The paper, in a finely divided condition, and held in suspension in water, is fed onto an endless wire-screen band of very fine mesh, which. while permitting escape of the water, retains the paper particles in a thin layer. Paper and its Manufacture Marvelous Consumption of Paper in the United States and How it is Made I By WILLIAM R. STEWART Editorial Staff, Cosmopolitan Magazine IN the United States at least, the present is distinctly the age of paper. Two and a quarter million cords of wood and two million tons of rags, straw, manila stock, and various kinds of fiber were used in this country last year in the industry of paper making. The value of the output was over $160,000,000. Sixty thousand persons were employed in eight hundred pulp and paper-mills, and the sum of the wages paid them exceeded thirty million dollars. Vast Consumption of Paper The per capita value of the paper consumed in the United States yearly is the greatest in the world, and amounted during last year to about $1.75. News paper figured largest in the total product, with a record for 1904 of about 650,000 tons, valued at about $23,000,000. In 1890 a total of 196,053 tons, worth $13,106,634, sufficed to meet the demand. We were noted as the greatest newspaper-reading people on earth in 1890, but in 1904 we read about three times more, or, at any rate, had three times as much offered us to read. It is interesting to note that in 1890 the cost of news paper was about double what it is at present, namely, $67 a ton, as compared with about $35 now. Although a greater quantity of news paper is made than of any other kind, in value it is exceeded by the production. of book paper. The scriptural author of the much quoted phrase that "Of making many books there is no end," would have found material for a stronger statement had he been able to contemplate a yearly output worth almost thirty million dollars. That is what the book paper made in the United States last year was valued at, and in quantity it amounted to 400,000 tons. There were also produced about seventeen million dollars' worth of fine paper, (under which designation are included writing papers ranging from the best bank-note and stock certificate to such inferior grades that a pen scarcely will travel over them without blotting; ledger papers, for bookkeeping and other fine writing purposes; and linen papers, usually with rough surface and laid water mark); wrapping paper, comprising rope manila, manila, bogus manila, etc.; tissue, such as blotting paper, cover papers, etc., and boards of all sorts, strawboard, box board, news board, bristol board, etc. A DIGESTER. In it is mixed with the paper the liquor used to dissolve the ink on the old paper. Like a good many other modern industries that of paper making had its origin with the Chinese. The papyrus of the Greeks and Romans was not paper at all, but simply the piths of the stem of a plant cut into strips, placed side by side and across each other and pressed into a sheet, to which the natural gum of the plant gave a homogeneous character. But the Chinese in very early times made as genuine paper, in its general characteristics, as that produced by the perfected methods and machinery of to-day. Composition of Paper A sheet of paper is an artificially felted web of vegetable fiber, purified by means of certain processes, of perishable materials; that is, fibers of more or less pure cellulose, cellulose being the enduring THE COLER GANG. Used to pulverize the mineral paper which is mixed with the old paper to strengthen it. portion of vegetable growth and forming the structural base of all plants. In its broad outline the process of paper mak with water, forming a sheet on a porous surface, so that the water may drain off, and drying the sheet of paper thus formed. Different materials are used for the pulp to make different grades of paper, wood pulp being now used in the. manufacture of nearly all the news paper, rags for writing and other fine papers, straw and manila in making wrapping papers, etc. But a large amount of paper is given its distinctive character after it leaves the paper mill by surface coatings with various substances. The processes of making pulp may be passed over as they have been previously discussed, and only the methods of making the paper from the pulp be taken up here. No more striking comparison can be made of the old and the new in the paper industry than to note that whereas only half a century ago most of the paper mills of the United States employed little labor outside of the individual proprietor and his family, some of the largest of their present-day successors, with their houses for employes, machine shops and other dependent feat The band of paper is shown going into the rolls wet. By the time it reaches the other end, it is bone dry. From the primitive hand processes of early paper making to the huge machines. of the present-day mills is a remarkable. progress in methods of production, yet the principles are the same whether the pulp be taken from the vat in small handsieves and turned out a single sheet at a time, as once was the method, or whether, as is now done, it is made to flow on to an endless wire cloth, from which it is conveyed on blankets, or felts, in a continuous web through heavy press rolls and over steam-heated drying cylinders. But machinery has made possible a more uniform quality of product as well as multiplied many times the rapidity of manufacture and diminished the labor cost. To a limited extent paper is still made by hand in the United States, but since the invention of what is known as the Foudrinier machine, in 1798, machinery has gradually supplanted the manual process. Until about 1860 paper was Method of Manufacture Rags are prepared for making into paper by the successive operations of cleaning, boiling, washing, bleaching, and beating or reducing to pulp. All this is END OF A FOUDRINIER MACHINE, WITH SULPHITE STOCK COMING OVER THE ROLLS. |