Cai Lun, formerly romanized as Ts'ai Lun, was a Chinese eunuch court official of the Eastern Han dynasty. He is traditionally regarded as the inventor of paper and the modern papermaking process, as he created paper in its modern form. Although early forms of paper had existed since the 3rd century BCE, he occupies a pivotal place in the history of paper due to his addition tree bark and hemp ends, which resulted in the large-scale manufacture and rapid spread of paper.
Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a specialized craft and a medium for artistic expression.
Pulp is a lignocellulosic fibrous material prepared by chemically or mechanically separating cellulose fibers from wood, fiber crops, waste paper, or rags. Mixed with water and other chemical or plant-based additives, pulp is the major raw material used in papermaking and the industrial production of other paper products.
The pulp and paper industry comprises companies that use wood as raw material and produce pulp, paper, paperboard and other cellulose-based products.
A paper mill is a factory devoted to making paper from vegetable fibres such as wood pulp, old rags, and other ingredients. Prior to the invention and adoption of the Fourdrinier machine and other types of paper machine that use an endless belt, all paper in a paper mill was made by hand, one sheet at a time, by specialized laborers.
Konjac is a common name of the East and Southeast Asian plant Amorphophallus konjac, which has an edible corm (bulbo-tuber). It is also known as konjaku, konnyaku potato, devil's tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, or elephant yam.
Paper craft is a collection of crafts using paper or card as the primary artistic medium for the creation of two or three-dimensional objects. Paper and card stock lend themselves to a wide range of techniques and can be folded, curved, bent, cut, glued, molded, stitched, or layered. Papermaking by hand is also a paper craft.
Wove paper is a writing paper with a uniform surface, not ribbed or watermarked. The papermaking mould's wires run parallel to each other to produce laid paper, but they are woven together into a fine wire mesh for wove paper. The originator of this new papermaking technique was James Whatman (1702–1759) from Kent, England.
Sadao Watanabe, born and raised in Tokyo, was a Japanese printmaker in the 20th century. Watanabe was famous for his biblical prints rendered in the mingei tradition of Japan. As a student of the master textile dye artist Serizawa Keisuke (1895–1984), Watanabe was associated with the mingei movement.
Shirataki or ito-konnyaku are translucent, gelatinous traditional Japanese noodles made from the konjac yam. The word shirataki means 'white waterfall', referring to the appearance of these noodles. Largely composed of water and glucomannan, a water-soluble dietary fiber, they are very low in digestible carbohydrates and food energy, and have little flavor of their own.
Korean paper or hanji is the name of traditional handmade paper from Korea. Hanji is made from the inner bark of Broussonetia papyrifera known colloquially as paper mulberry, a tree native to Korea that grows well on its rocky mountainsides, known in Korean as dak. The formation aid crucial to making hanji is the mucilage that oozes from the roots of Hibiscus manihot. This substance helps suspend the individual fibers in water.
Laid paper is a type of paper having a ribbed texture imparted by the manufacturing process. In the pre-mechanical period of European papermaking, laid paper was the predominant kind of paper produced. Its use, however, diminished in the 19th century, when it was largely supplanted by wove paper. Laid paper is still commonly used by artists as a support for charcoal drawings.
Damjing or Donchō was a Buddhist priest who was sent to ancient Japan from Goguryeo around 610. How his name was pronounced in the Goguryeo language is unknown.
William Joseph "Dard" Hunter was an American authority on printing, paper, and papermaking, especially by hand, using sixteenth century tools and techniques. He is known for, among other things, the production of two hundred copies of his book Old Papermaking, for which he prepared all aspects: Hunter wrote the text, designed and cast the type, did the typesetting, handmade the paper, and printed and bound the book. A display at the Smithsonian Institution that appeared with his work read, "In the entire history of printing, these are the first books to have been made in their entirety by the labors of one man." He also wrote Papermarking by Hand in America (1950), a similar but even larger undertaking.
The Robert C. Williams American Museum of Papermaking is a research institution and public museum dedicated to the preservation of the history of paper and paper technology. Located inside the Paper Tricentennial Building at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, the museum features the largest collection of paper and paper-related artifacts in the world, including watermarks, papers, tools, machines, and manuscripts. Changing exhibits focus on paper art, and a permanent exhibit details the science and technology used in papermaking.
Printing and writing papers are paper grades used for newspapers, magazines, catalogs, books, notebooks, commercial printing, business forms, stationeries, copying and digital printing. About 1/3 of the total pulp and paper marked is printing and writing papers. The pulp or fibers used in printing and writing papers are extracted from wood using a chemical or mechanical process.
Paper is a thin nonwoven material traditionally made from a combination of milled plant and textile fibres. It is primarily used for writing, artwork, and packaging; it is commonly white. The first papermaking process was documented in China during the Eastern Han period traditionally attributed to the court official Cai Lun. During the 8th century, Chinese papermaking spread to the Islamic world, where pulp mills and paper mills were used for papermaking and money making. By the 11th century, papermaking was brought to Europe. By the 13th century, papermaking was refined with paper mills utilizing waterwheels in Spain. Later European improvements to the papermaking process came in the 19th century with the invention of wood-based papers.
The wet strength of paper and paperboard is a measure of how well the web of fibers holding the paper together can resist a force of rupture when the paper is wet. Wet strength is routinely expressed as the ratio of wet to dry tensile force at break.
This article addresses the history of papermaking in Massachusetts.
Hemp paper means paper varieties consisting exclusively or to a large extent from pulp obtained from fibers of industrial hemp. The products are mainly specialty papers such as cigarette paper, banknotes and technical filter papers. Compared to wood pulp, hemp pulp offers a four to five times longer fibre, a significantly lower lignin fraction as well as a higher tear resistance and tensile strength. Because the paper industry's processes have been optimized for wood as the feedstock, production costs currently are much higher than for paper from wood.
