This manufacture of the Chinese extended also to the making of sheets of paper from old rags, silk, hemp, and cotton, as early as the second century of the Christian era, and is supposed to have been the source whence the Arabs obtained their knowledge of paper-making. The latter people first introduced the valuable art of making paper from cotton into Europe, in the earlier half of the twelfth century, and established a paper manufactory in Spain. In 1150, the paper of Xativa, an ancient city of Valencia, had become famous, and was exported to the East and West. Notwithstanding its fame, this paper was of a coarse and inferior quality, so long as its manufacture was confined solely to the Arabs, in consequence of their employing only mortars, and hand or horse-mills for reducing the cotton to a pulp; but when some Christian laborers obtained the management of the mills of Valencia and Toledo, the different processes of the manufacture were greatly improved. Cotton paper became general at the close of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries; but, in the fourteenth century, it was almost entirely superseded by paper made of hemp and linen rags. The paper made of cotton was found not to possess sufficient strength or solidity for many purposes; a very strong paper was therefore made of the above substances, not weakened by bleaching, according to the present mode, which, by removing the natural gum, impairs the strength of the vegetable fibre. Some of these old papers, having been well sized with gelatin, are said to possess their original qualities even to this day.
The manufacture of paper from linen rags became general in France, Italy, and Spain in the fourteenth century; the first German paper-mill was established at Nuremberg in 1390. English manuscripts on linen paper date as early as 1340; but it is believed that the manufacture did not exist in England until the end of the fifteenth century, when the Bartolomæus of Wynkyn de Worde appeared (1496), in which it is stated that paper of a superior kind was made for that work by John Tate, Jr., at his mills in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. In 1588, a German named Spielman, jeweller to Queen Elizabeth, established a paper-mill at Dartford. In 1770, the manufacture of fine paper was established at Maidstone, in Kent, by a celebrated maker, J. Whatman, who had worked as journeyman in some of the principal paper-mills on the Continent. Not long before this, wove moulds had been invented by Baskerville to obviate the usual roughness of laid paper, and these, attracting attention in France, led to the improvements which characterized the vellum paper of that period. Holland, too, contributed its share to the advancement of this manufacture, by inventing cylinders with steel blades for tearing the rags, and thus facilitating their conversion into pulp, which, by the old method of stampers only, was a very slow and defective process.
In 1799, the first attempt to produce paper in an endless web was made in France by a workman in the employ of M. Didot. The invention was brought to England by M. Didot, in 1801, and made the subject of patents, which, in 1804, were assigned to the Messrs. Fourdrinier. Mr. Bryan Donkin, the engineer, carried out the desired plans, and produced, after intense application, a self-acting machine or working model, on an improved plan, of which he afterwards constructed many others for home use and for exportation, which were perfectly successful in the manufacture of continuous paper. In 1809, Mr. Dickinson, the celebrated paper-maker invented another method of making endless paper, the highly ingenious details of which will be noticed hereafter. The Fourdrinier machines have been greatly improved by the inventions of other skilful manufacturers.
At one time there were serious apprehensions that the supply of linen rags would fail, and various researches were entered upon by ingenious individuals to find substitutes. A book written in German by M. Shäffers, so long ago as 1772, contains sixty specimens of paper made of different materials. This ingenious person made paper from the bark of the willow, beech, aspen, hawthorn, lime, and mulberry; from the down of the asclepias, the catkins of black poplar, and the tendrils of the vine; from the stalks of nettle, mugwort, dyer's weed, thistle, bryony, burdock, clematis, willow-herb, and lily; from cabbage-stalks, fir-cones, moss, potatoes, wood-shavings,[1] and sawdust. Paper has been likewise made from straw, rice, hopbind, liquorice-root, the stalks of the mallow, and the husks of Indian-corn. The fear of a failure of linen rags, and the consequent necessity for these experiments, were obviated by the discovery of chlorine. This powerful bleaching agent will restore many varieties of colored linen to their original whiteness, as well as discolored papers and manuscripts, so that the same substances may be used over and over again as a material for paper.
[1] A successful experiment of making paper from this material, as also of reeds, has lately been tried in Baltimore.
SUPPLY OF RAGS—SORTING—WASHING—GRINDING, AND BLEACHING.
The quality of the paper depends greatly on that of the linen worn in the country where it is made. Where that is coarse and brown, the rags and the paper made from them must be so too.
The quality of the rags depends very much upon the state of civilization of the countries which produce them; the lower the degree of civilization, the more coarse and filthy are the rags. When the rags are received at the mill, they are sorted according to their respective qualities; for if rags of different qualities were ground at the same engine, the finest and best parts would be ground and carried off before the coarser were sufficiently reduced to make a pulp. In the sorting of rags intended for the manufacture of fine paper, hems and seams are kept apart, and coarse cloth separated from fine. Cloth made of tow should be separated from that made from linen, cloth of hemp from cloth of flax. Even the degree of wear should be attended to, for if rags comparatively new are mixed with those which are much worn, the one will be reduced to a good pulp, while the other is so completely ground up as to pass through the hair strainers; thus occasioning not only loss of material, but loss of beauty in the paper; for the smooth velvet softness of some papers may be produced by the finer particles thus carried off. The pulp produced from imperfectly sorted rags has a cloudy appearance, in consequence of some parts being less reduced than others, and the paper made from it is also cloudy or thicker in some parts than in others, as is evident on holding a sheet up before the light. When it is necessary to mix different qualities of rags together to produce different qualities of paper, the rags should be ground separately, and the various pulps mixed together afterwards.
The rag-merchants sort rags into five qualities, known as Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. No. 1, or superfine, consisting wholly of linen, is used for the finest writing-papers. No. 5 is canvas, and may, after bleaching, be used for inferior printing-papers. There is also rag-bagging, or the canvas sacks in which the rags are packed; also cotton colored rags of all colors, but the blue is usually sorted out for making blue paper. Common papers are made from rag-bagging and cotton rags.
An operation sometimes required after unpacking the rags, is to put them into a duster, which is a cylinder four feet in diameter and five feet long, covered with a wire net and inclosed in a tight box to confine the dust. A quantity of rags being put into this cylinder, it is made to rotate rapidly on its axis, and thus a good deal of dust is shaken out, which might otherwise vitiate the air of the rag-cutting room.