A BRIEF HISTORY ABOUT MAKING PAPER
     A Chinese court official named Ts’ai created paper as we know it today by mixing mulberry bark, hemp and rags with water. He mashed it into pulp then pressed the liquid out and hung the thin material to dry in the heat of the sun. Who would ever think that man’s greatest communication tool would have begun under such unsophisticated circumstances.

     The Egyptians used papyrus to make their paper but basically the same method was employed. Everyone found writing on paper was a much easier way to communicate than carving messages on rocks.

     Throughout the ages, demand for paper grew and finally paper mills were built in order to meet the ever increasing needs of the writing public.

     The first paper mill in North America was built in 1690 by William Rittenhouse and William Bradford. These gentlemen collected, separated, cleaned and recycled old cloth rags to make our first writing papers and were highly successful.

     France and England were also leaders in the development of mass paper production. It was in the early 1800s that a Frenchman named Nicolas-Louis Robert and an English family named Fourdrinier respectively invented and patented a machine that produced paper on an endless wire screen.

     The sulphite pulping process was developed by American, Benjamin Tilghman in 1866 and, in the early 1900s; the United States began to use wood fiber to make paper. However, in 1937, the Kraft pulping process took over as the leading chemical pulping process and is still the method used today. (This method was invented by a chemist way back in 1867, who used the German word “Kraft” which means “strong” to describe his process.)

     America’s first Kraft mill was built in 1911 in Pensacola, Florida and it was superior because the chemicals used to dissolve the materials were recoverable and it produced tremendous amounts of energy during the recovery process. This process could also pulp pine trees, so the Kraft process permitted America to become a world leader in the production of paper and all related paper products.

     Cotton is still used to make some fine writing papers and money, however, modern technology has advanced the papermaking industry into a more efficient, more environmentally friendly industry. Recycled paper is used to create more paper and related paper products that have transformed the manufacturing process.

     The principles of papermaking are essentially the same as when Ts’ai Lun did it first but the wide variety of expanded and reformed production methods would stagger the imaginations of the early papermaking pioneers.