Who can tell me the evolution of paper?

Among many inventions in the world, paper is probably the greatest one, because it enables human civilization to spread and continue.

The invention of any object has its specific background and is the product of countless inventions, and the invention of paper is no exception.

Today, the invention of the paper we use is only 2000 years, but the history of human civilization is much longer. The reason why we can know the distant history is really thanks to other kinds of "paper" invented by human beings before the invention of real paper, and also thanks to the efforts made by our ancestors.

In the Metropolitan Museum in new york, USA, there is an ancient cultural relic "Kip" unearthed in Peru. If you are lucky enough to see this rare treasure, you may be disappointed, because it is just some rotten ropes with many knots. It turns out that Kip was used by ancient Indians to record.

In the development process of all nationalities in the world, almost all of them have had this method of knotting sounds. China's ancient book "Book of Changes" wrote: "The ancient rule is based on the knot, and the later sages take the book as a Covenant." It means that ancient people tied knots with ropes to solve problems, and later saints wrote them on paper instead.

According to modern research, this method of recording notes with knots is also quite complicated. 1 people agree to use knots of different sizes, styles and colors to express different things, hoping to use knots to help them remember or convey information to future generations. If the information to be recorded is complicated, the knots are also complicated, sometimes a string of knots are connected together, and sometimes a knot leads to many small knots. It is impossible for people to guess what the ancients recorded with this kind of knot. Take Kipp in Peru as an example. If everyone gives his own explanation of those knots today, I'm afraid there will be as many explanations as there are people.

Interestingly, long after the invention of paper as a recording material, in some culturally backward areas of the world, people are still taking notes in the original way similar to ancient human knots, only changing the knots into something with a slightly clearer expression. This kind of physical record can really be called a living "unearthed cultural relic".

In BC 13 12, a war broke out between Egyptians and Hittites living in Asia Minor, which lasted for 16 years. They won and lost each other and suffered heavy losses. Finally one day, they decided to make peace. BC 1296, in the palace of the Egyptian Pharaoh, the mission sent by the Hittites reached an agreement with the Egyptians to end the war and conclude a peace treaty.

In the era when there was no paper, it was not only Middle Easterners who thought of lettering.

A.D. 1899 (25th year of Guangxu reign), Wang Yin, a senior official in charge of education in Qing Dynasty, became ill by offering wine to imperial academy (imperial academy is the highest institution of higher learning in China, equivalent to a national university, and offering wine is equivalent to the president of a university). The doctor wrote a prescription after taking the pulse and the family got the medicine back. Wang found some artificial patterns on a medicine called keel. He looked at it carefully and thought that these patterns were very special, so he sent his family to the drugstore to buy some "keels" with clearer patterns.

"Keel" is actually a fossil of bones and teeth of ancient vertebrates, which is used by Chinese medicine to treat fright, chronic diarrhea, spontaneous sweating and night sweats. Why are there traces left by hand chiseling on ancient things? Wang has always been interested in archaeology, which makes him curious.

Wang collected many "keels" with clear silk threads, and found out that these "keels" were dug underground from Anyang, Henan. Anyang was the capital of Shang Dynasty. Textual research by scholars such as Wang and others. It turns out that these patterns are ancient characters of Shang Dynasty more than 3000 years ago. Because it is carved on tortoise shells and animal bones, it is called "Oracle Bone Inscriptions".

After the textual research of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, people realized that this tortoise shell and animal bones were mainly used for divination at that time. Yin people believe that everything in life should obey the gods, so all sacrifices, planting, hunting, going out, getting sick, windy, rainy, having children, etc. Should be divined.

After divination, write down the result. Where can I write it down? The most convenient thing is to write on bones for divination. Yin people used some hard things to carve words on Oracle Bone Inscriptions. The words are more than half an inch big and as small as sesame seeds. The words on the armor let us know something about what happened more than 3000 years ago.

