December 2016

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?

 

Hoover, Herbert. American Individualism. Introduction by George H. Nash. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, [1922] 2016. ISBN 978-0-8179-2015-9.

After the end of World War I, Herbert Hoover and the American Relief Administration he headed provided food aid to the devastated nations of Central Europe, saving millions from famine. Upon returning to the United States in the fall of 1919, he was dismayed by what he perceived to be an inoculation of the diseases of socialism, autocracy, and other forms of collectivism, whose pernicious consequences he had observed first-hand in Europe and in the peace conference after the end of the conflict, into his own country. In 1920, he wrote, “Every wind that blows carries to our shores an infection of social disease from this great ferment; every convulsion there has an economic reaction upon our own people.”

Hoover sensed that in the aftermath of war, which left some collectivists nostalgic for the national mobilisation and top-down direction of the economy by “war socialism”, and growing domestic unrest: steel and police strikes, lynchings and race riots, and bombing attacks by anarchists, that it was necessary to articulate the principles upon which American society and its government were founded, which he believed were distinct from those of the Old World, and the deliberate creation of people who had come to the new continent expressly to escape the ruinous doctrines of the societies they left behind.

After assuming the post of Secretary of Commerce in the newly inaugurated Harding administration in 1921, and faced with massive coal and railroad strikes which threatened the economy, Hoover felt a new urgency to reassert his vision of American principles. In December 1922, American Individualism was published. The short book (at 72 pages, more of a long pamphlet), was based upon a magazine article he had published the previous March in World's Work.

Hoover argues that five or six philosophies of social and economic organisation are contending for dominance: among them Autocracy, Socialism, Syndicalism, Communism, and Capitalism. Against these he contrasts American Individualism, which he believes developed among a population freed by emigration and distance from shackles of the past such as divine right monarchy, hereditary aristocracy, and static social classes. These people became individuals, acting on their own initiative and in concert with one another without top-down direction because they had to: with a small and hands-off government, it was the only way to get anything done. Hoover writes,

Forty years ago [in the 1880s] the contact of the individual with the Government had its largest expression in the sheriff or policeman, and in debates over political equality. In those happy days the Government offered but small interference with the economic life of the citizen.

But with the growth of cities, industrialisation, and large enterprises such as railroads and steel manufacturing, a threat to this frontier individualism emerged: the reduction of workers to a proletariat or serfdom due to the imbalance between their power as individuals and the huge companies that employed them. It is there that government action was required to protect the other component of American individualism: the belief in equality of opportunity. Hoover believes, and supports, intervention in the economy to prevent the concentration of economic power in the hands of a few, and to guard, through taxation and other means, against the emergence of a hereditary aristocracy of wealth. Yet this poses its own risks,

But with the vast development of industry and the train of regulating functions of the national and municipal government that followed from it; with the recent vast increase in taxation due to the war;—the Government has become through its relations to economic life the most potent force for maintenance or destruction of our American individualism.

One of the challenges American society must face as it adapts is avoiding the risk of utopian ideologies imported from Europe seizing this power to try to remake the country and its people along other lines. Just ten years later, as Hoover's presidency gave way to the New Deal, this fearful prospect would become a reality.

Hoover examines the philosophical, spiritual, economic, and political aspects of this unique system of individual initiative tempered by constraints and regulation in the interest of protecting the equal opportunity of all citizens to rise as high as their talent and effort permit. Despite the problems cited by radicals bent on upending the society, he contends things are working pretty well. He cites “the one percent”: “Yet any analysis of the 105,000,000 of us would show that we harbor less than a million of either rich or impecunious loafers.” Well, the percentage of very rich seems about the same today, but after half a century of welfare programs which couldn't have been more effective in destroying the family and the initiative of those at the bottom of the economic ladder had that been their intent, and an education system which, as a federal commission was to write in 1983, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America …, we might well have viewed it as an act of war”, a nation with three times the population seems to have developed a much larger unemployable and dependent underclass.

Hoover also judges the American system to have performed well in achieving its goal of a classless society with upward mobility through merit. He observes, speaking of the Harding administration of which he is a member,

That our system has avoided the establishment and domination of class has a significant proof in the present Administration in Washington, Of the twelve men comprising the President, Vice-President, and Cabinet, nine have earned their own way in life without economic inheritance, and eight of them started with manual labor.

Let's see how that has held up, almost a century later. Taking the 17 people in equivalent positions at the end of the Obama administration in 2016 (President, Vice President, and heads of the 15 executive departments), we find that only 1 of the 17 inherited wealth (I'm inferring from the description of parents in their biographies) but that precisely zero had any experience with manual labour. If attending an Ivy League university can be taken as a modern badge of membership in a ruling class, 11 of the 17—65%, meet this test (if you consider Stanford a member of an “extended Ivy League”, the figure rises to 70%).

