- Kurlansky, Mark.
Paper.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2016.
ISBN 978-0-393-23961-4.
-
One of the things that makes us human is our use of
extrasomatic memory: we invent ways to store and retrieve
things outside our own brains. It's as if when the evolutionary
drive which caused the brains of our ancestors to grow over
time reached its limit, due to the physical constraints of the
birth canal, we applied the cleverness of our bulging brains to
figure out not only how to record things for ourselves, but to
pass them on to other individuals and transmit them through time
to our successors.
This urge to leave a mark on our surroundings is deeply-seated
and as old as our species. Paintings at the
El Castillo
site in Spain have been dated to at least 40,800 years before the
present. Complex paintings of animals and humans in the
Lascaux Caves
in France, dated around 17,300 years ago, seem strikingly
modern to observers today. As anybody who has observed young
children knows, humans do not need to be
taught to draw: the challenge is teaching them to draw only
where appropriate.
Nobody knows for sure when humans began to speak, but evidence
suggests that verbal communication is at least as old and
possibly appeared well before the first evidence of drawing.
Once speech appeared, it was not only possible to transmit
information from one human to another directly but, by memorising
stories, poetry, and songs, to create an oral tradition
passed on from one generation to the next. No longer what
one individual learned in their life need die with them.
Given the human compulsion to communicate, and how long we've
been doing it by speaking, drawing, singing, and sculpting,
it's curious we only seem to have
invented
written language
around 5000 years ago. (But recall that the archaeological record
is incomplete and consists only of objects which survived through
the ages. Evidence of early writing is from peoples who wrote on
durable material such as stone or clay tablets, or lived in dry
climates such as that of Egypt where more fragile media such as
papyrus or parchment would be preserved. It is entirely possible
writing was invented much earlier by any number of societies who
wrote on more perishable surfaces and lived in climates where they
would not endure.)
Once writing appeared, it remained the province of a small class
of scribes and clerics who would read texts to the common
people. Mass literacy did not appear for millennia, and would
require a better medium for the written word and a less time-consuming
and costly way to reproduce it. It was in China that the
solutions to both of these problems would originate.
Legends date Chinese writing from much earlier, but the oldest
known writing in China is dated around 3300 years ago, and
was inscribed on bones and turtle shells. Already, the Chinese
language used six hundred characters, and this number would only
increase over time, with a phonetic alphabet never being adopted.
The Chinese may not have invented bureaucracy, but as an ancient
and largely stable society they became very skilled at it, and
consequently produced ever more written records. These
writings employed a variety of materials: stone, bamboo, and
wood tablets; bronze vessels; and silk. All of these were
difficult to produce, expensive, and many required special
skills on the part of scribes.
Cellulose
is a main component of the cell wall of plants, and forms
the structure of many of the more complex members of the
plant kingdom. It forms linear polymers which produce strong
fibres. The cellulose content of plants varies widely: cotton
is 90% cellulose, while wood is around half cellulose, depending
on the species of tree. Sometime around
A.D. 100, somebody in China (according
to legend, a courtier named Cai Lun) discovered that through
a process of cooking, hammering, and chopping, the cellulose
fibres in material such as discarded cloth, hemp, and tree
bark could be made to separate into a thin slurry of
fibres suspended in water. If a frame containing a fine screen
were dipped into a vat of this material, rocked back and forth
in just the right way, then removed, a fine layer of fibres with
random orientation would remain on the screen after the water
drained away. This sheet could then be removed, pressed, and
dried, yielding a strong, flat material composed of
intertwined cellulose fibres. Paper had been invented.
Paper was found to be ideal for writing the Chinese language,
which was, and is today, usually written with a brush. Since
paper could be made from raw materials previously considered
waste (rags, old ropes and fishing nets, rice and bamboo
straw), water, and a vat and frame which were easily
constructed, it was inexpensive and could be produced in
quantity. Further, the papermaker could vary the thickness
of the paper by adding more or less pulp to the vat, by
the technique in dipping the frame, and produce paper with
different surface properties by adding “sizing”
material such as starch to the mix. In addition to sating the appetite
of the imperial administration, paper was
adopted as the medium of choice for artists, calligraphers,
and makers of fans, lanterns, kites, and other objects.
Many technologies were invented independently by different societies
around the world. Paper, however, appears to have been
discovered only once in the eastern hemisphere, in China, and then diffused
westward along the Silk Road. The civilisations of Mesoamerica
such as the Mayans, Toltecs, and Aztecs, extensively used,
prior to the Spanish conquest, what
was described as paper, but it is not
clear whether this was true paper or a material made from reeds
and bark. So thoroughly did the conquistadors obliterate the
indigenous civilisations, burning thousands of books, that only
three Mayan books and fifteen Aztec documents are known to have
survived, and none of these are written on true paper.
