Christina Gerber, age 9, of Williamsport, Pa., for her question:
Who invented paper?
Our world of today is full of man made wonders. There are plastics to make bright Christmas toys, dresses of smooth dacron and even unbreakable cups. These and other man made wonders are new. But let's not forget that our crispy paper is a man made wonder that started long ago and far away.
Anyone can make a sheet of paper from shredded rags or stringy plant stalks. Peop1e started to write and read thousands of years ago, and in all that time they have found many different ways to make their paper. Long ago, the peop1e of Egypt made stiff pages from rushes. They lived along the muddy banks of the nile river where tall papyrus reeds grew in the swampy ground. The Egyptians dried these rushes, sliced them and pressed them flat. Then they pasted the flat layers together to make scrolls of stiff papyrus paper.
When Columbus set sail for America, all the countries of the old world were making paper of some kind. Some used the stringy stalks of the blue flowered flax plants. They dried and shredded the threads and mixed them with water and a gummy glue. Then they scooped up the wet mixture in a tray with a bottom of openwork net. Most of the water drained away and left a flat .layer of tacky threads in the tray. This was dried out in an oven or in the sun, and it became a sheet of paper.
Other peop1e shredded linen rags and mixed them with watery glue. They, too, sifted and dried their mixtures in wire trays. Some people did their writing on animal skins. After eating the meat of a sheep, they soaked its skin in a special mixture to stop it from rotting. Then they stretched it on a frame and dried it in the sun. The finished page was called vellum.
The people of china did their pretty picture writing on strips of silk. This was long before the invention of papyrus, rag paper or vellum. We 11ve in 1965 a.d., and the experts tell us that our kind of paper was made first in 105 a.d. It was made in China 1,860 years ago by a minister of public works whose name was ts'ai lun. He made a mushy pulp from mulberry bark, and his finished paper was a matted layer of woody threads. Most of our paper today also is made from wood pulp. The woody threads are shredded from chips of sturdy lumber.
Other countries one by one learned ts'ai lun's trick for making paper from wood pulp. The Arabs learned it from the Chinese prisoners of war and made it in old Bagdad, and the crusaders found samples of their paper in the holy land. Shredding the wood to pulp was hard work, and for a long time most countries in Europe made their paper from shredded rags. About 100 years ago a machine was invented to chomp logs into woody fibers. And step by step people learned to make less costly paper from wood pulp.