47 Fun Facts About Paper

Which Han dynasty court official is traditionally credited with inventing paper in 105 CE?

Cai Lun, a palace eunuch, reported his recipe of bark, hemp and old fishnets to the emperor, but paper fragments more than two centuries older show he refined the craft rather than invented it.

The word 'paper' comes from the name of which ancient writing material?

Papyrus lent paper its name, yet the two are unrelated technologies: papyrus is strips of plant pith pressed together in layers, while paper is pulped fibre matted on a screen.

The Egyptian writing material that gave paper its name was made from the pith of what kind of plant?

A wetland sedge taller than a person, the plant was sliced into strips of pith that were laid crosswise, pressed and hammered into a single sheet.

Before wood pulp took over in the 1800s, Europe's paper mills ran mainly on what raw material?

Discarded rags, mostly worn-out linen, ran so short by the 1700s that mills advertised publicly for them, a squeeze that sent inventors hunting for a way to pulp wood.

Before paper, Chinese scribes wrote on heavy bamboo strips or on which cloth?

Silk was light but far too expensive for everyday records, while bamboo was heavy and awkward to store, and that gap is what pushed Han craftsmen towards cheap paper.

Legend says Chinese prisoners taken at which 751 battle in Central Asia taught the Islamic world to make paper?

Talas is where the tale starts, but it was first written down nearly three centuries later by the historian al-Tha'alibi, and paper had already been used across Central Asia for centuries.

Under Caliph Harun al-Rashid in the 790s, which city got paper mills so its officials could give up parchment?

Baghdad turned to paper, the historian Ibn Khaldun wrote, because parchment was running short and the vizier al-Fadl ibn Yahya needed far more writing material for state records.

Papermaking entered Europe from the Islamic world, taking root first in which country?

Spain got there first because much of it was under Muslim rule: mills were running at Xàtiva near Valencia in the 11th century, about two centuries before the craft reached Italy.

Which Italian town, still a famous name in artists' paper, first put watermarks in its sheets in the late 1200s?

Fabriano's papermakers wired designs onto their moulds so that each maker's sheets could be told apart when held to the light, and they also pioneered sizing paper with animal gelatin.

Whose printing press, built in Mainz in the 1450s, sent Europe's demand for paper soaring?

Johannes Gutenberg's press produced books many times faster than hand copyists, which was only workable because paper mills had recently spread north of the Alps.

Around 1023, the government of which Chinese dynasty began issuing the world's first state-backed paper money?

Song-era Sichuan ran on iron coins so heavy that merchants traded paper receipts for them instead, and around 1023 the government took the idea over and issued the notes itself.

In 589 CE a scholar-official wrote he dared not use paper quoting the Classics for what?

Toilet purposes were so ordinary a use for paper in 6th-century China that the scholar Yan Zhitui drew the line only at sheets carrying the names of sages or lines from the Five Classics.

What did the Chinese fold and sew paper into during the Tang dynasty to preserve the flavour of tea?

Square bags of sewn paper trapped the scent: Lu Yu's 8th-century Classic of Tea lists a pouch of thick white paper among a tea drinker's tools, for holding freshly roasted tea so its fragrance cannot escape.

Which tissue brand was launched in 1924 to wipe off cold cream, years before anyone sold it for blowing noses?

Kleenex spent its first years in the make-up aisle as a cold cream remover; only in the 1930s, once buyers were reaching for it during colds, did adverts recast it as the handkerchief you can throw away.

Which company popularised toilet paper on rolls when it began marketing it in 1890?

Scott put toilet paper on rolls in 1890, yet the paper itself stayed rough for decades: in the 1930s a rival, Northern Tissue, could still make 'splinter free' its selling point.

In 1908 Melitta Bentz lined a punctured brass pot with blotting paper from her son's schoolbook, inventing what?

The coffee filter grew out of her irritation with bitter grounds in the cup; she registered it with the patent office that summer and set up a company with her husband that still trades under her first name.

Watching which insects build their nests led French scientist Réaumur to suggest, in 1719, that paper could be made from wood?

Wasps chew wood fibre into a papery pulp for their nests, and Réaumur asked why people could not do the same, yet he never tried it and mills took over a century to follow the insects' lead.

Which chemical pulping process, the world's most widely used, makes the tough brown paper of grocery bags?

Kraft means 'strength': the pulp comes out stronger than its rivals', which is why it is left unbleached for brown bags and parcel paper, and the process can even digest resinous pine.

Which substance, left in the pulp by mechanical pulping, makes newsprint turn yellow and brittle with age?

Lignin is the natural stiffener in wood, and cheap mechanical pulping leaves it in; chemical pulping strips most of it out, which is why a book page stays pale while a newspaper browns in the sun.

In 1917 Hallmark's founders ran out of Christmas tissue paper and sold fancy French envelope linings instead, launching which product?

Gift wrap began as a stopgap: the linings, priced at 10 cents a sheet, sold out as fast as the tissue had, and within a few years the Hall brothers were printing decorative paper of their own.

Most modern paper machines are still named after which brothers, the London stationers who bankrolled the original?

Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier spent some £60,000 perfecting the machine and were declared bankrupt in 1810, so their name spread round the world with every machine sold while the fortune never came.

In the American sitcom The Office, which fictional company sells paper from a branch in Scranton, Pennsylvania?

Dunder Mifflin turned real in 2011, when a Staples-owned retailer licensed the name from NBC and began selling actual reams of copy paper under the made-up brand.

On a paper machine, what is the mesh-covered cylinder that can impress a watermark called?

A dandy roll carries a raised wire design that presses into the wet sheet and thins the fibres, so the pattern glows when the page is held to the light, just as wires sewn onto a hand mould once did.