Paper arrived in the Near East just as the Islamic civilisation
was consolidating after its first wave of conquests. Now faced
with administering an empire, the caliphs discovered, like the
Chinese before them, that many documents were required and
the new innovative writing material met the need. Paper making
requires a source of cellulose-rich material and abundant water,
neither of which are found in the Arabian peninsula, so the
first great Islamic paper mill was founded in Baghdad in
A.D. 794, originally employing
workers from China. It was the first water-powered paper mill,
a design which would dominate paper making until the age of
steam. The demand for paper continued to grow, and paper mills
were established in Damascus and Cairo, each known for the
particular style of paper they produced.
It was the Muslim invaders of Spain who brought paper to Europe,
and paper produced by mills they established in the land they
named al-Andalus found markets in the territories we now call Italy
and France. Many Muslim scholars of the era occupied themselves
producing editions of the works of Greek and Roman antiquity, and
wrote them on paper. After the Christian reconquest of the
Iberian peninsula, papermaking spread to Italy, arriving in
time for the awakening of intellectual life which would be
called the Renaissance and produce large quantities of
books, sheet music, maps, and art: most of it on paper. Demand
outstripped supply, and paper mills sprung up wherever a
source of fibre and running water was available.
Paper provided an inexpensive, durable, and portable means of
storing, transmitting, and distributing information of all
kinds, but was limited in its audience as long as each copy
had to be laboriously made by a scribe or artist (often
introducing errors in the process). Once again, it was the
Chinese who invented the solution. Motivated by the Buddhist
religion, which values making copies of sacred texts, in the
8th century A.D. the first
documents were printed in China and Japan. The first items
to be printed were single pages, carved into a single wood block for
the whole page, then printed onto paper in enormous quantities:
tens of thousands in some cases. In the year 868, the first
known dated book was printed, a volume of Buddhist prayers called the
Diamond
Sutra. Published on paper in the form of a scroll
five metres long, each illustrated page was printed from a wood
block carved with its entire contents. Such a “block book”
could be produced in quantity (limited only by wear on the
wood block), but the process of carving the wood was laborious,
especially since text and images had to be carved as a mirror
image of the printed page.
The next breakthrough also originated in China, but had limited
impact there due to the nature of the written language. By
carving or casting an individual block for each character, it
was possible to set any text from a collection of characters,
print documents, then reuse the same characters for the next
job. Unfortunately, by the time the Chinese began to experiment
with printing from movable type in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, it took 60,000 different characters to print the
everyday language and more than 200,000 for literary works.
This made the initial investment in a set of type forbidding. The
Koreans began to use movable type cast from metal in the
fifteenth century and were so impressed with its flexibility
and efficiency that in 1444 a royal decree abolished the use
of Chinese characters in favour of a phonetic alphabet
called Hangul which is still used today.
It was in Europe that movable type found a burgeoning
intellectual climate ripe for its adoption, and whence it
came to change the world.
Johannes
Gutenberg was a goldsmith, originally working with his
brother Friele in Mainz, Germany. Fleeing political unrest, the
brothers moved to Strasbourg, where around 1440 Johannes began
experimenting with movable type for printing. His background
as a goldsmith equipped him with the required skills of carving,
stamping, and casting metal; indeed, many of the pioneers of
movable type in Europe began their careers as
goldsmiths. Gutenberg carved letters
into hard metal, forming what he called a punch. The punch was
used to strike a copper plate, forming an impression called
the matrix. Molten lead was then poured into the matrix,
producing individual characters of type. Casting letters in
a matrix allowed producing as many of each letter as needed
to set pages of type, and for replacement of worn type as required.
The roman alphabet was ideal for movable type: while the
Chinese language required 60,000 or more characters, a complete
set of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation for German
came to only around 100 pieces of type. Accounting for duplicates
of commonly used letters, Gutenberg's first book, the famous
Gutenberg Bible,
used a total of 290 pieces of type. Gutenberg also developed a
special ink suited for printing with metal type, and adapted a
press he acquired from a paper mill to print pages.
Gutenberg was secretive about his processes, likely aware he
had competition, which he did. Movable type was one of those
inventions which was “in the air”—had Gutenberg
not invented and publicised it, his contemporaries working in Haarlem,
Bruges, Avignon, and Feltre, all reputed by people of those
cities to have gotten there first, doubtless would have.
But it was the impact of
Gutenberg's Bible, which demonstrated that movable type could
produce book-length works of quality comparable to those written
by the best scribes, which established the invention in the minds
of the public and inspired others to adopt the new technology.
Its adoption was, by the standards of the time, swift.
An estimated eight million books were printed and sold in
Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century—more
books than Europe had produced in all of history before that time.
Itinerant artisans would take their type punches from city to
city, earning money by setting up locals in the printing business,
then moving on.
