tells us that " the priests wear shoes made of the byblos, the sails of the Egyp- tian boats are made of the byblos, the priests read to me out of a byblos roll the names of three hun- dred and thirty kings." The close affiliation between paper, as we now have it, and the vegetable substances which, with more or less preparation, were, in the early ages, used in its place, is indicated by the modern no- menclature of the paper world. Thus we have paper from papyrus, and Bible from the Egyptian name of the same plant. Folio is from the Latin folium, a leaf, and we still use it, in its translated form, both for the foliage of a tree and the thin sheets of a book. Page is the Latin pagina, a written leaf. Tablets from tabula, a board ; the the board smeared with wax used by the Greeks and Romans to write upon. Library is from the Latin, liber, a book, but previously the inner bark of a tree, from which the material for books was made. It is a happy, but doubtless accidental, 30 PAPER: ITS GENESIS coincidence, that the same word means free, un- shackled, independent, open and fresh. Schedule is from sckeda, the Latin for a strip of papyrus, and afterwards for a sheet of paper. Code and codicil are from codex, the trunk or stem of a tree. Volume is from vo lumen, any thing that is rolled or wound up7 as sheets of papyrus, and afterwards of parchment, were wound up. In a more liberal sense it was applied to the water which rolls over a fall, and to other rolling and pouring masses. But the first volumes were of papyrus; and each separate roll, as now each bound collection of written or printed leaves, was counted a volume ; a fact which one must always bear in mind when he reads of the immense num- ber of volumes in some ancient libraries. It will moderate his wonder why so few names of the books which composed them have come down to us. We may perhaps as well speak here as else- where of the effect which the cheapness and abundance of printed books has had in reducing the use of sculpture upon stone or other endur- ing material for the preservation of national records. For this, we now trust to the immense r AND ITS REVELATIONS. numbers and constant reproduction of printed histories. With this aid, the plain, unsculptured shaft on Bunker Hill tells its story as satisfactor- ily, and more eloquently, than Cleopatra's needles, with all their wealth of tediously inscribed hiero- glyphics, tell the history which they were de- signed to commemorate. Parchment, the material most used by the an- cients in the place of paper, next to the prepared papyrus, is the general name for the skins of cer- tain animals, when prepared to write upon, and " for other purposes." It is told in the old books that when Eumenes, king of Pergamos, some 200 years B. C, was ambitious to build up a large library, the Ptolemy then ruling in Egypt, jealous of rivalry in that respect, prohibited the export of papyrus, and that Eumenes finally circumvented him and accomplished his purpose by the inven- tion of parchment, which received its Latin name, pergamena, from that of his kingdom. If the story is true, the zeal and ingenuity of Eumenes availed him little, for, when Marc Antony was one of the masters of the world, he seized the library of Pergamos and presented it to his bril- liant and beautiful but profligate mistress, Cleo- 32 PAPER: ITS GENESIS patra, the Egyptian queen, who added it to that, already famous, at Alexandria, whose fate it eventually shared. It is, however, quite certain that the skins of animals were among the earliest materials used in the place afterwards filled by paper. Herodotus tells us that the skins of sheep and goats were in common use as a writing material more than two centuries at least before the time of Eumenes, and other writers more obscurely refer to it as in use long before that time. Rev. Dr. Humphrey Prideaux, an eminent philosophical writer in the early part of the seventeenth century, claimed that the authentic copy of " The Law " which Hilkiah found in the Temple and sent to King Josiah, must have been on parchment, as no other writing material could have lasted for the period of 830 years which lay between the writing of that copy of the Law and the reign of Josiah. The intimate relations between the Jews and the Egyptians, and modern discoveries as to the dur- ability of papyrus paper, somewhat impair the force of Dr. Prideaux's reasoning. But we still have no instance of papyrus paper preserved for so long periods, except when buried with cities AND ITS REVELATIONS. 33 or with men, it has been excluded from the air and other destructive agents. And, setting aside all Hebraic story, we still have the authority of Diodorus and Herodotus to the use, long before the time of Eumenes, by Greeks, Romans and Persians, of skins dressed substantially as parch- ment now is. What may rightly be claimed for Eumenes and those associated with him is, that they made improvements in the manufacture of parchment which better fitted it for use in book- making. If parchment had a later invention than papyrus paper, it has also had a longer continuance. Fine parchment is now made from the skins of sheep and she-goats, but a better article from those of kids, lambs and young calves ; the finest vellum from the skins of still-born calves, kids and lambs. Of the coarser parchments, Knight's Mechanical Dictionary says, with as much truth, and with more wit than is commonly found in encyclo- paedias — this dictionary being an encyclopaedia : " Coarse parchment for drum heads, etc., is made from calves', wolves', asses' and he-goats' skins. The asses' skin is said to be remarkably sonorous, and it is no wonder, seeing the amount PAPER: ITS GENESIS of noise it has contained at various times. The Greeks found the bones of the ass a superior article for making flutes. The flute and the drum, a rich asinine combination, which probably suggested the Scotch bag-pipe whose drone is nearest to the paternal bray of anything artificial." In the manufacture of parchment to be written upon, the object was to render the skins thin, pliant, and of a uniform surface, free from fatty matter and other obstacles to its receiving the fluid ink properly. The other qualities having already been in a good measure attained, it was probably the aim and success of Eumenes and his associates to prepare the surface of the parch- ment to properly " take " the fluid ink and pre- vent the necessity of recourse to the old paint-like article used with a brush — a much slower and more costly method of writing or copying. Knight thus describes the modern manufacture of parchment: "After removing the wool, the skin is steeped in lime and then stretched on a wooden frame : its face is then scraped with a half round knife. The next process consists in rubbing the skin, previously sprinkled with pow- dered chalk or slacked lime, and scraping it with AND ITS REVELATIONS. 