Which handmade Japanese paper, usually made from mulberry bark, do museums worldwide use to mend torn books and artworks?

Washi gets its strength from bark fibres that are pounded and left long rather than chopped, so even a tissue-thin strip pasted along a tear will hold a fragile page together.

The rough, feathery border on a sheet of handmade paper is known as what?

A deckle edge forms where pulp seeps under the deckle, the wooden frame that fences in the wet sheet; once an unavoidable flaw, it is now faked on machine-made paper to make books look handmade.

A4 paper was born in 1922 as part of a national 'DIN' standard for sheet sizes in which country?

Germany adopted engineer Walter Porstmann's system to end a jumble of competing sheet sizes and cut the cost of stocking paper, and other countries copied it until it became the world standard.

What is the aspect ratio of every sheet in the A series of paper sizes?

It means a sheet folded in half keeps the same proportions, a property noted by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in 1786.

What is the area of a sheet of A0 paper?

1 square metre is the starting point of the whole system: each size is half the one before, so an A4 sheet is a sixteenth of a square metre and a sheet of standard 80-gram office paper weighs 5 grams.

Which newspaper format takes its name from a brand of compressed medicine pills trademarked in the 1880s?

Tabloid was the drug firm Burroughs Wellcome's trademark for its small pressed pills, and by about 1900 the word had jumped to newspapers that served the news in similarly condensed doses.

What are the dimensions of US Letter paper?

8.5 × 11 inches became the US government's own size only around 1980: for nearly sixty years federal offices used a smaller 8 × 10.5 inch sheet that Herbert Hoover had prescribed as commerce secretary.

A US dollar bill contains no wood pulp at all: it is 25% linen and 75% which other fibre?

Cotton and linen make a banknote closer to cloth than to writing paper, and the tiny red and blue fibres scattered through every sheet are there for one reason: to make the paper itself hard to fake.

Which paper container did a Canadian newspaperman invent in 1911 to settle a hotel owner's row over broken deliveries?

The egg carton ended the age of all the eggs in one basket, which really was how farms delivered them; Joseph Coyle made his first cartons by hand, with a cushioned slot for each egg.

What is the best-known model in origami?

The paper crane became a worldwide peace symbol through Sadako Sasaki, a Hiroshima girl who folded cranes in hospital as she was dying of leukaemia; children still send them to her memorial from around the world.

Which sister craft of origami adds scissors to the folding to make paper snowflakes?

Kirigami has left the craft room: MIT engineers cut its patterns into thin sheets for shoe soles, so that rows of tiny spikes buckle out as you walk and grip the ice.

Origami master Akira Yoshizawa pioneered wet-folding, dampening the paper so that the finished model does what?

Holds rounded curves: the damp sheet dries hard in whatever shape it was given. Yoshizawa quit a factory job to fold full-time and got by selling food door to door.

The Miura map fold, a rigid origami pattern, has been used to deploy what in space?

Solar panel arrays folded this way spring open in one motion when a single corner is pulled, so a satellite needs fewer motors; astrophysicist Koryo Miura's pattern flew on Japan's Space Flyer Unit in 1995.

Britney Gallivan folded paper in half 12 times in 2002 using a strip how long?

1,200 metres of tissue, about 4,000 feet, beat a supposed limit of eight folds: every fold doubles the thickness, and she first derived a formula showing how fast the length needed grows.

Which publisher made the paperback respectable in 1935 by selling quality books for just sixpence?

Penguin began, Allen Lane said, after he found nothing worth reading at Exeter station's bookstall, and a big order from Woolworths kept his sixpenny gamble afloat.

The designer of the paper plane that flew a record 69 metres in 2012 left the throwing to a former what?

Quarterback Joe Ayoob, who had played for the California Golden Bears, sent John Collins's design 226 feet 10 inches down an air base hangar, and the film of the throw went viral.

Marco Polo remarked that the Chinese burned paper effigies of servants, camels and horses during what?

Funerals ended with paper horses, camels, servants and money burned beside the body, because mourners believed the dead would own the real things, alive in flesh and blood, in the next world.

Which poison gave fashionable Victorian wallpaper its vivid green and was blamed for sickening the families who lived with it?

Arsenic made the green so bright, and the wallpaper designer William Morris had a stake in it: his father was a founding investor in the mine that became Britain's biggest arsenic producer.

Paper is the traditional gift for which wedding anniversary?

The first anniversary's paper is said to stand for the fragility of a new marriage, and the traditional list toughens from there: wood at five years, tin at ten, silver at 25 and gold at 50.

How did the Han court eunuch credited with inventing paper meet his end in 121 CE?

He took his own life rather than face trial: summoned to answer for a palace plot decades old, he bathed, put on his finest robes and drank poison.

How many sheets are in a ream, the bundle used to rate US paper weights?

500 sheets is the modern ream; the older one held 480, twenty quires of 24, and the word travelled west with the craft itself, from the Arabic rizmah, a bundle.

The colour-changing dye in litmus paper is extracted from what?

Lichens yield a dye that turns red in acid and blue in alkali; the name probably comes from Old Norse for 'dye moss', and its either-or verdict is why a 'litmus test' now means any decisive check.

Kaolin, the clay that gives glossy magazine paper its smooth coating, is best known as the key ingredient of what?

Porcelain and glossy paper share a clay named after Gaoling in China, which a French Jesuit missionary brought to Europe's notice in the early 1700s while studying how the Chinese made porcelain.

Which paper cup brand began as the 'Health Kup', sold to replace the shared drinking glasses at public water fountains?

Dixie was a name borrowed from a New York doll maker to stand out from a crowd of rival cups; the cup itself sold on fear of disease, as state after state banned the shared tin dipper.