IV
HOW RAGS AND TREES BECOME PAPER
It was a great day for the children on the farm when the tin peddler came around. He had a high red wagon, fairly bristling with brooms, mop-handles, washtubs, water-pails, and brushes. When he opened his mysterious drawers and caverns, the sunshine flashed upon tin pans, dippers, dustpans, and basins. Put away rather more choicely were wooden-handled knives, two-tined forks, and dishes of glass and china; and sometimes little tin cups painted red or blue and charmingly gilded, or cooky-cutters in the shape of dogs and horses. All these rare and delightful articles he was willing to exchange for rags. Is it any wonder that the thrifty housewife saved her rags with the utmost care, keeping one bag for white clippings and one for colored?
These peddlers were the great dependence of the paper mills, for the finest paper is made from linen and cotton rags. When the rags reach the factory, they are carefully sorted. All day long the sorters sit before tables whose tops are covered with coarse wire screens, and from masses of rags they pick out buttons, hooks and eyes, pins, bits of rubber, and anything else that cannot possibly be made into paper. At the same time they sort the rags carefully into different grades, and with a knife shaped like a small sickle fastened upright to the table they cut
them into small pieces. Some of the dust falls through the screen; but to remove the rest of it, the cut-up rags are tossed about in a wire drum. Sometimes they are so dusty that when they come out of the drum they weigh only nine tenths as much as when they go in. The dust is out of them, but not the dirt. To remove that, they are now put into great boilers full of steam; and here they cook and turn over, and turn over and cook for hours. Lime and sometimes soda are put with them to cleanse them and remove the coloring material; but when they are poured out, they look anything but clean, for they are of a particularly dirty brown; and the water that is drained away from them looks even more uninteresting. Of course the next step is to wash this dirty brown mass; and for at least four hours it is scrubbed in a machine which beats it and rolls it and chops it and tumbles it about until the wonder is that anything is left of it. All this while, the water has been flowing through it, coming in clean and going out dirty; and at length the mass becomes so light a gray that making white paper of it does not seem quite hopeless. It is now bleached with chloride of lime, and washed till it is of a creamy white color and free from the lime, and then beaten again. If you fold a piece of cheap paper and tear it at the fold, it will tear easily; but if you do the same thing with paper made of linen and cotton, you will find it decidedly tough. Moreover, if you look closely at the torn edge of the latter, you will see the fibers clearly. It is because of
the beating that the fibers are so matted together and thus make the paper tough. While the pulp is in the beater, the manufacturer puts in the coloring matter, if he wishes it to be tinted blue or rose or lavender or any other color. No one would guess that this white or creamy or azure liquid had ever been the dirty rags that came into the mill and were sorted on the wire tables. Besides the coloring, a "filler" is usually added at this time, such as kaolin, the fine clay of which china is made. This fills the pores and gives a smoother surface to the finished paper—a good thing if too much is not put in. A little sizing is also added, made of rosin. Save for this sizing, ink would sink into even the finished paper as it does into blotting paper. After this, more water is added to the pulp and it is run into tanks.
Now the preparation is completed, and the pulp is pumped to large and complicated machines which undertake to make it into paper. It first flows through screens which are shaken all the while as if they were trembling. This shaking lets the liquid and the finer fibers through, but holds back the little lumps, if any remain after all the beating and straining and cutting that it has had. The pulp flows upon an endless wire screen. Rubber straps at the sides keep it in, but the extra water drops through the meshes. The pulp is flowing onward, and so the tiny fibers would naturally straighten out and flow with it, like sticks in a river; but the wire screen is kept shaking sideways, and this helps the
fibers to interlace, and the paper becomes nearly as strong one way as the other.
If you hold a sheet of paper up to the light, it will show plainly what is next done to it. Sometimes you can see that it is marked by light parallel lines running across it close together, and crossed by other and stouter lines an inch or two apart. Sometimes the name of the paper or that of the manufacturer is marked in the same way by letters lighter than the rest of the sheet. Sometimes the paper is plain with no markings whatever. This difference is made by what is called the "dandy," a cylinder covered with wire. For the first, or "laid" paper, the small wires run the length of the cylinder and the stouter ones around it. Wherever the wires are, the paper is a little thinner. In some papers this thinness can be seen and felt. For the second kind of paper the design, or "watermark," is formed by wires a little thicker than the rest of the covering. For the third, or "wove" paper, the dandy is covered with plain woven wire like that of the wire cloth; so there are no markings at all. This work can be easily done because at this point the paper is so moist.