35 a knife. It is then rubbed with a lamb skin hav- ing the wool on, so as to smooth the surface and raise a very fine nap ; after which, if any greasy matter remains, it is again steeped in the lime pit for a few days. The grain surface is then re- moved with a knife and the skin pumiced, if necessary, to give it an equal thickness." A peculiarity of the manufacture, not men- tioned by Knight, is that the frame, technically " the herse," upon which the skins are stretched, by the best makers, is surrounded by screws, much like the pegs by which the violin is tuned. This is probably a modern invention, the an- cients having used a hoop, as the smaller manu- facturers now do. But, even with the herse, there is no automatic power, but merely a use of natural mechanical forces applied by hand. A fine proof of the value of parchment is found in the fact that, during the dark ages, the monks used the rolls containing the great works of an- tiquity — and which their more enlightened prede- cessors had treasured up in the monastic libraries — as a material on which to indite their supersti- tious legends and scholastic controversial essays. Upon the revival of learning, chemical science 36 PAPER: ITS GENESIS found the means to remove the inferior ink of the convents and revive the better, which had been erased. In those curiously restored manu- scripts — known as palimpsests — some of the choicest classics have been preserved as perfectly as though they had been hidden in the ashes of Herculaneum or the catacombs of the Ptolemies. r AND ITS REVELATIONS. 37 PART II. The Second Era of Paper Making — Hand-Made Paper from Vegetable Pulp. It being admitted that the papyri rolls were essentially a true paper, and that parchment is well adapted to some of the purposes for which paper is used, and in some degree to others, it is nevertheless true that the great revolution in the fundamental principles of the manufacture took place when paper was first made of rags, or other vegetable fiber, reduced to a pulp, gathered into a sheet, felted in setting, and dried. "Human invention," it is said, "had in this case been anticipated by the wasp, which may be considered as a professional paper-maker, devot- ing a large portion of her time and energies to the production of this fabric, of which she builds her nest. For this purpose she seeks dry wood 38 PAPER: ITS GENESIS — fence rails and weather-beaten boards being a favorite source of supply — which she saws, or rasps, by mastication, into a paste, which, mixed with a natural size exuded for the purpose, she spreads into a sheet in a manner truly marvelous." As neither the wasp, hornet, or any other in- sect which operates in a similar manner, ever used its product as a writing material — perhaps from ignorance of the bleaching and polishing processes — we have no means of determining the date when the insect manufacturer began : author- ities differ as to the probabilities — all the way from six thousand to six million, or more, years. The date of the invention by man of the art of paper-making from a vegetable pulp, prepared artifically from some vegetable fiber, is somewhat less uncertain, but it varies still over three hun- dred years in the estimate of different historians. The earliest estimates place it in the reign of Wan-te of the Chinese imperial dynasty, which lasted from the years 179 to 156 before Christ; the latest at about 200 A. D. So far as we have any information, the Chinese have an undoubted title to the honor of the in- vention. Four kinds of paper have been made AND ITS REVELATIONS. 39 in China at least ever since the latest of these dates, and it may be that their invention or im- provement from time to time caused the diversity of opinions we have mentioned. All these kinds appear to have been known as early as A. D. 250, and to have experienced very little change from that time until the Celestial Empire was recently opened to the influences of our terrestrial civilization. These papers are known as Rice, Silk, Bamboo and Bark. Rice paper is a material so delicate and filmy that at the first glance one would think it illy adapted to receive writing or printing ; but it is much used for those purposes, and we have seen a beautiful little volume composed of it and filled with exquisite paintings of flowers. It is made from the pith of a leguminous plant, which the Chinese import from India and the island of Formosa, where it grows in abundance. The pith, having been prepared of the desired length for the sheet, is cut spirally into a thin slice, which is then flattened, pressed and dried. It obtains its name by receiving a sizing wholly or prin- cipally of rice water. The similarity of this proc- ess to the preparation of papyrus is so striking 4Q PAPER: ITS GENESIS as to render it probable that it was suggested by it. Bark paper is made from the smaller branches of a variety of the mulberry tree. The bark, after being separated from the stem by boiling in lye, is macerated in water for several days ; the outer part scraped off, and the inner boiled and stirred in lye until it separates. It is then washed in a pan or sieve, and worked by the hands into a pulp, which is afterwards spread on a table and beaten fine with a mallet. It is next placed in a tub with an infusion of rice and a root called oreni, and all thoroughly mixed. The sheets are formed by dipping a mould made of strips of bul- rushes, confined in a frame into the vat. After moulding, the sheets are laid one upon another with strips of reed between. A board loaded with weights is then laid upon the pile to express the water, and, when that is accomplished, they are separated and dried in the sun. This paper is even more delicate than the rice; so much so that when it is necessary to write on both sides of a page two must be glued together. Suppos- ing, as the natural order seems to suggest, that the rice paper was the first and the bark the AND ITS REVELATIONS. 41 second made by the Chinese, we have here the first appearance of the pulping process in the manufacture. The bamboo paper, made from the fibre of that plant, reduced to a pulp and gathered in films, is, however, very ancient, and possibly older than the bark. The silk paper is the victim of a misnomer, arising from the misinformation of early travelers, which it has been found almost impossible to correct, for it is commonly believed to be made of silk. Silk is an animal, not a vegetable, sub- stance, and, although a few silken rags or a little refuse silk may occasionally be mixed with other material, they cannot by themselves be reduced to a pulp suitable for making paper. The silk paper of China is made, like our own, from cotton and linen rags, hemp, unmanufactured cotton and the like, sometimes mingled with wood and bam- boo pulp and possibly with a little silk. The rags, cotton and hemp, are prepared by being cut and well washed. They are then bleached, and by natural maceration of twelve days' duration converted into a pulp. This is made into balls weighing about four pounds, which, having been saturated with