Later, Zhan Ren carved words with a knife, or wrote on bamboo or wood chips with pigment and ink. This kind of bamboo and wood is about one or two feet long, and each piece can be engraved with more than a dozen words, as many as thirty or forty words. In ancient times, bamboo chips were called "Jane", sawdust was called "letter", and letters were called "letter" and "letter" because letters were written with such bamboo chips and sawdust. Earlier, the reason why Chinese characters were written vertically from top to bottom instead of horizontally from left to right was also determined by the writing characteristics of three bamboo slips.

In ancient times, people didn't need a lot of bamboo to write letters, and they didn't need it if they wanted to write a book. You must connect the bamboo pieces with a rope to read. Now we call the quantifier of a book "book", that is, pictographs wearing pieces of bamboo slips.

We can imagine that this kind of book written with bamboo and wood chips must be huge and inconvenient to carry. During the Warring States Period, Hui Shi, a thinker, went out to give lectures, and the book he took with him contained five cars, so there was an allusion to "learning to be rich and having five cars". Obviously, this heavy paper has seriously affected the development of culture.

When our ancient people carved characters on the Oracle Bone Inscriptions, the ancient Egyptians were already recording characters with light papyrus.

Papyrus is a tall herb, which looks a bit like a reed and can grow to 4 meters high. The hometown of this plant is in Egypt. Thousands of years ago, the fertile alluvial plains on both sides of the Nile were covered with its footprints, but now it has long since disappeared in Egypt. In Africa, only a few areas in Sudan and Syria are still growing, and the last batch of papyrus in Europe is on the verge of withering and drying up on the Ceylon River near Siracusa, Sicily. This is mainly caused by river pollution.

People deplore the decline of papyrus. This is not only because it is an excellent raw material for papermaking, but also because it is a good friend of mankind. In the days when there was no paper in ancient times, people used paper to record the first pages of the history of human civilization.

According to research, about 5000 years ago, Egyptians used papyrus to make "paper". They broke the papyrus stems into filaments, folded them into two layers, and then glued them together. The quality of papyrus made by this method is quite good, and it has become the main export product of Egypt. Most classical Greek literary works are written on papyrus.

It is much more convenient to write on this papyrus "paper" than to carve it on clay boards, silver boards or tortoise shells. This invention of the Egyptians was later spread to Europe. Before artificial paper made in China was introduced to Europe, papyrus was the most commonly used paper in Europe.

There was no papyrus in ancient India. People use it to make paper, but it is another kind of plant.

This is a tropical tree called Bedo Tree. Its DBH is often around 1 m and its height is more than 20 meters. This tree looks like a palm tree, and some are like palm trees. This kind of tree has many palmately divided leaves clustered at the top of the tree, which is very huge. One leaf with petiole is two or three meters long. This kind of leaf was used by ancient Indians to make paper.

India is the birthplace of Buddhism, and there are many temples. In those temples, scriptures written by Bedouin leaves are often preserved, which are called Bedouin scriptures. Myrica rubra leaves used for writing must be collected from Bedouin trees over 8 years old. Bedouin leaves are tubular and light brown. They are cut from the petiole and spread out to form a fan. Each leaf has 30 thick veins, and nearly 30 small leaves can be obtained by removing the veins with a knife. This banded leaflet is more than 2 meters long, with one end slightly wider and the other end slightly narrower.

This blade can't be used, it must be specially made. People first roll up the leaves and put them in a large pot and boil them in water. Then take it out to dry. In order to make the leaves elastic and not easy to break, it is necessary to hang the dried leaves on a wooden stick, press both ends of the leaves with both hands and grind them up and down, so that the surface of the leaves will be ground off and become white and smooth. After this processing, each scallop leaf is cut according to the required size, gathered together, burned a hole in the scallop leaf with a red-hot iron bar, and sewn up with a rope.

Strictly speaking, the scriptures on Bayeux are not written, but "engraved". People use a thin iron pen to carve words on leaves, and then use ink to paint on leaves, that is, "color". This ink is a mixture of black soot from oil lamps and cinnamon oil. After smearing, it can not only leave clear handwriting on the notch, but also have the functions of moisture-proof, anti-corrosion and moth-proof for laurel leaves. Perhaps because the "paper" of laurel leaves has the advantage of easy long-term preservation, people still use laurel leaves to write long after the invention of real paper.

