Anyone who needed to keep written records in antiquity faced trade-offs of cost and convenience. Clay tablets lasted, but they were heavy and held little text. Papyrus, made from a plant of the Nile valley, was light, but it depended on one region of cultivation and became brittle in damp or cold climates. Parchment, made from animal skin, was durable, yet every sheet required the hide of an animal, so books were expensive. In China, strips of bamboo and wood carried texts but were bulky, and silk was too costly for everyday use.
What was missing was a light, cheap surface that could be made almost anywhere with plant fibers and water. Paper filled that gap.
How it works
Paper is a sheet formed by a tangle of cellulose fibers. The basic recipe, in its many variants, follows the same steps.
1. Preparing the fibers. Materials such as paper mulberry bark, hemp, flax, bamboo or scraps of cloth are soaked, beaten and sometimes boiled or left to ferment so that the fibers separate. 2. Making the pulp. The loose fibers are suspended in water to form a thin slurry. 3. Forming the sheet. A screen of fine mesh held in a frame is dipped into the slurry and lifted out, letting the water drain away. The fibers settle on the screen in an even layer. 4. Pressing and drying. The wet sheets are stacked and pressed to squeeze out water, then dried in air or on heated surfaces. They are often coated with glue or starch so that ink does not bleed, which is called sizing.
Traditions differ. In China and Japan, flexible bamboo screens were common, and each sheet was formed on the screen and then peeled off. In medieval Europe, screens of wire were set in rigid frames, and sheets were transferred to felts for pressing. The wires leave faint lines visible when the sheet is held to the light. When a wire design is sewn to the screen, it leaves a watermark, which makers used as an identifying sign.
Historical context
China: before and after Cai Lun
Chinese tradition credits Cai Lun, an official at the Han court, with presenting an improved form of paper to the emperor in 105 CE. Archaeology, however, has turned up fragments of fiber paper at Chinese sites that researchers date as early as the second century BCE, including a small map fragment from a tomb at Fangmatan in Gansu province and paper stuck to a bronze mirror from a tomb at Baqiao in Shaanxi province. The view most widely held today is that paper developed gradually in unnamed workshops, and that Cai Lun mattered as a figure who helped standardize and promote raw materials and methods, not as the inventor in any simple sense. The earliest papers were also used for wrapping and padding, and only slowly became a surface for writing.
Over the following centuries paper became established in Chinese administration, literature and religion. Buddhism in particular generated huge demand for copies of sacred texts, which was one of the pressures that led to woodblock printing. Later, in the Song dynasty, paper even served as money: paper notes circulated in Sichuan in the eleventh century.
The road west
Paper traveled through Central Asia and on to Korea and Japan, where it was being made by the early seventh century according to traditional accounts. In the Islamic world, tradition links the arrival of papermaking at Samarkand to Chinese prisoners taken after the battle of Talas in 751. Historians treat the details of that story as a tradition to be weighed against other evidence. What is clearer is that paper was being produced in Baghdad by the end of the eighth century (sources give dates from about 793 to 796), in a city with intense activity among copyists, libraries and booksellers. It served the administration of the caliphates and the circulation of works of science, philosophy and literature.
From the Islamic world, paper reached the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. The town of Xàtiva, in the region of Valencia, was described by the geographer al-Idrisi around 1150 as a producer of paper of unmatched quality, and paper may have been made in Islamic Spain even earlier. In Italy, Fabriano rose to prominence from the thirteenth century, with innovations that included water-powered stamping mills to pound rags into pulp, sizing with animal gelatin instead of starch, and the regular use of watermarks. The earliest known watermarks appear in Italy in the 1280s, with 1282 commonly cited for Fabriano and Bologna. In time France, Germany, the Low Countries and other regions set up their own mills.
Paper was not the only fiber-based writing surface. In Mesoamerica, Maya and Aztec scribes used bark paper, known today by the Nahuatl word amate, made by beating the inner bark of fig and related trees. It is a separate development and shows that similar ideas could arise independently.
From rag to wood
For centuries the main raw material in Europe was the rag, meaning old linen and hemp cloth. That created a bottleneck: rising demand for paper, which would be enormous after the printing press, ran up against the supply of rags. In the eighteenth century, naturalists and papermakers looked for alternatives. The French scientist René-Antoine de Réaumur drew attention in 1719 to the way wasps make paper from wood, and Jacob Christian Schäffer tested a range of plant materials in the 1760s.
Machine production followed. Nicolas-Louis Robert (sometimes given as Louis-Nicolas), an employee of the Essonnes paper mill in France, built a machine for making paper in a continuous roll in 1798 and received a patent for it in 1799. It was developed in England by engineers, notably Bryan Donkin, with financing from the Fourdrinier brothers, and the first production machines were operating in England in the early 1800s. In the 1840s, Friedrich Gottlob Keller in Saxony (and, independently, Charles Fenerty in Nova Scotia) developed a mechanical process for grinding wood into pulp, and chemical pulping methods followed in the 1850s and 1860s. Together they made paper far cheaper.
Impact and limitations
Paper lowered the cost of record-keeping and of circulating information. For bureaucracy, it made it possible to file contracts, tax records and correspondence in large volume. For education, it made notebooks and textbooks feasible. For culture, it fed the market in hand-copied and then printed books. The spread of printing in Europe depended on the prior availability of paper that was cheaper than parchment.
Paper also has weaknesses. The fibers and additives used in each period affect how long it lasts. In the early nineteenth century, papermakers began sizing paper with rosin and alum, a method that Moritz Friedrich Illig described in print in 1806 or 1807 and that came into wide use only some decades later. Paper made from wood pulp with acidic sizing from the mid-nineteenth century onward tends to yellow and crumble with age. That is a serious problem for libraries and archives. It led to the development of acid-free papers and of deacidification and conservation techniques. Well-made old rag paper often outlasts much industrial paper of the following centuries.
The fragility is also material: a light, combustible substance, paper suffered in fires and floods, and a great deal of early written work vanished because too few copies were made. What emerged over time was the practice of multiplying copies and keeping them in different places, which later guided thinking about preserving digital records too.
There were environmental and social consequences as well. Collecting rags and, later, cutting trees for pulp reshaped supply chains and landscapes. The paper industry created work, but chemical pulping also polluted rivers.
Connections to other technologies
Paper interacts with writing as a record-keeping technology. The surface changed how people wrote, organized documents and formed archives. It is also a precondition of the printing press, which multiplied what a scribe needed months to produce. Finally, growing volumes of correspondence and administrative paperwork are part of the background to the telegraph, which set out to shorten the time between sender and receiver. The wire screens of European papermaking also relied on metallurgy, since they needed metal drawn into fine, even wire.