An age-old love affair

Mankind and paper have had an intimate relationship for two thousand years. A world without books, newspapers or wallpaper would be inconceivable today. But how did paper manage to conquer our daily lives in the course of history? A journey through time, illustrated with works by artist Dorothea Reese-Heim.
The streets of Paris are in a state of chaos: sugar, coffee beans, eggs and flour lie unwrapped on the shelves in the shops; customers shovel goods into their bags with bare hands. When Philippe goes to pay, he discovers that he hasn't a single bill in his wallet. Perhaps the television can tell him what's going on: "The Department of State confirms the complete and global disappearance of all paper," the newscaster reports.
The French short film A Paperless World cinematizes a playful idea surrounding an object so ubiquitous, we hardly take note of its existence anymore. How did paper acquire such significance in our daily lives over the course of history?
On an evening in the year 219 B.C., the servants of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi are exhausted from carrying 60 kilograms of reports and documents written on bamboo back and forth. Silk, which people have already been writing on for a long time, would certainly be much better and lighter than bamboo, but it's expensive and rare. If only there were something that combined the lightness of silk with the strength and availability of bamboo I Finally, towards the end of the century, the ideal synthesis was found, and the first paper appeared on the face of the earth. In 105 A.D., a court official by the name of Tsai Lun became the first person to describe the technique of papermaking. The basic principles have remained unchanged to this day: fibrous plant material containing cellulose - in ancient China, that, meant bast fibers of the mulberry tree, cambric grass or old fabric - is diluted with generous amounts of water. The fibrous pulp is then poured into a screen, pressed and dried.
From China, paper first travelled via the Silk Route to the Arab world. Unable to make it themselves, the Arabs continued also to use papyrus and parchment. However, in the year 751, a number of Chinese papermakers were captured in the Battle of Talas, and they revealed the closely-kept secret of how to manufacture paper. Thereafter, paper mills quickly spread throughout Arab lands. This development perfectly suited Harun al-Rashid, the famous caliph immortalised in The Thousand and One Nights. Corrupt officials in his empire were constantly falsifying orders issued by the caliph in writing. With a little skill, it was very easy to manipulate parchment: a light scratch and the original text simply disappeared. The scribe needed only to write over the spot, and no one noticed the forgery. That was impossible with paper. If you scratched it, you made a hole.
The caliph introduced paper throughout the administration of his enormous empire. Religious and scientific texts also soon began to be written on the new material: "Paper was the medium of the written word at the height of Arab culture, when it dominated the region stretching from the Pyrenees to the Indus," says French scientist, painter and sculptor Pierre-Marc de Biasi, author of a Saga du Papier.
During this period, Europeans were still writing on parchment made from cow, sheep and goat hides. Parchment had since replaced the papyrus used in antiquity, because it was not only more durable, but could also be used on both sides. It was the Moors who finally introduced paper to Europe:
the first paper mill opened in Spain in the 12th century. In Germany, Ulrnan Stromer manufactured the first paper outside the gates of Nuremberg in 1390. Europeans initially distrusted the new material. Just hold a flame to it, and it instantly caught fire. It tore easily as well. For this reason, some universities banned the "inferior" material and decided to stay with parchment.
The notion that parchment was more suitable for precious documents persisted for a very long time: the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and even the 7llYeaty of Versailles of 1919, are written on parchment. Nevertheless, the leather hide was unable to stop the triumph of paper. In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg tried to force parchment into his printing press, but it worked much better with paper. The raw material used to make it - linen - was available in vast quantities in those days, because linen clothing had replaced wool in the 13th century. According to de Biasi, the enormous boom in European writing culture at the end of the 15th century never would have come about if people had continued to wear wool.
More and more paper mills began to be built along Europe's rivers. The new cultural medium was just what a monk and teacher in the small German village of Wittenberg had been waiting for: "The first ideological battle fought with printed paper was Martin Luther's reformation movement," de Biasi emphasises. "It never would have been so successful without paper."
Soon, the supply could hardly keep up with the demand. Ragmen began scouring every inch of the continent. The situation escalated when cotton came into fashion at the time of colonisation, because printing paper cannot be made from cotton -and that, of all things, in the age of the Enlightenment. Printing 7,000 copies of the 40-volume D'Alembert Encyclopaedia would have completely exhausted France's supply of paper for a whole year.
In the late 18th century, the spirit of the Revolution also seized workers in paper mills. Aware of how sought-alter and rare their product was, they frequently went on strike. The trend enraged Nicolas-Louis Robert, foreman of a paper mill in Esonne near Paris. He asked himself whether it would be possible to manufacture the scarce material without the constantly striking workers. In 1798 he came up with the answer: the world's first paper-making machine. With its help, a web of paper of any desired length could be produced for the first time - considerably faster and cheaper than ever before. Robert achieved a daily output of 100 kilograms and a working speed of five meters per minute.