Around the Spring and Autumn Period, people in China began to write with silk. It is much more convenient to write on silk with ink than bamboo slips, and silk is light and soft and can be rolled up. Now sometimes a book is called a book, which comes from this.

Unfortunately, this kind of "silk paper" is very useful, but it is expensive. In the Han dynasty, a piece of silk was equivalent to 720 Jin of rice, which most people could not afford. So until the Han Dynasty, "silk paper" and bamboo slips were also used by people at the same time.

Cai Lun was a eunuch and emperor in the Eastern Han Dynasty. His job is to supervise the manufacture of royal vessels. For these positions, it is natural to consider saving money. Expensive silk is also under consideration in Cai Lun. Can you find a writing material that can replace silk? It is not only as light and easy to write as silk, but also very cheap.

Cai Lun often goes for a walk outside the city during his break. He couldn't help thinking of the drifting scene he saw during the outing.

The so-called floating means that when people use inferior cocoons that are not suitable for spinning to make silk cotton, they first boil the secondary cocoons in water, then spread them on the table and soak them in the river, and then rotten them into silk cotton with a stick. Women engaged in this kind of manual labor are called "mobile mothers".

Cai Lun found that during the bleaching process, some residual silk floc stuck to the mat. After drying, the remaining flocs were peeled off to form a thin layer of six thin flocs. Some poor people who can't afford silk use this kind of wadding to write; But the words written on it are very vague.

Because silk products are expensive, most people can't afford to wear them. At that time, there was no cotton, and ordinary people could only wear hemp products. People peel off hemp skin and still use the methods of rinsing and ramming in water to make hemp yarn suitable for spinning. In this process, there will still be pits on the mat. Cai Lun found that some people also write with hemp chips.

"Well, that's an idea. Maybe we can try. " As a result, Cai Lun became a "drifter". He collected the silk wadding and hemp wadding left on the mat and put them in water to continue rinsing and beating, which made them very bad. Then he fished them out with a cushion to filter the water, and after drying, they became thin and thin flocs. Write with it, and the effect is similar to silk.

Paper was born. Now the left part of the word "paper" also shows that the original paper is directly related to silk.

Cai Lun also found in the experiment that the paper made of hemp wadding is as good as that made of silk wadding, or even stronger. This, of course, made him very satisfied, because silk is a valuable thing, and silk floss is not as easy to obtain as hemp wool. Cai Lun also believes that since it takes time and energy to retch and mash cannabis, it is easier to obtain and mash useless rags, broken fishing nets and bark.

After a period of exploration, Cai Lun finally invented a mature papermaking process: bark, rags, old fishing nets and so on. Is collected, soaked, mashed and silted, then soaked and cooked with plant ash solution to remove colloid, grease and pigment, and then further mashed to make them paste. Then, take out this mushy pulp and spread it thinly on the bamboo curtain to dry, and it becomes soft paper. seven

In the first year of Yuan Xing in the Eastern Han Dynasty (A.D. 105), Cai Lun dedicated his papermaking method to the emperor. Han and Emperor, who was ill in bed, appreciated it very much and ordered it to be popularized throughout the country. Later, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty named Cai Lunlong Hou Ting for his contribution to the invention of paper.

China's papermaking was later spread to Korea, Japan, India and Arabia, and then to Europe through North Africa. The invention of papermaking is one of the most outstanding contributions of the Chinese nation to world civilization. Cai Lun's name has also remained in the history of world science and technology.

According to statistics, there are about 12000 kinds of paper with different uses in the world, which meet the needs of human beings in all aspects. Some of these papers were invented consciously, and some were born unintentionally; Some inventions applied for patents and left the name of the invention, while others did not know who the inventor was, leaving only his invention.

Carbon paper was invented by Wedgwood in England in the early19th century. At that time, he ran a literature shop in London. Wedgwood often writes to his regular customers with pencils and introduces him to several new stationery in the store. The contents of these letters are similar, and he wrote them mechanically, which is a bit boring. "Can you write two or three letters at once?" The idea came to Wedgwood when he looked at the last word mark left on the last piece of paper.