water, are spread upon a frame of 4 2 PAPER: ITS GENESIS fine reeds and pressed under heavy weights. The drying is completed by suspension of the sheets upon the wall of a proper room ; and they are finished by being coated with a gum size, and polished with some smooth, hard substance. The sheets are sometimes of very large dimensions — reaching twelve feet in length with a correspond- ing breadth, the moulds being managed by the aid of pulleys. The art of paper-making spread from China throughout Central Asia, and there the Saracens found it during their conquests in Bukhara, about A. D. 704. It is curious, in this connection, to note the method of the paper manufacture as it was found by Moncroft in his travels a little before 18 18, in the neighboring region of Thibet: At a little distance from us, and close to the river, two people are engaged in preparations for making paper. They have two large bags of old paper that has been written upon, manufactured from the bark of the Latbarua. A few large flat stones are placed near the edge of the river where a stream has been divided from the main current by a low bank of sods. On the grass are two frames of wood, covered on one side with fine cloth, the other being open, thus forming a shallow tray. The workmen begin by dipping some of the old paper in the water, and then beat it upon a flat stone with a small round one until it is reduced to a pulp. One of the trays is then placed in the broad part of the canal, r AND ITS REVELATIONS. 43 leaving a space for the water to run under it. The pulp is then put into a gear pump with water and worked into a fine paste. It is then poured upon the cloth and thus sunk two or three inches in the stream, so that the water rises through the cloth into the tray and still further dilutes the pulp. The floating impurities are picked, and the pulp agitated by hand until it is supposed to be sufficiently clear, when the current of water is lessened. The workman sees if the cloth be equally covered with pulp, and if any spots look thin, he stirs with his finger some other that appears too thickly covered, and raises a cloud of paste which he leads to the thin place, and by making a little eddy with a gradually decreasing motion deposits it there. When the sheet is, by this simple process rendered even, it is raised out of the water and laid upon the ground to dry. After the greater portion of the moisture is extracted it is gradually inclined from its horizontal position, until when nearly dry it becomes upright. When per- fectly hard, one corner of the large sheet is lifted from the cloth and then the whole detached by hand. It is a long way from this primitive process and these rude appliances to the costly modern paper mill filled with complicated machinery and skilled manufacturers. But it is the first step which is half the journey, and the proverbial persistence of the orientals in adhering to old methods renders it probable that the paper- making which, in 1817, Mr. Moncroft found in Thibet was very like that found A. D. 704 by the Arabian conqueror in Bukhara: somewhat 44 PAPER: ITS GENESIS more rude, perhaps, in its appliances, but essen- tially the same in its operations. The material for the Bukhara paper is, how- ever, said to have been cotton. At least that was the material used by the Arabians when that enterprising and cultivated people carried the manufacture home. In the eighth century the Saracens made large conquests in Spain, where they established the flourishing Kingdom of Grenada, rich in many arts, among which was that of paper-making for which they at first, probably of necessity, used flax, although in their old Arabian home cotton had been the chief material. Cotton, however, soon resumed its reign. The raw cotton being used, the product was yellow and brittle and the Saracens made little improvement in it. Christian Spaniards, who had learned the art, remedied the difficulty in 1085 A. D., by substituting rags, and the same class, in Xatina, an ancient city of Valencia, in 1 151, made the further improvement of stamping the rags, cotton, etc., into pulp, by water power. The paper of this city became famous, and was exported both to the East and the West. Cotton paper became general about the close AND ITS REVELATIONS. 45 of the twelfth century, but in the fourteenth, having been found as it was then made, not to possess sufficient strength or solidity for many purposes, it was almost entirely superseded by that made of hemp and linen rags; not weakened in their fibre in bleaching as they are in the present mode, which destroys the natural gum. These old linen papers, well sized with gelatine, retain their original qualities in many specimens even to the present day. The manufacture of this class of paper became common in France, Spain and Italy in the fourteenth century. The firs t German mill was built at Nuremberg, in 1390. There are claims of the existence of a document written upon English linen paper bearing the date of 1320; but the best English authority which we are able to consult believes that the manufacture did not exist there until near the end of the fifteenth century, when the " Bartolomceus " of Wynkin de Worde, the father of English typography, (published in 1496) speaks of a superior kind of paper made for that work by Thomas Tate at his mills in Stevenhenge, Hertfordshire. In 1498, Henry VII. gave this mill the munificent subsidy of sixteen shillings 46 PAPER: ITS GENESIS and eight pence, which it does not seem to have survived, for we hear no more of it, although Tate lived until 15 14. In 1588, one Spielman, a German, and jeweler to her majesty, Queen Elizabeth, established a mill at Dartford, and got knighted for his enterprise. But, probably owing to the civil wars and the political disturbances connected with them, it was long before the paper manufacture flourished in Great Britain. While France, by the superior quality of her product, was enabled to export it in immense quantities to all the countries of Europe — 2,000,000 livres in value in the year 1658 to Holland alone — England was importing almost her entire con- sumption. In 1663, says one authority, she received paper to the value of ,£100,000 from Holland alone; evidently, however, the product of France, as according to the same authority the first paper mill in Holland was not built until 1685. So slow was the progress of the manufacture in England that in Anderson's Commercial Dictionary, printed at London in 1826, it is stated that paper was first manufact- ured in the Kingdom in 1690, and that up to that time she paid ,£100,000 annually for that AND ITS REVELATIONS. 