When was paper discovered

A material prepared in ancient Egypt from the pithy stem of a water plant, used in sheets throughout the ancient Mediterranean world as a surface for writing or painting. While papyrus is made from the dried pith of the papyrus plant that has been woven, paper has been disintegrated and reformed. However, earlier examples have been found, and he may have simply improved upon a known process. Legend states that he was inspired by the nests of paper wasps. Portrait of Cai Lun.

This portrait of Cai Lun depicts the invention of paper. The bark of the Paper Mulberry and Sandalwood were often used and highly valued during the period. His basic process of creating felted sheets of fiber suspended in water, then draining the water and allowing the fibers to dry in a thin matted sheet is still followed today. Chinese Hemp Wrapping Paper. Made from tree bark, the earliest example of amate was found at Huitzilapa near the Magdalena Municipality, Jalisco, Mexico, dating to 75 B.

European papermaking spread to the Americas, first in Mexico by , and then in Philadelphia by In the s and s, two men on two different continents set out to make paper out of wood. German Friedrich Gottlob Keller and Canadian Charles Fenerty sought to pulp wood, and by , they announced that they had invented a machine that extracted fibers from wood and made paper out of them.

Fenerty also bleached the pulp, making the paper white. By the end of the 19th-century almost all printers in the western world were using wood instead of rags to make paper. The new paper, along with the inventions of the fountain pen, mass-produced pencil, and steam driven rotary printing press caused a major transformation in 19th century life.

They allowed for book publishing, schoolbooks, and newspapers. Today, paper is made from trees farmed specifically for that purpose, and from recycled paper. Recycled paper is used in newspapers, notebook paper, grocery bags, corrugated boxes, envelopes, magazines, and cartons. Paper mills also use wood chips and sawdust left over from industrial processes. In the U. By subscribing, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

You may unsubscribe at any time. By Marcia Wendorf. Gutenberg Bible s Depositphotos. Tablet Rimush Parchment is made from the untanned skins of of sheep, calves or goats, and it has been a writing medium for over two millennia.

Follow Us on. Sponsored Stories. Parchment and vellum are also not paper. They are made from the skins of animals Hunter ,6. Where It Began.

It was, thin, feted, formed, flat made in porous molds from macerated vegetable fiber. Hunter ,4 Before the 3rd century AD, the first paper was made of disintegrating cloth- bark of trees and vegetation such as mulberry, hemp, china grass Hunter ,56 Paper was used in China from AD , for engraving religious pictures and reached its height of in with the wooden block prints made popular by Sung Ying-hsing.

The technology of making paper moved from China to Japan and then to Korea in AD where it was commonly made from mulberry bark and Gampi. Later it was made from bamboo and rice straw. Hunter ,59 Marco Polo gave one of the first descriptions of Chinese papermaking in his 'Milione'.

He mentions that the Chinese emperors jealously guard the secrets of papermaking and that fine paper is manufactured from vegetable fiber: rice or tea straw, bamboo canes and hemp rag cloth. Chinese paper made from bark and the fibers of rags and hemp may have traveled on caravans following the Gobi Desert, the Desert of Takla Makan and the Tarim Valley and finally arrived in Samarkan.

But papermaking was a closely guarded secret and it was not actually made there until after AD. In the Chinese lost a battle in Turkistan on the banks of the Tharaz River. It was recorded that among the Chinese prisoners were skilled papermakers.

The craftsmen began making paper in Samarkan. Hunter ,60 Samarkan was a good place to make paper because it had an abundant supply of hemp and flax and pure water. It took years to find its way to Europe. Hunter , By the end of the 10th century, paper had replaced parchment and papyrus in the Arab world. The material of the Arab paper was apparently substantially linen. It seems that the Arabs, and the skilled Persian workmen whom they employed, at once resorted to flax, which grows abundantly in Khorasan, as their principal material, afterwards also making use of rags, supplemented, as the demand grew, with any vegetable fibre that would serve; cotton, if used at all, was used very sparingly.

Paper of Oriental manufacture in the Middle Ages can be distinguished by its stout substance and glossy surface, and was devoid of water-marks. The oldest recorded document on paper was a deed of King Roger of Sicily, of the year ; and there are others of Sicilian kings in the 12th century. A notarial register on paper, at Geneva, dates, from The oldest known imperial deed on the same material is a charter of Frederick II to the nuns of Goess in Styria, of the year , now at Vienna.

In , Frederick II forbade further use of paper for public documents; which were in future to be inscribed on vellum. In Venice the Liber plegiorum, the entries in which begin with the year , is made of rough paper; as are the registers of the Council of Ten, beginning in ; and the register of the emperor Henry VII.

In the British Museum there is an older example in a manuscript. Arundel which contains some astronomical treatises written on an excellent paper in an Italian hand from the first half of the 13th century. The letters addressed from Castile to Edward I. Stutermeister , 11 There is a record of paper being used by the Empress Irene in Greece at the end of the 13th century, but with one doubtful exception, there are no extant Greek manuscripts on paper before the middle of the 13th century.

The English word "ream" meaning sheets is derived through Spanish and French from the Arabic word rizmah that translates as "a bundle". Felipe de Javita in the ancient city of Valencia and it can be dated to AD Papermaking continued under Moorish rule until when the moors were expelled.

Paper making then began to gradually spread across Christian Europe. Bamboo molds were common in China, but it was not readily available in Europe. The bamboo allowed the mold to be flexible, but the European rigid wire mold, was better suited to the formation of rag fiber.

Europeans also invented the Fence or Deckle, which keeps the paper within bonds Hunter , The earliest paper was called 'cloth parchment', but it often contained wood and straw in addition to cloth.

All these raw materials were beaten to a fine pulp and mixed with water. Sheets of paper were then pressed out, dried and hardened. The demand for paper was slight in the 1st Century Europe Hunter , Paper cost more than vellum, it was more fragile than parchment and it was associated with Jews and Arabs who were not trusted.

Hunter , 61 In fact, The Church in Western Europe initially banned the use of paper calling it a 'pagan art' believing that animal parchment was the only thing 'holy' enough to carry the Sacred Word. Hunter , The first representation of the printing process is the wood print Der Papierer by Jost Amman in the Little Book of trades. Hunter , 5. In Italy the first great center of the paper-making industry was Fabriano in the marquisate of Ancona.

Mills were established in , and rose to importance with the decline of the manufacture in Spain. This document clearly points to the existence of a number of paper factories, and implies a well developed commercial activity. Fabriano was the first manufacturing center to harness water power to drive the fibrillation pulping process, previously a labor intensive manual activity.

In a factory was established at and Treviso ; and other factories were quickly established in the territories of Florence, Bologna, Parma, Milan, Venice. The factories of northern Italy supplied southern Germany with paper as late as the 15th century. The earliest German factories are said to have been set up between Cologne and Mainz, and in Mainz itself about Ulman Stromer established a mill in at Nuremberg, with the aid of Italian workmen.

Ratisbon and Augsburg were other sites of early manufacture. Western Germany, the Netherlands and England, are said to have obtained paper at first from France and Burgundy then through the markets of Bruges, Antwerp and Cologne. By the second half of the 14th Century, the use of paper for all literary purposes had become established in all of Western Europe.

In the course of the 15th century vellum was gradually superseded by paper. Some later manuscripts would use a mixture of vellum and paper.