However, Robert was not as skilled at business affairs as he was at inventing paper-making machines. He let himself be talked out of the patent by his employer, who in turn allowed an English brother-in-law to steal it. Robert earned all of 2,400 francs on his pioneering machine and, following the bankruptcy of the paper mill in Esonne, spent the rest of his working life as a primary school teacher. In the meantime, the British set about improving his invention, and by 1820, Europe was bristling with papermaking machines ready to go into mass production. But people were still wearing cotton clothes, so there was nothing with which to feed the high-performance machines.
People racked their brains over the question of what could possibly be suitable for making paper, apart from linen rags. Antoine Réaumur, a zoologist, made an important early discovery in 1719: "American wasps produce a very line paper, similar to ours," he wrote in a report to the French Academy. "They teach us that it is possible to make paper from vegetable fibers, without using rags; they almost seem to exhort us to likewise manufacture a fine, good paper from certain types of wood." The wasps were obviously doing an excellent job, because when Réaumur showed a piece of a wasp's nest to a paper manufacturer, he believed he was looking at the product of a competitor in Orleans.
The theologian and natural scientist Jacob Christian Schãffer of Regensburg attempted to make paper from pine cones, stinging nettles, corn and straw. Justus Claproth, a scholar from Göttingen, took a very different and farsighted approach to combating the paper shortage in 1774: he disclosed an "invention for turning printed paper into new paper" - the first recycling process.
Mummies and wood fibers. It was in the 1840s that geologist Isaiah Deck set out in search of Cleopatra's emerald mines in Egypt. He didn't find them, but he did discover mummies. The clever scientist had a good business sense and drew up the following calculation: assuming 2,000 years of mummification, an average life expectancy of 33 years and a constant population of 8 million in the Nile delta, results in roughly 500 million mummies. An average mummy provided about 8 pounds of linen. Wasn't that a perfect solution to the paper crisis! In addition, the ancient Egyptians also mummified their sacred bulls, cats, ibises and crocodiles. These sample calculations appear not to have been the end of the matter. In 1856, the Syracuse Daily Standard wrote: "Our newspaper is now made of rags straight from the land of the pharaohs."
Fortunately, however, this gruesome source of raw material didn't have to be exploited for long. At roughly the same time, master weaver Friedrich Gottlob Keller succeeded in producing a wood fiber pulp by pressing wood against a rotating grindstone and adding water. The wood fiber pulp yielded paper that was coarse and dark, but nonetheless serviceable. A paper mill owner by the name of Voelter perfected the process of producing ground wood pulp. Following conversion of the machines from rags to wood, mass production began in 1860, thanks to the widespread availability of the raw material. Paper production in England alone grew sevenfold between 1861 and 1900.
Paper prices plummeted. "For the first time in the history of mankind, it was possible to give everyone something to read." Newspaper circulation sky-rocketed, everyone could afford to buy a paper and keep themselves informed. "It was the birth of democracy," de Biasi emphasises.
The mass product swiftly conquered new markets. While 98 percent of paper production went into books in D'Alembert's times, books today only account for a meager 0.3 percent of paper consumption. "We produce 3,000 different paper, card and board grades," reports Manfred Kuhn of the German Pulp and Paper Association. Some 300 million metric tons of paper are produced around the globe each year. "You could pave a road from Norway to France with the paper manufactured world-wide in a single day," de Biasi says.
Contrary to expectations, the advent of computers has not caused a drop in paper consumption, but an increase. E-mails, websites, first drafts of written documents - everything is printed out. "People simply like to have something in their hands," says Kuhn laconically. In the meantime, the enormous demand for paper is becoming a threat to our planet. Between 50 and 70 percent of the primary forests exploited in Canada, Russia and Scandinavia go into paper production, explains forest expert Oliver
You could pave a road from Norway to France with all the paper manufactured world-wide in a single day.
Salge of Greenpeace Germany. In Indonesia, deforestation is so extensive that the last rainforest there will probably be destroyed no more than ten years from now. But the production of paper need not inevitably lead to the destruction of our environment. There are alternatives, both to the chlorine bleaching process and to the clear-cutting of primary forests. Much will depend on whether the affluent nations cut their paper consumption in the future.
According to Salge, if half of the world's population used as much paper as Germans do, "then all the forests in the world wouldn't be enough to cover the demand."
It comes as no surprise to de Biasi that paper consumption has increased in the digitised world. He describes an almost physical intimacy between man and paper: "Paper is like people in a lot of respects. It is weak, and it ages. The slightest mishap, and it tears. Paper is pleasant to the touch, it smells good, and it suits our reading speed, our rhythm." But will this 2,000 year-old love affair between mankind and paper prove to be compatible with a livable environment in the future? The answer is in our hands.- Courtesy Print Process