Chapter 15
The wasp seems to teach us a means of overcoming these difficulties.
—RENÉ ANTOINE FERCHAULT DE RÉAUMUR
IT WAS A MACABRE SCENE ON THE DESERTED, WINDSWEPT killing fields of the Napoleonic Wars before the burial details went to work. Ragmen picked through the dead, stripping off their bloodstained uniforms and selling the cloth to papermakers.
This was not a uniquely European practice. In the summer of 1863 in the United States, after the Battle of Gettysburg, in which 51,000 men were killed in three days, ragmen and other “scavengers of mixed nationalities,” as one contemporary observer put it, traveled by wagon from Spring Forge, more than twenty miles away, to gather rags. Others were also looking for souvenirs, especially guns and swords, from the corpses that were starting to fester. Three ragmen loaded their wagons with the clothing they had stolen and sold it to the Jacob Hauer paper mill on nearby Codorus Creek.
Hauer had died eight years earlier, and his heirs in Philadelphia owned the mill. It produced 1,500 pounds of paper every day on one Fourdrinier machine. The paper was made from rags bought from wandering ragmen. But once the Civil War had begun, it had become more difficult to obtain rags and the mill was starving for them—until they received the wagonloads of uniforms, bandages, and slings from the Gettysburg battlefield.
The local people were deeply offended by the scavengers, especially the ragmen, some of whom, they said, went as far as to dig up shallow graves. The army sent in cavalry and infantry troops to stop the stealing, and the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry apprehended the three ragmen as they were taking a wagonload back to the paper mill. The three men were given the dirtiest post-battle job—clearing 5,000 dead horses from the battlegrounds. Most were put in piles and burned. The stench, spreading out for miles, was overwhelming.
But once again, the mill had no source of rags. They could not even buy clean scraps, because these were sent to a nearby military hospital for bandaging. The mill went out of business and its 101-acre facility was sold at a bargain price by the Orphan Court. It was subsequently purchased by a twenty-one-year-old local, Philip Henry Glatfelter, for $14,000. The Glatfelter Company still makes paper on the site today.
WITH PEOPLE READING more than ever and presses printing more than ever, on paper that the mills could produce faster than ever, there was only one part of the equation missing. Nothing had been done to increase the rag supply. The problem was becoming desperate.
Even at the height of the Industrial Revolution, nothing had changed in the rag-collection process. The ragmen wandered the streets and took what they gathered to the rag merchants. In the United States, ragmen went from house to house looking for rags until near the end of the nineteenth century. The American people still had ingrained in them from Revolutionary times that they needed to save rags so that paper could be made. The advertising line “Ladies Save Your Rags” was ubiquitous.
John Clark & Company, which opened in 1807 in Black River, Wisconsin, even tried poetry to acquire more rags:
Sweet ladies pray be not offended,
Nor mind the jest of sneering wags
No harm, believe us, is intended,
When humbly we request your rags.
The scraps, which you reject, unfit
To clothe the tenant of a hovel,
May shine in sentiment and wit,
And help to make a charming novel . . .
Incredibly, there are three more stanzas like this.
The United States did not have nearly enough rags to supply its paper mills, and so it imported rags from Europe. Foreign rag imports to New York, mostly from Italy, rose three and a half times between 1845 and 1859. In Europe, automated textile mills were producing more cloth, but that was not translating into useful rags. Wool had become increasingly fashionable, often replacing cotton and linen. In 1825, the United States imported $79,639 worth of rags. The following year, the figure had risen to $122,624. By 1832, it had reached $707,011. These rises reflected both an increase in the amount of rags imported and an increase in price; the scarcity of rags had made prices climb. By the 1850s, rags represented half the cost of making paper.
Meanwhile, the demand for paper, especially inexpensive paper, was soaring. Newspapers in particular, with their growing number of subscribers, operated on a commercial model that required cheaper and faster product. Once the telegraph was launched in the 1840s, news could arrive with great rapidity and newspapers were expected to keep up, especially with news from the trade and commodity markets. In 1852 the New York Tribune installed six-cylinder presses that could print 15,000 sheets per hour. This seemed nearly miraculous until other papers started installing ten-cylinder presses that could print 25,000 sheets an hour. And that output more or less doubled after the 1860s, when presses could print both sides of a sheet at the same time. As transportation improved, notably through railroads, circulation areas also expanded. It all seemed limitless—if newspapers could only get enough low-priced paper.
