Papermaking
Mechanizing papermaking reduced some of the chronic labor problems associated with handmade papermills: Louis-Nicolas Robert, an engineer in charge of labor management at the Didots’ Essonne mill, was motivated to mechanize the process in order to reduce the chronic labor problems that he faced from families of papermakers who frequently complained about working conditions or pay, and moved disruptively from one mill to another.
Introducing machines increased production speed and enabled production of much larger sheets of paper than could be made by hand. This is turn enabled the new printing machines to print more pages on a single larger sheet, further speeding up the printing process, and reduced the need for industrial printers to warehouse paper, lowering their costs. Identifying the earliest printing done of machine-made paper is difficult, as only a few early publications explicitly state that they were printed on machine-made, rather than handmade, paper.
Jean Abbot Dusautoy. The Paper-Maker’s Ready Reckoner. Romsey, 1805.
The Ready Reckoner was a financial tool intended to help operators of hand papermills to control costs and optimize products. Tables show how to calculate an exhaustive number of expenses, from the prime cost of rags per ream, to rent, taxes, utensils, wages, supplies, and other associated fees. The Ready Reckoner, published in a very small edition and expensive, suggests labor costs were not hand papermill operators’ primary concern.
Jérôme de LaLande. L'Art de faire le Papier. Paris, 1761.
L'Art de faire le Papier by the astronomer Jérôme de LaLande was the first comprehensive book on papermaking. Before the papermaking machine, paper was laboriously made one sheet at a time. Several of the plates that illustrate LaLande’s book were engraved sixty-three years before it was published, showing little had changed in the intervening years. These three plates may be the earliest published illustrations showing women performing any procedure in book production. The upper image of plate 1 shows women sorting rags.
The actual processes of making the sheets of paper from the ground-up linen rags, using the wire moulds created for the process, were monopolized by men.
Philippe-Xavier Leschevin & Pierre-Joseph Antoine. Rapports Lus à l’Académie des Sciences […] de Dijon […] Sur les machines à fabriquer le papier inventées par le sieur Ferdinand Leistenschneider. Dijon, 1815.
This pamphlet on the papermaking machine invented by Ferdinand Leistenschneider of Poncey was probably the first publication devoted solely to a papermaking machine. Notably, it is printed on handmade paper.
Louis Piette. Traité de la fabrication du papier. Paris, 1831.
Because Louis-Nicolas Robert’s machine was first developed in England, the papermaking machine industry in France fell behind that in England. Even so, Louis Piette’s book was one of the first in any language to discuss the early history of papermaking by machine. Besides being a technical treatise on papermaking, this work contains a detailed chronological record of the awards given to the earliest inventors of papermaking machines in England and France.
A. Heferstein (architect). Manuscript Model.
This is a three-dimensional manuscript model, with several fold-up flaps, of the papermaking machinery at the paper mill of C.F.H. Günther of Greiz, Germany. The blue and gray bars at the top of the model indicate flowing water, which powered the pumps within.
Louis-Nicholas Robert. Brevet 329 (1799). “Pour une machine à faire le papier d’une très-grande étendue.” Description des machines et procédés spécifiés dans les brevets d’invention, Vol. 5. Paris, 1823.
This is the brevet (French patent), obtained in 1799 but not published until 1823, for Louis-Nicolas Robert’s papermaking machine. Robert, an engineer and supervisor of papermaking personnel, invented the papermaking machine primarily to reduce labor disputes among hand papermakers, and to increase production rather than to reduce costs. Lacking capital to develop the invention in France, Robert’s boss, Pierre-François Didot, traveled to England to develop the invention. By the time Robert’s brevet was published in France, the invention was of historical interest only.
John Gamble. No. 248, Machinery for making paper. London, 1801.
To develop Robert’s machine in England during the Napoleonic Wars, Didot enlisted the aid of his English brother-in-law, John Gamble, then employed in the office of the British Commissioner for exchanging prisoners of war in France. Gamble left Paris for London in March 1801 and, only a month later, received an English patent for the papermaking machine. In London, Gamble was introduced to Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, of the firm of Bloxam and Fourdrinier, the leading wholesale stationers in London, who took great interest in Robert’s invention and set about trying to improve it.
John Anastasius Freylinghausen. An Abstract of the Whole Doctrine of the Christian Religion. London, 1804.
Freylinghausen’s book was the first printed on machine-made paper. It was also the first book printed using stereotype plates produced by Earl Stanhope’s innovative process, which he never patented. Because there was no patent, the exact nature of Stanhope’s improvements to the stereotyping process is unclear. In his Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (1867), William Thomas Lowndes states that the translator of Freylinghausen’s book was Queen Charlotte, consort of King George III.
Julien François Turgan. Les Grandes Usines de France. Paris, 1860.
This hand-colored woodcut, drawn by Emile Bourdelin and engraved by H. Linton for Turgan’s book, shows a Fourdrinier papermaking machine at La Paperie d'Essone outside of Paris. This is the papermill where Louis-Nicolas Robert had invented the first papermaking machine sixty-two years earlier. The difference in scale and complexity between Robert’s initial machine, patented in 1799, and the machine shown in 1860 is significant.
The Monthly Supplement of The Penny Magazine, No. 96. 31 August to 30 September 1833.
This explanatory diagram shows the workings of a Fourdrinier papermaking machine of the type that was producing machine-made paper throughout Britain and the Continent. The machine was named after the Fourdrinier brothers, the leading wholesale stationers in London, who paid for its development after they acquired the English patent for Louis-Nicolas Robert’s machine in 1805. Robert’s machine got off to a slow start, but without the ready availability of the huge quantities of machine-made paper produced by these machines, The Penny Magazine could not have reached its circulation of two hundred thousand copies per week.
Report of the [...] Trials of Jeremiah Brandreth […] for High Treason. Nottingham, 1817.
This report’s gory frontispiece shows presumed-Luddite Jeremiah Brandreth’s severed head after he was executed for high treason for trying to overthrow the government. The textile workers who engaged in Luddite behavior, damaging mainly steam engines and power looms, were motivated by economic downturns, harsh working conditions, low pay, and fear of displacement from increasing mechanization. They were aggressively prosecuted and severely punished. Because industrial printers usually retained their handpress departments for short run jobs even after they installed printing machines, Luddite behavior was rare in the printing trades.
100 Guineas Reward.
Broadside.
This substantial reward of one hundred guineas, offered by the estate of English academic, mine owner, and writer William Burden (d. 1819), for the capture of the Luddite(s) who damaged a steam-powered pumping “machine engine” equates to £14,029.80 in today’s money, but the value to a coal miner making a relatively low wage in 1821 would probably have been higher.