The History Of Paper: Technological Invention

Name: Instructor: Course: Date: History of Paper If you tell a group of ten people to mention five technology that they know at the top of their list, very few would mention paper. It would not be even surprising to find that none mentions paper as a technological invention. This is relative to the fact that, most of the people just consider it to be another item that they use and not an invention. However, paper at one time was a technological invention much like Artificial Intelligence which most people consider to be quite innovative. This was a development that largely associated with China (Casey). Like a computer, there was a time when paper was mind blowing. Today, people will only think about paper when they want to wrap something with it. Even writing on paper is slowly becoming obsolete given that one can type on their virtual or real keyboards or even write with their stylus on mobile devices such as tablets, smartphones, laptops and smart tables among others. Today, even the element of going to the library means login in to your computer, tablet of smartphone. For the rest of the community, reading the newspaper means getting the daily subscriptions from the favorite dailies. However, there is a lot of intrigue associated with the paper as a technology. After the mastery of sound as a way of communication, man moved on to drawings which were mainly in the form of hieroglyphics, signs and symbols on walls of caves then on workable material such as wood, stone, ceramics, leaves, barks and papyrus among others. It was through these developments that the invention of paper first came to the limelight in China (Hunter and De 3). After the invention of the camel’s hair brush in 250 B.C. by Meng T’ien, which brought on developments in calligraphy and even the Chinese characters, then came the first concept of paper (Hunter and De 4). For all the content that the Chinese scholars were generating, there was need for a better and cheaper writing material (Needham and Qian 32). It was in the search for a better writing material that the Chinese eunuch referred to as Ts’ai Lun in 105 A.D. came to the limelight with his invention. His was a flat, felted material that was formed of porous molds that came from macerated vegetable fibre. Ironically, while the invention of the paper came in the year 105 A.D., it was not until the year 770 A.D. that printing came to be (Hunter and De 4). What is most interesting about the technology is that it is rumored to have been kept secret (Hoey). Much like most of the technologies where the country that discovers the technology will first use and experiment with different elements before it finally spreads to the rest of the world, this was also the case with the paper (Hoey). After the Chinese, then came the Arab world, who are documented as having made the first paper mills in history and even they kept it a secret before the Europeans could finally pick up on the technology. The Europeans also proved their skills in the nineteenth century, with devices such as the London’s Fourdrinier machine which was patented in the year 1801 (Hoey). In the early years of the nineteent...