Although published in a different century in a very different America, much of what Hoover wrote remains relevant today. Just as Hoover warned of bad ideas from Europe crossing the Atlantic and taking root in the United States, the Frankfurt School in Germany was laying the groundwork for the deconstruction of Western civilisation and individualism, and in the 1930s, its leaders would come to America to infect academia. As Hoover warned, “There is never danger from the radical himself until the structure and confidence of society has been undermined by the enthronement of destructive criticism.” Destructive criticism is precisely what these “critical theorists” specialised in, and today in many parts of the humanities and social sciences even in the most eminent institutions the rot is so deep they are essentially a write-off.

Undoing a century of bad ideas is not the work of a few years, but Hoover's optimistic and pragmatic view of the redeeming merit of individualism unleashed is a bracing antidote to the gloom one may feel when surveying the contemporary scene.

 

Carroll, Michael. On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2015. ISBN 978-3-319-17758-8.

By the mid-23rd century, humans have become a spacefaring species. Human settlements extend from the Earth to the moons of Jupiter, Mars has been terraformed into a world with seas where people can live on the surface and breathe the air. The industries of Earth and Mars are supplied by resources mined in the asteroid belt. High-performance drive technologies, using fuels produced in space, allow this archipelago of human communities to participate in a system-wide economy, constrained only by the realities of orbital mechanics. For bulk shipments of cargo, it doesn't matter much how long they're in transit, as long as regular deliveries are maintained.

But whenever shipments of great value traverse a largely empty void, they represent an opportunity to those who would seize them by force. As in the days of wooden ships returning treasure from the New World to the Old on the home planet, space cargo en route from the new worlds to the old is vulnerable to pirates, and an arms race is underway between shippers and buccaneers of the black void, with the TriPlanet Bureau of Investigation (TBI) finding itself largely a spectator and confined to tracking down the activities of criminals within the far-flung human communities.

As humanity expands outward, the frontier is Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and the only moon in the solar system to have a substantial atmosphere. Titan around 2260 is much like present-day Antarctica: home to a variety of research stations operated by scientific agencies of various powers in the inner system. Titan is much more interesting than Antarctica, however. Apart from the Earth, it is the only solar system body to have natural liquids on its surface, with a complex cycle of evaporation, rain, erosion, rivers, lakes, and seas. The largest sea, Kraken Mare, located near the north pole, is larger than Earth's Caspian Sea. Titan's atmosphere is half again as dense as that of Earth, and with only 14% of Earth's gravity, it is possible for people to fly under their own muscle power.

It's cold: really cold. Titan receives around one hundredth the sunlight as the Earth, and the mean temperature is around −180 °C. There is plenty of water on Titan, but at these temperatures water is a rock as hard as granite, and it is found in the form of mountains and boulders on the surface. But what about the lakes? They're filled with a mixture of methane and ethane, hydrocarbons which can exist in either gaseous or liquid form in the temperature range and pressure on Titan. Driven by ultraviolet light from the Sun, these hydrocarbons react with nitrogen and hydrogen in the atmosphere to produce organic compounds that envelop the moon in a dense layer of smog and rain out, forming dunes on the surface. (Here “organic” is used in the chemist's sense of denoting compounds containing carbon and does not imply they are of biological origin.)

Mayda Research Station, located on the shore of Kraken Mare, hosts researchers in a variety of fields. In addition to people studying the atmosphere, rivers, organic compounds on the surface, and other specialties, the station is home to a drilling project intended to bore through the ice crust and explore the liquid water ocean believed to lie below. Mayda is an isolated station, with all of the interpersonal dynamics one expects to find in such environments along with the usual desire of researchers to get on with their own work. When a hydrologist turns up dead of hypothermia—frozen to death—in his bed in the station, his colleagues are baffled and unsettled. Accidents happen, but this is something which simply doesn't make any sense. Nobody can think of either a motive for foul play nor a suspect. Abigail Marco, an atmospheric scientist from Mars and friend of the victim, decides to investigate further, and contacts a friend on Mars who has worked with the TBI.

The death of the scientist is a mystery, but it is only the first in a series of enigmas which perplex the station's inhabitants who see, hear, and experience things which they, as scientists, cannot explain. Meanwhile, other baffling events threaten the survival of the crew and force Abigail to confront part of her past she had hoped she'd left on Mars.

This is not a “locked station mystery” although it starts out as one. There is interplanetary action and intrigue, and a central puzzle underlying everything that occurs. Although the story is fictional, the environment in which it is set is based upon our best present day understanding of Titan, a world about which little was known before the arrival of the Cassini spacecraft at Saturn in 2004 and the landing of its Huygens probe on Titan the following year. A twenty page appendix describes the science behind the story, including the environment at Titan, asteroid mining, and terraforming Mars. The author's nonfiction Living Among Giants (March 2015) provides details of the worlds of the outer solar system and the wonders awaiting explorers and settlers there.