In both Europe and America, papermakers needed to find a material for making paper that was both cheaper and more readily available than rags. In ancient times, the Asians had found numerous alternatives, such as bamboo and tree bark, but the nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans struggled to find one. In Britain, the first written suggestion of an alternative paper source appeared in a slim booklet published in 1716 with the unwieldy title Essay for the month of December 1716 to be continued Monthly, by a Society of Gentlemen, For the benefit of the People of England.Aside from the not-entirely-impractical suggestion that paper mills be set up on barges in the Thames and other large rivers, which the authors said was already being done on the Elbe and the Danube, the society suggested that instead of making paper from rags and hemp products such as rope, raw hemp could be used. That was similar to what the Aztecs might have done with agave. The society also suggested that mills could grow their own supplies by planting hemp on the mill grounds.
But the real forefather of modern paper, the man who solved the rag problem, though it took over a century for his ideas to be implemented, was a Frenchman born in the late 1600s, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. Réaumur, who has a major street in Paris named after him, was a restless genius who studied everything from geometry to birds’ nests. He is most famous for creating a temperature scale in which zero is the temperature at which water freezes. It is the basis of the Celsius thermometer used by most of the world today, though, foolishly, not by the United States.
Réaumur was fascinated with insects. He studied wasps and found that they built nests from wood fibers—nests that very much resembled paper. Wasps gathered wood particles from weathered old barns or fenceposts and built ingeniously designed waterproof homes with dome-shaped roofs of thin, light, overlapping paper. It occurred to Réaumur that these remarkable natural engineers had a better way of making paper than people did. When in 1719 he presented his study of wasps to the French Royal Academy, he stated:
The American Wasps form very fine paper, like ours; they extract the fiber of common wood of the countries where they live. They teach us that paper can be made from the fiber of plants without the use of rags and linen. And seem to invite us to try whether we cannot make fine and good paper from the use of certain woods. If we had woods similar to those used by the American wasps for their paper, we could make the whitest paper, for this material is very white. By a further beating and breaking of the fibers that the wasps make and using the thin paste that comes from them, a very fine paper can be composed.
He went on to say how important it was to study wasps, because rags were becoming scarce and expensive. He warned, “While the consumption of paper increases every day, the production of linen stays the same.” But neither he nor anyone else took up the wasps’ invitation.
The Europeans did start looking for other materials with which to make paper, however. In 1727, Franz Ernst Brückmann, a German mineralogist, published a book about geology printed on asbestos paper, a toxic idea that fortunately did not catch on. A Flemish eighteenth-century naturalist, Albertus Seba, came up with other ideas that had more of a future. He suggested making paper either from trees or seaweed, both of which are done today. Others suggested using various bushes or swamp moss. In 1771, a German clergyman and aspiring naturalist, Jacob Christian Schäffer, published a six-volume investigation of alternative sources for making paper; included in the volumes were sample sheets that he had made. The formulas’ main ingredient was vegetable fibers, to which about 20 percent cotton fiber was added. He made paper from raw hemp, bark, and straw, all three of which were familiar in ancient China. He also made paper from wasp nests, vines, moss, cabbage stalks, pinecones, asbestos, thistles, turf, corn husks, potatoes, old shingles, reeds, and the leaves of horse chestnut, walnut, tulip, and linden trees. He experimented with several types of wood. For his paper made from potatoes, which he called earth apples after the French pommes de terre, he had to first explain what potatoes were, as they were then unknown in most of Europe.
After Schäffer’s investigations, it was understood that there were any number of materials that might be used to make paper. In the United States, there was even an attempt to make paper from okra. In 1800, the Marquis of Salisbury presented King George III with a book whose pages were made entirely from straw. That same year, Matthias Koops published Historical Account of the Substances which Have Been Used to Describe Events, and to Convey Ideas from the Earliest Date to the Invention of Paper. More significant than its text was the yellowish paper on which it was printed—it too was made entirely from straw. Koops even started calling his Millbank paper mill the Straw Paper Manufactory. There were other experimental features to Koops’s book. The second edition contained an appendix that was printed on paper made of wood; according to historian Dard Hunter, this was the first use of bleached wood paper in an English book. Koops also experimented with recycled paper.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the British were making small amounts of paper from mill sweepings. Irish mills made paper from the waste flax found in linen mills. Cotton mills started selling their waste to paper mills rather than discarding it. Early nineteenth-century paper mills in Lancashire became dependent on the scrap from cotton and linen mills. Straw produced an unattractive off-white paper that was used for newspapers but little else. A more successful alternative to rags, used in Britain, was esparto grass, which is a perennial grass that grows in Spain and North Africa. Even with import costs, the grass was cheaper than rags, and by midcentury, the British were making significant amounts of paper with it. Esparto grass was a British specialty adopted by no other country.