47 imported from France. In 1690 the war with that country at once cut off this supply and called for high duties upon that received from other sources. Even the prospect of this state of affairs had in the year before rendered paper so dear that printing almost entirely ceased, except for absolutely necessary purposes ; and now, in 1690, some French Protestant refugees, who had settled in England began the manufact- ure of white writing paper — that, then recently, made there being brown. The business did not, however, become general. In 1696 a bill was brought into Parliament to lay a tax of 25 per cent, ad valorem upon all imported paper, parch- ment and vellum, 20 per cent, upon that made in England, and 17 upon that in the hands of dealers for sale. While this bill was pending, one company published a protest in which they stated that there were not above one hundred paper mills in all England, of which none, except their own, made anything except brown, and the coarsest kinds of white, paper. Their own prod- uct was worth ,£8,000 per annum ; the others would not average ,£200 ; that of all England would not exceed ,£28,000. All the parchment, 4 8 PAPER: ITS GENESIS vellum and paste-board made or imported in 1695 was not worth more than £"10,000 The bill nevertheless became a law, and, not- withstanding the slight discrimination in favor of the British manufacture, we are not surprised to learn that in 171 3 it had "fallen into decay;" but rather to find that in that year Thomas Wat- kin, a London stationer, succeeded in reviving it, and soon carried it to high repute and perfection. It increased so that in 1721 the whole quantity of paper made in Great Britain rose to 300,000 reams, or about two-thirds the whole consump- tion of the realm. The value of that made two years later, in 1723, was estimated at ,£780,000. But it was many years still, after this, before the English manufacture acquired an equality with that of the continent of Europe ; for it is emphatically stated that James Whatman, who in 1770 established a superior manufacture at Maidstone in Kent, and became celebrated in his art, had first worked as a journeyman in some of the principal paper mills " on the Continent." After this, the work prospered. In 1799 twenty-four millions pounds of rags, of which over one-third were imported from the Continent, r AND ITS REVELATIONS. 49 were made into paper in England, and in 1800 the duty on paper manufactured in the Kingdom was ,£315,805. Favoring laws and the zeal of the manufacturer had made that change from the statement of the Protest of 1696. The introduction of the paper manufacture into the British colonies in North America ante- dated, however, even the era of that protest ; and the product seems to have been not of the quality styled " brown," although doubtless, not of the purity which would delight a printer of 1 88 1. Before James Whatman's enterprise was well under way the amount of the paper-making in the colonies was so great as to intensely dis- gust their remarkably affectionate, cherishing mother beyond the seas. William Rettinghuysen, whose name anglicized into Rittenhouse, was afterwards rendered famous by his great grandson, David, the mathematician and astronomer, emigrated from Holland among the early settlers of Germantown, Pa., now a suburb of Philadelphia ; and we are not sure that the family name will not finally find its chief and most lasting honor in the fact that its first ancestor in America established in 1690 the first 50 PAPER: ITS GENESIS paper mill in America. In this work he was associated with William Bradford, for whose character we must refer the reader to Franklin's Autobiography. The mill was built upon a small stream in Roxborough near Philadelphia, still called Paper-Mill Run. Every household in the northern colonies then made linen from the flax grown as a staple upon almost every farm, and it was used for the purposes for which cotton is now chiefly employed; so that the rags and worn- out articles of this material furnished abundant stock for one mill. We condense the following statement of the other paper mills in America previous to the year 1800 from Joel Munsell's admirable " Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper- Making." The second mill in America was built in 17 10 at Crefeld, now a part of Germantown, by Wil- liam De Frees, a connection of the Rittenhouse family. In 1697 William Bradford, a rather speculative sort of person, leased his quarter part of the Roxborough mill to William and Nicholas Rittenhouse for ten years, at the annual rent of seven reams of printing paper, ten reams of good writing paper and two reams of blue AND ITS REVELATIONS. paper. In 1724 Bradford applied to the execu- tive council of New York for the exclusive right to make paper in that province for fifteen years. Not getting it he did not have a chance to sell out to some practical manufacturer. It is need- less to say that he built no mill himself. In 1828 William Demees and John Gorgas, who had been apprentices of Rittenhouse, erected the third paper mill in Pennsylvania, and are "said to have made paper resembling tanned asses' skin from a species of rotten stone found in the vicinity, which was prepared for use by being thrown into the fire for a short time." If there is any truth in the story the stone must have been fibrous asbestos, and might have remained in a fire more than a short time without hurting it. In 1854 one Maniere took out a patent in England for making a fire-proof paper out of this substance : but it was known in the time of Pliny. In 1728 the General Court of Massachusetts granted to a company the exclu- sive right of making paper in the Province for ten years on condition that in the first fifteen months they should make 115 reams of brown paper, and sixty reams of printing paper; the 52 PAPER: ITS GENESIS second year the same with the addition of fifty reams of writing paper, and each year afterwards the same with the further addition of twenty-five reams of superior writing paper. The same vice clogged the paper manufacture which for many years retarded the progress of the woolen : each maker, instead of perfecting himself in a single branch of his business, undertook all ; the same mill in one case making broadcloths, satinets, cassimeres, etc., and in the other the several classes of paper. The first paper mill in New England — not then specially a manufacturing section — went into operation at Milton, Massachusetts, in 1730, under the patent granted two years before. The manager was David Henchman, a Boston book- seller, who received some aid from the General Court, and in 1731 exhibited creditable specimens of his work before that august body. The mill was discontinued after a few years from lack of a skilled workman; but it was revived in 1770 — a citizen of Boston obtaining for a British soldier stationed there, a furlough long enough for him to put it in operation ; a favor which the powers over the water would have hardly approved. r AND ITS REVELATIONS. 