HISTORY OF PAPER

50 B.C.
The Chinese first made paper with short lengths of bamboo and then later added cotton linen rags which were soaked in   water and pounded into swollen pulp. This was then formed into sheets and dried.
2nd Century
   105 A.D: Ts’ai Lun, a Chinese court official, has his name linked to the invention of paper. Most likely, Ts’ai mixed       mulberry bark, hemp, and rags with water, mashed it into pulp, pressed out the liquid, and hung the thin mat to dry in   the sun.
8th Century 
Arabs were known to make writing paper and were the first to use linen in the process.

 Papyrus

12th Century 
Spain, France & Italy had papermaking mills.
13th Century 
Germany had papermaking mills.
14th Century
England recorded locations for papermaking mills. Rags were the principal raw material and they were in short supply, thus limiting growth.
15th Century
   1400-1600: In Renaissance Europe, paper was in high demand by the educated and elite society. Paper thus became an essential commodity, but the demand was too great for the supply at the time. Rags were the principal raw material and in short supply.

17th Century
   1648: Henry Crane emigrates from England and settles in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His great-grandson, Stephen Crane, is the first in the family to become a papermaker.
   1690: William Rittenhouse and William Bradford of Germantown, PA built the first North American papermaking mill at Wissahickon Creek, near Philadelphia, that used rags as the raw material. Rags were boiled, rinsed, and beaten to a pulp, then pressed to get the water out and dried to become paper. Thanks to a great deal of imagination and hard work, they successfully collected, separated, cleaned, and recycled old cloth rags to make America’s first writing. Among the many picturesque acres of Philadelphia’s Fairmont Park, there is a rare and unique treasure known as Historic Rittenhouse Town. It is the site of America’s first paper mill, established in 1690 by Wilhelm Rittenhausen. Today, 7 buildings remain, dating from the early 18th century until the end of the 19th century, including a barn which houses a papermaking studio, the original Rittenhouse Family Homestead, and the original Rittenhouse Homestead Bakehouse. The site is open to the public and offers many exciting programs that enrich interest and awareness of this important National Historic Landmark and all it has to offer. The paper mill structure unfortunatley no longer exists. The mill building was taken down sometime after Fairmount Park took control of the site in the late nineteenth century. In the mid-1990s, Historic RittenhouseTown Inc. hired archeologists to search for the site of the mill. The base of the second mill has been located and Historic RittenhouseTown Inc. hopes eventually to be able to expose part of the base of the mill and include this in historical interpretation of the site.
18th Century
   1716: Hemp was first used in an experiment as a raw material for paper making in Europe.
   1750: In Holland the first mechanical rag beater was developed called the Hollander. It was a tube with a revolving roller inside that passed over knives. This cut the rags up for pulping.
   1775: The first US paper money – Stephen Crane sells currency-type paper to engraver Paul Revere, who prints the American Colonies’ first paper money. Revere’s transaction is on display in the Crane Museum.
   1791: Rags needed in US- The Second Congress of the US passed a resolution calling on the people for rags to keep the infant papermaking industry alive. Rags were deemed in short supply. Alexander Hamilton reported later that year that supply of rags was adequate.
   1798: Rolls made instead of sheets- Nicholas-Louis Robert of France invented a machine that produces paper on an endless wire screen. The Frenchman patented the idea of matting the fabric fibers and joining the sheet on a moving wire belt through which excess water could drain away. His machine would make continuous rolls rather tan sheets. It became the Fourdrinier. Fifty years later, papermakers began successfully using wood fiber to make paper, a process that was introduced in the United States in the early 1900s.


19th Century 
   1800: Matthias Hoops published a treatise on papermaking written on paper made from straw, leaves, wood and other vegetable products.