Esparto may be why Britain was slower than the Continent to turn to wood pulp. There were patents registered in Britain for making paper from wood pulp in the 1840s and 1850s, but the idea was not taken up by paper mills. On the Continent, the wood-pulp industry was inaugurated in 1840 when a German, F. G. Keller, patented a very workable method of making paper from the pulp produced by grinding wood. By 1850, paper based on the Keller patent was being commercially manufactured. German techniques for producing ground wood pulp were then readily adopted in North America, a land where forests were plentiful.
MAKING PAPER OUT of wood, though it may seem natural enough today, did not strike most people as a sensible thing to do. In Germany in 1765, paper was made experimentally from wood pulp, but outside of a few eccentric circles and a patent or two filed in London, the idea did not catch on—not even after machine-made paper had generally replaced handmade. The first wood-based paper in America was not made until 1863; papermakers hesitated giving up scrounging for old, dirty clothes and replacing them with a natural product made principally of cellulose.
Cellulose is the fiber from which paper is made, and wood is about half cellulose. The exact amount varies slightly. European spruce is exactly 50 percent cellulose, but American white spruce is 56.48 percent. American aspen or poplar is 57.25 percent cellulose, and American hemlock is only 48.7 percent. The percentage of cellulose can vary by as much as 4 percent on different parts of the same tree.
Traditional paper sources such as flax and hemp have a higher percentage of cellulose than wood, and cotton is 90 percent cellulose. If those statistics had been known in the mid-1800s, they could have been a good reason for papermakers to hesitate about using wood for paper, especially since it was obvious that very little needed to be done to cotton to turn it into paper, whereas a great deal needed to be done to wood. Making paper from wood is counterintuitive; wood is hard. In contrast, grass, flax, cotton, hemp rags, and other materials are soft, like paper, though they require a long process of soaking, fermenting, and beating before they can be reduced to the fibers necessary for papermaking.
Nobody even knew about cellulose until 1838, however, when French chemist Anselme Payen discovered it. Cellulose is a carbohydrate made of glucose. It is what chemists call “a straight chain polymer,” which means that while other starches tend to coil or spread out, cellulose fibers remain in stiff rods with hard outer walls that are not soluble in water.
The first attempt in the United States to commercially produce wood pulp for paper mills was by a Massachusetts company, Platner & Smith in 1857. The effort failed, however, because the process was too expensive and yielded poor-quality paper. The first commercially successful wood pulp did not appear until 1867, when it was made in Curtisville, Massachusetts, by two German brothers, Albrecht and Rudolf Pagenstecher, who had brought over two German Keller-Voelter wood grinders. They sold their pulp to the Smith Paper Company, which used it to produce one of the fastest-growing commercial products of the day, newsprint. Seventeen years later, in 1884, turning wood into paper became truly efficient thanks to Peter Jensen in Maasbüll, Germany. He started producing wood chippers, machines that rapidly cut wood blocks into pieces no more than one inch long and 1/8 to 3/16 of an inch thick.
In the 1860s, an American chemist named Benjamin Chew Tilghman experimented with breaking down wood by cooking it in a sulfur dioxide and water bath placed in a long rotating cylinder that he called a digester—the name by which it is still known. At first the pulp came out very dark and wouldn’t bleach, but he solved the problem by adding a base, lime, to neutralize the acid. His digester was fifty feet long and three feet wide. In 1867 Tilghman patented his invention in London, the place for industrial patents at the time. His patent included environmental measures such as instructions on how to use water to absorb the sulfur-dioxide gas fumes the process produced and how to turn that water and sulfur-dioxide solution into fertilizer. But the paper industry was mainly interested in the first part of his patent.
Tilghman’s “sulphite” process ultimately became the mainstay of North American paper production. By 1920, the United States and Canada, rich in forestland, were producing more than 2 million tons of sulphite pulp annually. The sulphite process gave off horrendous odors, but fortunately many paper mills, no longer needing to be situated near population centers for rags, were now located deep in the countryside, near forests. And though the mills were no longer water-powered, they were still located near a water source. A tremendous amount of water was needed to move and spread the wood fibers thinly on the screens; the solution had to be only 2 to 4 percent wood fibers and 96 to 98 percent water, making the pulp look like slightly cloudy water. All paper mills today are still located by a water source.
