Originally from China
Paper became known to the world thanks to the Celestial Empire. The first raw material for it was silk scraps. Although silk was an excellent writing material, it was too expensive, so even small scraps were put to use, ground between stones. The resulting pulp was poured onto a flat surface and dried under weight. This wasn’t yet paper in the full sense of the word, but it was already a step toward its creation. Silk was soon replaced by a cheaper material — crushed mulberry bark and bamboo stalks. By the turn of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, paper made from plant fibers was no longer a rarity in China. By the 3rd century, it had completely replaced wooden writing tablets.
In the 2nd century AD, paper reached Korea. In the 3rd century AD, it reached the shores of Japan, but only truly took hold there by around 610 AD. Over time, the students surpassed their teachers — a century later, the Japanese were already making their own paper, which exceeded Chinese paper in quality.
In the 3rd century, paper spread into Central Asia. In the 7th century, it became known in India, and in the 8th century, in Western Asia. In the 10th century, paper “reached” Africa; in the 12th century, it entered Europe; and by the 16th century, it was already known in the Americas (Mexico, 1580). Small-scale production emerged later, in the 17th century, on the territory of what is now the United States.
The first paper workshop was built in Samarkand by the Arabs with the help of Chinese prisoners in the 7th–8th centuries. Paper began to be made from rags and cotton. The Arabs were the first to use a grinding method for the paper pulp instead of pounding it in a mortar, and they held a monopoly on papermaking for five centuries, carefully guarding its secrets.
In Europe, Spain became the first paper producer (around 1150), adopting the technology from the Arabs. Paper appeared in Italy in 1154. By the 13th–14th centuries, Western Europe was also producing and using large quantities of paper.
“Paper Mills”
The papermaking process requires large amounts of water to power the mill drives. That’s why paper workshops were built as close to water as possible, and often directly on a river. They came to be known as “paper mills.” The first paper mills appeared in Italy in the 13th century (Fabriano, 1276, followed later by Bologna and Ancona), in France in the 14th century (1348), in Germany in 1380, in England in the mid-14th century, in the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark in the 1360s, in Poland in 1493, and in Bohemia in 1499.
With the advent of book printing, paper mills also began operating in Russia. There are references suggesting that writing paper was already being produced under Ivan the Terrible, but it was of such poor quality that Russians continually ordered it from abroad.
Under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, even though Russia already had two paper factories, writing paper for state needs was still being purchased from England.
The paper industry began to develop actively under Peter I, who, after traveling abroad, conceived the idea of “establishing paper mills in every province.” In 1714, by the tsar’s decree, a paper mill was founded near St. Petersburg, and two years later the first sheet of paper was produced.
Russia purchased paper as an “overseas good” for more than 260 years. Up until the early 19th century, paper was imported through Arkhangelsk. Just a year after the city’s founding, merchants had already brought in 400 reams of French paper through it. From this first sea port, this scarce cargo was sent on to Moscow. At that time, the ream served as the main international unit for measuring paper output — it consisted of 480 sheets, each of which was in turn divided into quires containing 24 sheets each.
One of the first founders of a paper enterprise in Russia was Afanasy Goncharov, the great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin’s wife — a wealthy Kaluga townsman who later became a nobleman. His paper mill employed up to 540 people, not counting the serfs bound to the estate who performed corvée labor at the factory. It was the largest enterprise of its kind in Russia, rivaling in size most similar factories in Western Europe.
In northern Russia, the founder of paper production was Ivan Demidov, an Arkhangelsk merchant originally from the Kegostrovskaya volost of the Arkhangelsk district. For about 45 years (from 1820 to 1865), his enterprise supplied paper to various offices, sugar refineries, and educational institutions in the province, and the paper was also shipped to markets in other regions.
At the start of the 19th century, Russia already had 64 registered writing-paper factories. By 1835, their number had grown to 134.
In the first half of the 16th century, paper production also began in Ukraine. In 1612, the first paper factory was built in the town of Radomyshl, located halfway between Kyiv and Zhytomyr. The paper produced there was shipped down the Teteriv River to the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, where it was used to print books and other important documents. The factory was founded by Yelysei Pletenetsky, archimandrite of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. During the ban on the “Greek religion” hierarchy imposed by King Sigismund III of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, all Orthodox literature in Ukraine was printed on paper from this factory. The factory continued operating during the time of Metropolitan Petro Mohyla. On October 29, 2009, a monument to Yelysei Pletenetsky — archimandrite of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra and founder of the first paper factory in Central Ukraine — was unveiled and consecrated in the ethnographic park in Radomyshl.
A special center of Ukrainian paper production in the 17th–18th centuries was Eastern Galicia.
Improving the Production Process
Over time, workshop-based paper production changed character and took on features of manufacturing. The papermaking process involved 30 separate operations. The key figure at the paper mill was the vatman, whose main tool was a rectangular mold with a mesh bottom. The vatman was considered an important figure and enjoyed a number of privileges. He would dip the mold into a vat filled with paper pulp and lift it out quickly. This had to be done so that, once the water drained off, an even layer of fibers remained on the mesh, from which a sheet would later be formed. The wet sheets of paper were separated by felts and gathered into stacks. The water was then pressed out of them.
Drying was an important step, but not the very last one. After the moisture was removed, the sheets were straightened and smoothed on a flat roller using a roller made of hardwood or bone. They were then pressed again. Sometimes the paper was dipped in a tray of diluted animal or fish glue — fish glue was considered better, since it was less prone to rotting. After that came another round of drying and smoothing.
As technology developed, papermaking became an easier process. Machines appeared that could run around the clock without interruption. Still, the 19th-century papermaking machine consisted of the same basic parts as its 16th-century counterpart, though of course with some changes — using wood as a raw material for paper turned out to be far more convenient than using rags. Important discoveries were made along the way. In the Netherlands, for instance, the 17th century saw the appearance of the Hollander beater, which pulped the fibers using rollers. In Germany, a formula for resin sizing of paper was developed. In 1799, in France, Nicolas-Louis Robert invented a mechanical method of papermaking: the paper pulp passed over a moving mesh belt positioned above a vat that fed the mixture. The machine used for papermaking already included such components as the mesh, the press, the dryer, and a finishing section. Even today, however, exclusive, high-end paper is still made entirely by hand.