Early paper money from British Colonies

   1801: Crane is founded by Zenas Crane, Henry Wiswall and John Willard; the original one-vat mill has a daily output of 20 posts (1 post = 125 sheets). Crane runs its first newspaper ad, asking ladies to save their household rags for papermaking.
   1803: The Fourdrinier brothers in England improved the Nicholas Louis Robert continuous roll papermaking machine and made the Fourdrinier papermaking machine, which is still the heart of the paper and pulp industry
   1810: The US census reported 179 mills in 17 states with an output of 3,000 tons. But the supply of rags was not sufficient to fuel the growth and demand for paper. European imports of rags became very expensive.
   1815: European papermakers were flooding the US with exports of paper & rags, making high profits because of the lack of supply of rags in the US. This hurt the US papermaking industry.
   1820: The US census reported only 108 mills in operation compared to 179 ten years earlier. The newly invented cylinder-mould machine replaces hand-forming. In Boston, Governor Strong uses Crane paper for executive proclamations and state documents.
   1822: A US tariff was implemented to help the papermakers in the US. From here on, the industry grew steadily into its world dominance of today.
   1840: Mechanical Process for making wood pulp- The development of the wood grinder for making ground wood now called pulp. This process grinds the wood in revolving grinders. There is little chemical change and the resulting pulp contains practically all the original cellulose constituents of the original wood. This pulp cannot be bleached and is used where color is unimportant, such as newsprint.
   1844: Money Paper- Crane patented a method to embed silk threads into banknote paper to foil counterfeiters. The direct descendant of this idea can be seen in the embedded security thread in today’s U.S. currency. It was patented in 1991 by Tim Crane, a member of the sixth generation
   1854: Wood pulp first used- Practical results of making paper from wood pulp were first obtained. Mechanical wood pulp or groundwood, as the new pulp was called, was used to supplement the supply of rags, and the mixture of rags and wood pulp produced a paper suitable for the times.
   1856: In 1856, the English started to use corrugated paper for sweatband linings in stovepipe hats. Albert L. Jones, a New York City inventor, in 1871 was the first to use corrugated as a packing material for shipping kerosene-lamp chimneys and other glass. Goodbye sawdust and straw – over the next two decades cardboard evolved into today’s familiar sandwich, corrugated stuffing between two layers of linerboard. * see note below
  1866: In 1866, an American named Benjamin Tilghman developed the sulfite pulping process. This process used sulphurous acid to dissolve the liqueous constituents of wood, leaving a residual of cellulose fibers. The first mill using this process was built in Sweden in 1874 and this became the dominant pulping process until 1937.

Early British writing paper

   1870: There were eight ground-wood mills in the US. Mills were mostly in New England because of large supplies of spruce pulpwood there. In the 1890’s, mills were being erected in the Lake States region because of the supply of spruce and balsam.
   1870: Elegant women’s stationery from Europe becomes the rage in America. Zenas Crane Jr. travels to Europe to learn the techniques. Soon, Tiffany, Bailey, Banks & Biddle, Marshall Field’s and Shreve, Crump & Lowe all carry Crane stationary paper.
   1872: Charles Benjamin Clark, a 28-year-old Civil War veteran, recruits John A. Kimberly, Havilah Babcock and Frank Shattuck to build a paper mill in Wisconsin. They began producing newsprint from linen and cotton rags on October 22, 1872. Rags were cut up by machines and boiled for 14 hours. Then the rags were steamed, pressure washed, and rinsed for 5 hours. The rags were then bleached, drained and then beaten to make pulp. More bleaching added whiteness.
   1873: W. Murray Crane receives a challenge from Winchester Arms Company of New Haven, Connecticut, to develop a strong, thin wrapping for repeater rifle bullets. This lucrative contract carries Crane through the recession of the 1870s. Other innovations around this time include a substitute for parchment, sheepskin for diplomas, and special thin paper for Bibles.
   1874: Brothers Thomas Scott, Irvin Scott, Clarence Scott; and their cousins Thomas Seymore and Zerah Hoyt, establish The Scott Paper Company is established in Philadelphia, PA.
   1878: API, the American Paper Institute, was first formed as the American Paper Makers Association in 1878. Five years later, it was reorganized and renamed the American Paper Manufacturers Association. A wood pulp division was added in 1887 and in 1897 the organization was again renamed as the American Paper and Pulp Association (APPA). This name lasted for the next 66 years.  Today, the group is part of the American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), which was formed in 1993.
   1879: W. Murray Crane wins heated competition for U.S. currency paper. He later becomes Governor of Massachusetts and a U.S. Senator.
   1880: US – There were now 40 ground-wood mills in America.
   1880: Great Britain- The British Perforated Paper Company produced toilet paper.
   1882: Sweden first used the sulfite pulping process on a commercial basis.
   1883: German inventor Carl Dahl discovered adding sodium sulfate to the caustic soda pulping process produced a very strong pulp. This was called the Kraft process; Kraft means strong in German. During the early 1900’s, the Kraft process became the most important pulping process due to its several distinct advantages. First, the chemicals used to dissolve the lignin were recoverable and tremendous amounts of energy were produced during the recovery process. The process could also pulp pine trees, a predominant forest species in the United States. The Kraft process allowed the United States to become a major producer of paper products; Kraft paper makes paper bags and heavy wrapping.
   1890: The manufacture of sulfite wood pulp was first commercially accepted in the US. This process involved cooking wood chips in an acid, chiefly bisulfite of lime, at high temperature and high pressure. This pulp can be bleached white. Sulfite pulp is very stable and the bleached pulp is good for writing, tissue, book and wrapping papers as well as food containerboard. Unbleached sulfite pulp is used in newsprint.