It doesn't seem difficult to realize this idea. Wedgwood quickly thought of a way: soak a piece of tissue paper in blue ink and dry it between two blotter sheets. When writing, you can underline ordinary paper to get a copy. 1806, Wedgwood obtained his patent for "copy letter file device".

When Wedgwood's invention came out, business activities in Britain were very developed, and carbon paper was of great use. Seeing that his invention was so popular, Wedgwood set up a workshop to produce this special paper. Later, the French used glycerin and pine smoke to infiltrate paper to make carbon paper. About 18 15, the Germans innovated again, adding hot glycerin and dyes extracted from coal tar, finely grinding them, and coating them on tough tissue paper to make new carbon paper. Later, people added wax to the coating of this kind of carbon paper to reduce the viscosity, which is our common carbon paper today.

Today, there are more and more raw materials for papermaking, and the methods of papermaking are more and more novel, and the varieties of paper are even more varied.

There is a kind of paper called electrothermal fax paper. One side of it is coated with aluminum metal, and the other side is coated with white low-voltage insulation layer. When this paper is installed on an instrument, the recording needle on the instrument will automatically break through the white low-voltage insulation surface according to various signal voltages such as light, heat, static electricity, biological current, etc., exposing the black base paper, and forming transmitted characters and graphics.

Some papers can also "talk". This kind of paper is called magnetic paper, which is made by coating a layer of magnetic substance on thick paper. It can be recorded on a tape recorder like a recording tape, and it can also play sound. If you use this paper to write letters to distant relatives and friends, you don't have to write. You just need to use it to record your words and send them in an envelope. After receiving it, relatives and friends put the paper in the tape recorder and can hear their own voices.

Paper is very fragile. It is afraid of tearing, pulling and poking. However, as long as synthetic fibers are mixed into ordinary pulp, synthetic paper can be made by ordinary papermaking methods. After both sides of this paper are roughened, patterns and characters can be printed like ordinary paper. Especially tough, even if dozens of tons of tanks are crushed, they will not break! It is natural to print military maps with such paper.

We know that paper will make a "splash" sound when it is turned. Radio announcer 9 will also broadcast the annoying sound of paper all the time while reading the manuscript. Now people have invented a kind of silent paper, which is as light and soft as silk, with countless fine holes on it, and it doesn't make a sound when turned over.

One kind of scented paper is especially popular with children. An American publishing company once published a special fruit album. Children who have read books can smell bananas, apples and other fruits in the picture as long as they touch them with their hands. This is because the fruits in the book are cut and pasted with paper with different smells. When you rub the fruit on the screen with your hand, the paper will give off fragrance because of the heat generated by the friction.

Vinciunas, a scientist from the former Soviet Union, invented the strangest paper in the 1980s. The raw materials for papermaking are basalt, tuff and other stones that you can't imagine at all.

Vinciunas first melted basalt and other stones into liquid, and then used rapid wire drawing equipment to draw magma into extremely fine tows. This kind of "stone fiber" is soaked in phenolic resin and becomes a brown tissue. After another process, after adding some chalk powder, the paper will be white. This paper has high strength, so it can be made very thin. Together, five pieces of paper are as thick as our usual piece of paper.

This kind of stone paper has excellent toughness, which can be pulled quickly and won't break. If it is used to print newspapers, the speed of newspaper printers can be increased several times. Because of the good coloring performance of stone paper, the pictorial printed with it is very rich in color. In addition, stone paper is not afraid of water, fire and bacteria, so books printed with it are much more worry-free to keep. Stone paper has another outstanding advantage. With the mass production of stone paper, replacing trees as materials can avoid countless forests being cut down, which is conducive to maintaining ecological balance.

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Since Cai Lun invented paper, the paper-making materials used by people, whether rags, broken nets, bark, wheat straw, rice straw, reeds, Russian hair and wood, are all fiber materials, and stone paper is the first paper made of non-fiber materials. What kind of new papers will be published in the future? We can't predict, but what is certain is that the pursuit of human beings is endless, and so is the invention of paper.