53 The public interest in this mill is shown by an announcement in the News Letter in i 769 that "the bell cart will go through Boston before the end of next month, to collect rags for the paper mill at Milton, when all people who will encour- age the paper manufactory may dispose of them ;" and the public zeal was spurred by the adding of the following poetic effusion : " Rags are as beauties which concealed lie, But when in paper how it charms the eye. Pray save your rajjs, new beauties to discover, For paper, truly, every one's a lover; By the pen and press such knowledge is displayed As wouldn't exist if paper was not made. Wisdom of things, mysterious, divine, Illustriously doth on paper shine." In 1768 Christopher Leffingwell became the first paper-maker in Connecticut, and established a mill at Norwich, being encouraged by a bounty from the colony of two pence per quire on all good writing paper, and one penny upon all printing and common paper. In 1 770 he received this bounty upon 4,020 quires of writing paper and 10,600 of printing paper. The government of the colony, probably considering the industry well established, then withdrew its bounty; but 54 PAPER: ITS GENESIS the country was close upon the era of the Revo- lution, and it was a mistake to withdraw encour- agement from a manufacture which furnished a product so necessary as paper. In this year there were in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware — then the chief seats of the paper manufacture — forty mills whose product was valued at ,£100,000, not, probably, the pound sterling, but the colonial pound, worth in Federal currency three dollars, thirty-three and one-third cents. Massachusetts when the Revolution com- menced had but three small paper mills, and Rhode Island only one, and that out of repair. Connecticut had at least one, in addition to Leffingwell's ; that of Watson and Ledyard at East Hartford, which in 1776 wholly supplied the press of Hartford — then sending out eight thousand copies of newspapers weekly — and also furnished the greater part of the writing paper used in Connecticut and in Western Massachu- setts, as well as much of that required in the continental army. In Southern New York there were in 1776 at least two mills ; as Thomas Loosely and Thomas Ems obtained exemption from military service r AND ITS REVELATIONS. 55 for a master workman and two attendants for each mill, as indispensable to the prosecution of the business. Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina and other provinces at once took measures to increase the supply, but with no sufficient effect. The paper famine continued to be severe, and what could be procured, generally of the poorest quality; everything like rags being ground up together to make paper, giving it the peculiar tints observable in the publications and manu- scripts of the period. Paper sufficiently thin, strong, pliable and inflammable for the making of cartridges was especially scarce. Upon the occupation of the city of Philadelphia by the American army in 1778, paper of this class was called for by proclamation, and searched for by files of soldiers, with small result, the largest quantity being a sermon preached in favor of defensive war during the French and Indian troubles, and printed by Franklin. Twenty-five hundred copies were found in a garret, and employed in making the musket cartridges after- wards used in the battle of Monmouth. In 1 78 1 the public printer of New York was J 56 PAPER: ITS GENESIS unable to obtain paper upon which to print the journal of the Assembly. After the Revolution, paper mills multiplied, but not so rapidly that there were not until the end of the century frequent periods of great scarcity, sometimes compelling newspaper pub- lishers in certain localities to suspend their issues for a time. The greatest seat of the paper manufacture in America is now found in the four western coun- ties of Massachusetts, a region full of its mills, and with flourishing cities and towns largely dependent upon it for their prosperity. In the sixth century Cassiodorus wrote : " It is a noble invention of ingenious Memphis that the beauti- ful texture (papyrus paper) made in a single spot should cover all the writing desks of the world." The world is practically many times larger now than it was in the sixth century, and has a great many more writing desks ; and it is certainly a thing of note that the " beautiful textures " made in a single section, circumscribed, and remote from metropolitan centres, not only supply a very large proportion of them, but supply greater needs, of which the sixth century never dreamed. AND ITS REVELATIONS. 57 The pioneer of the manufacture in this region, to which it is now so familiar, was Zenas Crane of Worcester, who in 1799 went "prospecting" through it, on horseback — as most traveling there was then done — in search of a proper location for a paper mill, and finally selected one on the west branch of the Housatonic River in the town of Dalton, Berkshire County. The owner, Martin Chamberlin, was so doubtful of the success of the enterprise that he would only give an oral " per- mit to build and try it," and after the thing was done gave a deed "for the land with the mill standing thereon." The mill, afterwards known as " The Old Berk- shire," was built in the spring of 1801, by Henry Wiswell and Zenas Crane. As described by Mr. Charles O. Brown, president of the Carson & Brown Company, which now owns the works which have succeeded it, it was a one vat mill with a daily capacity for making 20 "posts " con- taing 1 2 5 sheets of paper each, of "cap " or " folio" size, or a weight of from 100 to 200 pounds. Mr. Crane was the manager, and, in addition, there were required an engineer at $3 a week, a vat- man and coucher at $3 each, a lay-boy at 60 cents 58 PAPER: ITS GENESIS and board, a man for general work, and two girls at 75 cents a week each and board The history of the business in Dalton and Berkshire is inter- esting, but it was recently told in an essay by Lieut-Governor Weston, which was published in The Paper World, and is also too local for our present purpose, except in so far as it illustrates the general progress of the manufacture. About the time of the building of the Old Berk- shire mill, the Fourdrinier machine was invented and although it was several years before it was in- troduced in American mills and many before the first was employed in Berkshire, it marked a new era in the general manufacture and we suspend our account of particular establishments to note some of the great improvements which had been made previous to this invention. The first point in the manufacture of paper is like the old recipe for cooking a hare : " First, catch your hare " — First, gather your rags. Very much depends upon the character of the rags, and that very much upon the civilization and re- finement of the region in, or the class from which, they are collected. But the method and sources of this supply in themselves form a large subject, AND ITS REVELATIONS. 