Search

Paper is so ubiquitous in our daily lives that it is difficult to imagine effective functioning of our technological society without it. Indeed, we often measure the level of contemporary cultures by the amount of paper consumed. In the United States the amount is more than 500 pounds per capita annually and is rising year by year. The contributions of paper are not without drawbacks: a limited supply of fibrous source materials, problems of air and water pollution in manufacturing processes, and questions of disposal of the paper once it has served its intended purposes. Paper has not always held so important a place in the human economy; the multitude of demands that paper now fills were necessarily satisfied by other materials. It is significant that the earliest use of paper was in written communication. In this, it was preceded by other less-abundant or less-appropriate materials; baked clay tablets in the Near East, sheets of papyrus in the Nile valley, parchment or vellum in the Near East and Europe, cloth or strips of wood and bamboo in China, and sheets of macerated barks in Oceania, Africa, and the early Americas. The word "paper" is used to describe a felted sheet of fibers formed by passing a liquid suspension of the fibers through a fine screen. The liquid drains away to leave a mat of fibers which is removed from the screen and dried. The definition is general. The fibers commonly used are composed chiefly of cellulose, although paper can be and is made from fibers of many other types, including glass, asbestos, wool, metals, and synthetic polymers. The liquid is almost always water, although other liquids can be used. Water is inexpensive and plentiful, and its interaction with cellulose fibers contributes unique properties-in swelling of fibers during mechanical processing and in formation of the paper sheet, and in fiber-to-fiber bonding which occurs as the sheet is dried and which is responsible for the greater part of the mechanical strength of paper. Paper is reported to have been in use in China before the Christian era, although Hou Han Shu (Book of the Second Han Dynasty) credits its invention in A.D. 105 to Ts'ai Lun, who is said to have made sheets of paper from macerated tree bark, hemp waste, old rags, and fishnets [1]. The craft soon spread to Korea and Japan, and found its way into Central Asia and Persia by the routes of the camel caravans. The Arabs began making paper about A.D. 750, and the art spread to Syria, Egypt, and Morocco. The Moors introduced paper into Spain about A.D. 1150. In 1268 a paper mill was established at Fabriano, Italy. Papermaking began in France and Germany in the fourteenth century and in England in the fifteenth. The first American paper mill was established in 1690 near Germantown, Pennsylvania, by William Rittenhouse, a Dutch papermaker. Until the invention of the paper machine, paper was made by a labori