To the Europeans, wood pulp seemed to be the answer too, but since they had far fewer forests than the North Americans did, they often had to import the pulp. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain was importing almost 500,000 tons of wood pulp annually. By the 1950s, they were importing four times that much. Paper demand and paper production had caught up with each other, making it much easier to produce more. Between 1870 and 1880, Britain doubled the amount of paper it produced; in the last forty years of the nineteenth century, an average of two new paper mills started up there every year. This led to price wars, which was hard on the paper mills, making it difficult for some to survive, but it was good for newspapers, which thrived on making their product as cheap as possible. In 1869, the cost of The Times of London went from 4 pence per paper to 3.
According to the US census, there were 169 paper mills in the United States in 1820; by 1870, that number had grown to 669. And in the 1870s, it became fashionable to make inexpensive paper versions of everything. A paper petticoat went on the market and, whatever its drawbacks, cost only 15 cents. An invention was patented for making coffins from paper pulp. Men’s paper shirt collars were a $75 million a year industry in Boston. A Troy, New York, company started making boats out of varnished paper. In 1874, Nathaniel Bishop shoved off from Quebec on a 2,500-mile voyage in one of their fifty-eight-pound paper canoes. Eight months later, he arrived in the Gulf of Mexico.
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WHEN THE SECOND edition of Matthias Koops’s book came out, the appendix in the back printed on wood-based paper was white, but over time, it turned brown. So have most of the books printed between the 1860s and the early twentieth century. The culprit is lignin, the substance that holds cellulose fibers together. Where there is cellulose, there is lignin. Hemp has less than 4 percent lignin, but wood can be as much as 30 percent lignin. That is what makes wood the only really solid vegetable fiber that is sturdy enough for construction.
Paper that turned brown with time was acceptable for newsprint. The basic assumption about newspapers, though not always correct, was that they were inexpensive and intended to be thrown away. That assumption was true for certain other types of paper as well, including what used to be called “math paper,” cheap paper for schoolchildren to use to work out math problems. But books and stationery and official documents could not be allowed to turn color after a year or two.
In 1879 Carl F. Dahl invented a process in Danzig, then part of Prussia, called kraft. Kraft is a German word for “strong,” and Dahl’s process made paper stronger. Wood chips were treated with sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide, sometimes called white liquor. This broke down the bond that holds cellulose to lignin, and the lignin could then be washed away. In 1895, the Glatfelter mill near the Gettysburg battlefield installed the kraft process and only then did they completely abandon rag for wood. Both in Europe and the United States the kraft process was embraced by some, but did not completely take over the old sulfite process until the 1940s.
A 150-year-old book made from wood paper will not hold up as well as the 500-year-old books of Aldus Manutius made from rag paper. Even today, the finest paper, used for quality stationery, artwork, or currency, is often made from linen or cotton, not wood. Some mills, such as Crane in Dalton, Massachusetts, always stuck with linen and cotton and never switched to wood. But they could do so because their mainstay business was the high-grade paper used to print US dollars and other currencies.
When papermakers turned to wood, they used acidic water to soak pulp. It was logical to think that acid would break the pulp down to fibers, and it did. The problem was that the acid continued breaking down the paper, and so now more than a century’s worth of books are falling apart. It was not until 1970 that the concept of acid-free paper was widely embraced. Although it is counterintuitive, alkaline, the exact opposite of acid, breaks down pulp just as well as acid. Now in the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library they are deacidifying books published from 1840 to 1970 with a gas or alkaline solution.
A huge number of books were produced during this period, often with paper made on the originally French-designed Fourdrinier machines, grown so large that they had to be housed in huge airplane hangar–like buildings. An American Fourdrinier in 1867 produced 100 feet of paper a minute. By 1872, it had sped up to 175 feet a minute. In 1880, Glatfelter installed a Fourdrinier that turned out 200 feet of paper per minute. By the end of the century, a roll of paper that came off a Fourdrinier was more than 13 feet wide.
Already by 1873, the United States, a land of forests and industry, had overtaken Europe as the largest papermaker in the world. Germany and Britain competed for second place.