59 which we pass over here. Sufficient, that there are at least, as sorted by the foreign rag mer- chants, five different qualities, and that in the mills a still more careful discrimination is desir- able. Says Tomlinson, a high English authority : " If rags of different qualities were ground at the same engine the finest and best parts would be ground and carried off before the coarser were sufficiently reduced to make a pulp. In the sort- ing of rags intended for the manufacture of fine paper, hems and seams are kept apart, and coarse cloth separated from fine. Cloth made of tow must be separated from that made of linen, cloth of hemp from cloth of flax. Even the degree of wear should be attended to, for if rags compara- tively new are mixed with those much worn, the one will be reduced to a good pulp while the other is so completely ground up as to pass through the hair strainers, thus occasioning, not only loss of material, but loss of beauty in the paper ; for the smooth, velvet softness in some papers may be produced by the finer particles thus carried off. The pulp produced from imperfectly as- sorted rags has a cloudy appearance, in conse- quence of some parts being less reduced than 6o PAPER: ITS GENESIS others, and the paper made from it is also cloudy, or thicker in some parts than others, as is evident on holding a sheet up before the light When it is necessary to mix different qualities of rags in order to produce different qualities of paper, the rags should be ground separately and the various pulps mixed afterwards." At what time these refinements in the manu- facture were severally introduced does not ap- pear ; they seem to be the result of the experience of practical workers, like Whatman ; a natural and gradual growth, unmarked by sudden transi- tions. The sorting at the mill is done by women and children. Each sorter stands before a table frame covered at the top with wire cloth of about nine meshes to the square inch. To the frame a long steel blade is attached in a standing posi- tion, and the sorter shreds the rags by drawing them across the edge. Sometimes the seams and edges are cut out and sorted by themselves, and sometimes they are ripped open with a sharp, small knife. The long knife attached to the frame was formerly, and is sometimes still in American mills, the ends of broken scythes. A great deal of dust shaken out in this operation AND ITS REVELATIONS. 6l falls through the wire cloth into a receptacle be- low. The rags, as they are cut and sorted, are thrown into compartments surrounding the table and specially assigned to each class. In many cases, after unpacking bales of rags it is necessary to partially cleanse them in a duster ; that is a rapidly revolving cylinder covered with wire netting and enclosed in a tight box. Much dust, which might otherwise vitiate the air of the sorting room, is thus thrown out. The " stamp- ing " method of pulping rags, of which mention has been made, prevailed before the use of the duster and when there was scant sorting of the ragr. It was then the practice to pile the rags in large stone vats and leave them a month or six weeks, with frequent stirring and a constant sup- ply of water, to rot or ferment until the fiber be- came sufficiently loose to be reduced to pulp by pounding with stampers in wooden mortars. A writer cotemporary with this method thus de- scribes the further process : " These mortars are cut out in a block of heart of oak, well seasoned, the cavity being of an oval figure about eighteen inches broad, thirty inches long and eighteen or twenty deep, the bottom concave and lined with an iron plate an inch thick, eight inches 62 PAPER : ITS GENESIS broad and thirty long, shaped inward like a mould for a salmon, with the head and tail rounded. In the middle of the mortar is a cavity, beneath the plate, and four or five grooves are cut, forming channels which lead to a hole cut from the bottom of the cavity quite through the block; it is covered by a piece of hair sieve fas- tened to the inside. This plate is grooved to make teeth, on which the teeth of the hammers act, to cut the rags in pieces. The use of the hair sieve is to prevent anything going out except the foul water. Two hammers work side by side in each mortar, and are lifted alternately by the mill. They are sometimes made, in the same manner as the stampers of an oil mill, to lift perpendicularly. In other mills they are large hammers moving on a center, like a fulling mill, and lifted by cogs upon the mill shaft in the same man- ner. The mortars are kept constantly supplied with fair water by little troughs, leading from a cistern which is kept full by small buckets affixed to the floats of the water wheel ; these when they have raised the water to the top pour it into the cistern in the same manner as the Persian wheel." This was an ingenious contrivance, as will be seen, and a vast improvement upon the primitive method of hand-beating with mallets or stones ; but its operation was tedious, and the result not perfect. It was easily superseded by an invention made in Holland about the year 1759, and hence called the " Dutch Engine," but of late more com- monly simply " The Rag Engine." Essentially there are two engines arranged in pairs upon dif- ferent levels, the bottom of one being higher than AND ITS REVELATIONS. 63 the top of the other, so that the contents of the higher may be let off into the lower ; the stuff partially pulped in one becoming completely so in the other. Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary describes them as follows : " The two are alike in general construction, consisting of an ob- long trough with semi-circular ends. They are made of wood lined with lead, or may be entirely of cast-iron. The trough is divided by a longitudinal partition, on one side of which is journaled a re- volving cylinder provided with teeth. This cylinder is capable of being raised or lowered, and works against a block fixed in the lower part of the trough, which is also provided with cutters cor- responding to those of the cylinder. The first, or upper machine, is termed the Washer, as into it the rags, after being boiled in lye, are introduced. A current of water is allowed to flow through the trough, and the roller, in its elevated position, is set in motion, which thoroughly washes and cleanses the rags. The roller is then lowered in its bearings and the speed of rotation increased, causing a constant current circu- larly around the trough, carrying the pulp between the roller and the block until it is reduced to what is technically known as 'half stuff.' This is then transferred to the second engine, known as the beater. During this part of the process the bleaching material is added. The Beater, or Pulping Engine, is precisely similar to the washer, except that its roller and block are provided with a large number of cutters, and it is driven at higher speed. * * * * The pulp in its finished condition is called 'whole stuff] and is run into a reservoir whence it is taken out as it is wanted to sup- ply the vats." The rag engine is still in use, with some im- 6 4 PAPER: ITS GENESIS provements, but substantially of the same con- struction. At first, in Holland, it was driven by