In early sixteenth century Germany, the printing revolution
sparked a Reformation. Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk,
completed his German
translation of the Bible
in 1534 (he had earlier published a translation of the New
Testament in 1522). This was the first widely-available translation
of the Bible into a spoken language, and reinforced the Reformation
idea that the Bible was directly accessible to all, without need for
interpretation by clergy. Beginning with his original
Ninety-five
Theses, Luther authored thirty publications, which it is
estimated sold 300,000 copies (in a territory of around 14 million
German speakers). Around a third of all publications in Germany
in the era were related to the Reformation.
This was a new media revolution. While the incumbent Church reacted
at the speed of sermons read occasionally to congregations,
the Reformation produced a flood
of tracts, posters, books, and pamphlets written in vernacular
German and aimed directly at an increasingly literate population.
Luther's pamphlets became known as
Flugschriften: “quick writing”.
One such document, written in 1520, sold 4000 copies in three weeks and
50,000 in two years. Whatever the merits of the contending doctrines,
the Reformation had fully embraced and employed the new communication
technology to speak directly to the people. In modern terms,
you might say the Reformation was the “killer app”
for movable type printing.
Paper and printing with movable type were the communication and
information storage technologies the Renaissance needed to
express and distribute the work of thinkers and writers across
a continent, who were now able to read and comment on
each other's work and contribute to a culture that knew no
borders. Interestingly, the technology of paper making was
essentially unchanged from that of China a millennium and a half
earlier, and printing with movable type hardly different from that
invented by Gutenberg. Both would remain largely the same until
the industrial revolution. What changed was an explosion in the
volume of printed material and, with increasing literacy among
the general public, the audience and market for it. In the eighteenth
century a new innovation, the daily newspaper, appeared. Between
1712 and 1757, the circulation of newspapers in Britain grew
eightfold. By 1760, newspaper circulation in Britain
was 9 million, and would increase to 24 million by 1811.
All of this printing required ever increasing quantities of paper,
and most paper in the West was produced from rags. Although
the population was growing, their thirst for printed material
expanded much quicker, and people, however fastidious,
produce only so many rags. Paper
shortages became so acute that newspapers limited their size
based on the availability and cost of paper. There were even
cases of scavengers taking clothes from the dead on
battlefields to sell to paper mills making newsprint used
to report the conflict. Paper mills resorted to doggerel to
exhort the public to save rags:
The scraps, which you reject, unfit
To clothe the tenant of a hovel,
May shine in sentiment and wit,
And help make a charming novel…
René
Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, a French polymath who published
in numerous fields of science, observed in 1719 that wasps made their
nests from what amounted to paper they produced directly from wood.
If humans could replicate this vespidian technology, the forests of Europe
and North America could provide an essentially unlimited and renewable
source of raw material for paper. This idea was to lie fallow for more
than a century. Some experimenters produced small amounts of paper
from wood through various processes, but it was not until 1850 that
paper was manufactured from wood in commercial quantities in Germany,
and 1863 that the first wood-based paper mill began operations in
America.
Wood is about half cellulose, while the fibres in rags run up to 90%
cellulose. The other major component of wood is
lignin,
a cross-linked polymer which gives it its strength and is useless
for paper making. In the 1860s a process was invented where wood,
first mechanically cut into small chips, was chemically treated
to break down the fibrous structure in a device called a
“digester”. This produced a pulp suitable for paper
making, and allowed a dramatic expansion in the volume of paper
produced. But the original wood-based paper still contained
lignin, which turns brown over time. While this was acceptable
for newspapers, it was undesirable for books and archival
documents, for which rag paper remained preferred. In 1879,
a German chemist invented a process to separate lignin from
cellulose in wood pulp, which allowed producing paper that did
not brown with age.
The processes used to make paper from wood involved soaking the
wood pulp in acid to break down the fibres. Some of this acid
remained in the paper, and many books printed on such paper between
1840 and 1970 are now in the process of slowly disintegrating as
the acid eats away at the paper. Only around 1970 was it found that
an alkali solution works just as well when processing the pulp,
and since then
acid-free paper
has become the norm for book publishing.
Most paper is produced from wood today, and on an enormous, industrial
scale. A single paper mill in China, not the largest, produces
600,000 tonnes of paper per year. And yet, for all of the
mechanisation, that paper is made by the same process as the
first sheet of paper produced in China: by reducing material to
cellulose fibres, mixing them with water, extracting a sheet (now
a continuous roll) with a screen, then pressing and drying it to
produce the final product.
Paper and printing is one of those technologies which is so
simple, based upon readily-available materials, and potentially
revolutionary that it inspires “what if” speculation.
The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans each had everything they
needed—raw materials, skills, and a suitable written
language—so that a
Connecticut
Yankee-like time traveller could have explained
to artisans already working with wood and metal how
to make paper, cast movable type, and set up a printing press
in a matter of
days. How would history have differed had one of those societies
unleashed the power of the printed word?
December 2016 