wind-mills; in England and America chiefly by water power. Of course steam is now largely employed. After the rags had been cut and beaten into whole stuff, all the other processes of the manu- facture were performed by hand, until about the opening of the present century ; the method being that described below : " The ' whole stuff,' now often called the ' beaten pulp,' prepared in the engine, is run out by pipes into the stuff chest, where, if there are different kinds, they are mixed. It is then transferred to vats or tubs, each of about five feet in diameter and two and a half feet deep, provided at the top with planks inclined inward to prevent slopping during the moulding. In the Old Berkshire mill, and doubtless in others in America, these vats were square and smaller at the bottom than at the top. The paper is made into sheets by means of the mould and the deckle. The mould is a shallow box, or frame, firmly made of ma- hogany, of which the top is covered with a wire cloth or screen, varying in fineness with the paper to be made. It consists of wires tightly stretched across the frame and crossed at right angles by a few stronger wires bound to the smaller at the points of inter- section by a still finer wire. In several kinds of paper the marks of the mould are apparent, the fabric being thinner where the pulp comes in contact with the protuberances. It is on the same principle that what, by a misnomer, is called the water-mark, is produced, fine wires bent in the desired form being sewed to the AND ITS RE VELA TIONS. 65 surface of the mould, and leaving their impression upon the sheet. The paper moulded upon the kind of wire cloth described above is known as laid. A species of it, or an imitation made by ma- chinery, has since been highly esteemed by connoisseurs as a writ- ing paper, but the roughness it exhibited in the early part of the eighteenth century rendered it objectionable for that purpose, and still more so for printing; which led to the invention in England, about the year 1750, of wove paper; the wire cloth of the mould, not the paper, being woven. The result was a perfectly smooth sheet. The deckle is a thin, flat frame of mahogany, bound at its cor- ners with brass, corresponding in its outer dimensions to the size of the mould and in its inner to that of the sheet to be moulded. Its office is to retain the pulp upon the wire cloth, and it must be so evenly made that it will lie flat upon it, or the edges of the paper will be badly finished. When the deckle is in place it forms, with the mould, a shallow sieve, not fastened together, but held in place by the two strong hands of the dipper, a skilled workman, who takes up in it so much pulp suspended in water as his experience tells him is sufficient for a sheet of paper. This he shakes gently until the water is drained off and the pulp spread evenly upon the wire, in the form of a sheet. He then removes the deckle, and shoves the mould along a board placed for that purpose on the top of the vat, to the concher, another workman, who, with great skill and care, gradually inclines the mould to a piece of felt or woolen cloth laid flat to receive the still soft sheet of pulp which he gently deposits upon it, and returns the mould to the dipper to be again used. By constant practice the two become so dextrous as to re- peat this delicate operation with great rapidity, considering its nature, although of course not to be compared with the speed of modern machine work. The dipper thus continues to lay alter- nately a sheet and a felt until a post — that is, six quires — are piled 66 PAPER: ITS GENESIS up; the felt absorbing a portion of the moisture which remains, and preventing the sheets from adhering to each other as they would in their raw state if not separated. When a post is com- pleted it is put in a screw press, which forces out a large quantity of water, hardens and consolidates the paper, and, to a certain ex- tent, smooths the swells and hollows caused in the laid paper by the wires. When a second post is ready, the first is taken out of the screw press by the lifter, a third skilled workman, who makes them up into a compact pile without felts. When several of these piles are ready they are put into what is called the wet press, and, under heavy pressure, a great deal of moisture is again expressed, the sheets gain stronger consistency by the closer interlacing of the fibers, and the felt marks are obliterated. After being removed from this press, the sheets, in parcels of seven or eight, are hung to dry upon peculiarly arranged racks. When sufficiently dry the paper is taken down, sleeked, dressed, and shaken to separate the sheets and get rid of the dust. Next comes the sizing — the size being made from the shreds and parings of raw hide and parch- ment, the liquid product of which is nicely clarified and receives a small modicum of alum. Into this the sheets are dipped in such a manner as to expose both surfaces. The sheets are then piled up, with thin boards interposed at intervals to keep them steady, and are again subjected to pressure in order to get rid of any super- fluous size. In this and preceding pressings the force must be ap- plied very gradually and with great care, so as to permit any bub- bles of air caught between the sheets to escape without injury to the paper. The paper is then transferred to lofts, and in parcels of two, three, or even more sheets, hung up to dry, care being taken to regulate the temperatuie and the admission of air. After hanging three or four days, it is taken down and carried to a build- ing called a saul, from the French salle, or the German saa/, a hall, where it is examined, finished, and again pressed. The press r AND ITS REVELATIONS. 67 used is of extreme power, and paste-board very smooth and hard is placed between the sheets in making writing paper; answering to our calendering process. The best quality of paper was hot- pressed ; that is, between every fifty sheets of paste-board a plate of heated iron was interposed. The last pressing is repeated several times, the sheets being as often turned, so that the smooth- ing may be uniform. The paper is then made into quires and reams, trimmed, and once more pressed." The above description, which is chiefly con- densed from Tomlinson, is that of paper-making by hand in England at a comparatively recent date. The earlier manufacture both there and in America, was, however, very nearly the same, with inferior mechanical appliances, especially in the matter of presses. In the Old Berkshire mill, the first in western Massachusetts, the common screw press was used for many years, the power being applied by a lever made of a bar of stout wood, sometimes twenty feet long. A workman in the mill at the time, now a gentleman in high standing in the community, tells us that he has often seen these levers splintered by the workmen in their efforts to secure an effectual pressure. The engineer, vat-man (or dipper) and coucher performed the same work, substantially in the same manner, as in the English mills. But, in- 68 PAPER: ITS GENESIS stead of the lifter, the lay-boy took the sheets from the felts and laid them in piles, an operation which required some dexterity ; and the subse- quent processes of pressing, sizing, trimming and folding were done by such work people as were competent and could be spared from other work, under the direction of the overseer or engineer. The lay-boy held a good deal such a position as that of the devil in a printing office. When he was not engaged in his special duty he was kept busy in tending upon the workmen, and on all sorts of errands, the most frequent being to Holden's tavern, to which he was constantly des- patched for bottles of rum or some other liquor, for which he was rewarded with a liberal glass upon his return. The gentleman who tells us this from his own experience wonders that this practice did not make him a drunkard. Before he was fourteen years old he had, by it, acquired a love for ardent spirits, which he still retains, although for over forty years he has tasted none. The reader will observe passim the large num- ber of workmen employed in proportion to the amount of product as compared with the modern machine manufacture, and also the low wages of AND ITS REVELATIONS. 69 labor. A considerable number of the skilled workmen employed, probably twenty-five or thirty during the first thirty years, were Englishmen. A matter of some interest belonging to the era of the hand manufacture is the derivation of the names of certain classes of paper from curious water-marks of the old makers. One of the old- est — as far back as 1539 — consisted of a hand pointing to a star ; whence came the name of " hand paper." A favorite mark about the same time was a jug or pot, and so came u pot paper." When the Puritans had succeeded in overthrow- ing the royal government and establishing the English Commonwealth, they substituted for the royal arms, which had before distinguished a cer- tain class of paper, a fool's cap and bells, and f-rom that piece of grim ridicule the " foolscap " sheet took its name. A postman's horn indented upon another size made it " post," and with the addition of the city where it was first made, " Bath post." 7° PAPER: ITS GENESIS PART III. The Manufacture of Paper by Machinery — The Manufacture of Paper by Hand. Great as the advance had been from primitive methods, paper-making at the close of the last century was still a tedious, difficult, and therefore costly, operation. But if there was among manu- facturers any longing for improvement by means of machinery, it was far from hopeful. They seem to have been resigned to the separate moulding and finishing of each sheet by hand, although it required much time, as well as extra- ordinary care and skill in each workman from en- gineer to lay-boy. And yet the first and most important step had been taken towards the inven- tion of a machine by whose aid, chiefly, the proc- ess has been rendered so nearly automatic as to require comparatively little care and skill on the AND ITS REVELATIONS. 71 part of subordinate workmen, and so hastened that rags received at the mill on one day may be turned out the next day as paper, instead of re- quiring three months as formerly ; while, although the machine is itself very expensive, the cost of the product is reduced fully one-half. An Eng- lish writer, speaking of what is accomplished by this machine in mills known to him, says : " In the brief space of three minutes, and in the short distance of thirty or forty feet, a continuous stream of fluid pulp is made into paper, dried, polished and cut into sheets. The paper thus produced is moderate in price, and for many pur- poses superior to that made by hand. It is of uniform thickness, and can be fabricated of any desirable dimensions. It does not require to be sorted, trimmed or hung up in the dry-house — operations which in the hand manufacture led to defects in about one sheet out of every five." This extreme speed, however, is not usual, nor indeed is the manufacture from the rags in one day very common, although in case of necessity in book and newspaper it is not infrequently done. In the English mills the same may be true of writing paper, which is there completely 72 PAPER: ITS GENESIS finished by machinery. The best American writ- ing papers — known as loft dried — after being sized, dried, and cut into sheets, are taken from the racks hung in lofts for complete drying and finished by hand, with the aid of powerful calen- dering presses. But even these, if need be, can be finished in five days from the rags. The early history of the machine by which the achievements specified by the English writer are accomplished — and which we now call the Four- drinier Paper Machine — is a noble one in itself, but sad as regards the men to whom the world is indebted for it — literally indebted ; for, except in pitifully scant honors to their names, small part of the debt has ever been cancelled. Most of them died in poverty, to which they were reduced from affluence by their expenditures in this be- half ; and in biographical dictionaries which care- fully preserve the memories of petty politicians, obscure divines and the like class of " notables," we look in vain for the names of Robert, Gamble, Fourdrinier and Donkin. It was in the year 1798, when the throes of the French Revolution were beginning to subside under the rule of Napoleon, that Louis Robert, Prepared by J. E. A. SMITH, And originally published in the pages of The Paper World. A Sixteenth Century Paper Mill. IN THREE PARTS. PART I. Connection between the Invention of Printing and Paper — Reasons for the long delay of both — Ar- ticles USED IN THE PLACE OF MODERN PAPER BEFORE ITS INVENTION. PART II. The Second Era of Paper-Making — Hand-Made Pa- per from Vegetable Pulp. PART III. The Manufacture of Paper by Machinery — The Manufacture of Paper by Hand. PART I. Connection between the Invention of Printing and Paper — Reason for the long delay of both — A r tides used in the place of Moder?i Paper before its Iitvention. A PHILOSOPHICAL historian maintains that the failure of the civilized and highly cultivated nations of antiquity to invent the art of Printing was due to the lack of a cheap, light and durable material to receive and preserve the impression of the types ; and, in support of his proposition, he reminds us of the near and suggestive approach to such a discovery which was constantly before the eyes of Egyptians, Greeks and Romans in the use of seals. Since this proposition was made, some thirty or forty years ago, Oriental investigation has found, an- tedating even Egyptian civilization, on the in- scribed bricks of Babylon and Nineveh, long histories actually printed, although the impression was embossed by moulds instead of being colored by ink. It was, nevertheless, just as much print- ing as the books which are now prepared for the use of the blind. In often-recurring phrases, r