"My head is full of [ideas] ...but they serve no purpose thereby must be put down on papery
Camilo Jose Cela, writer
The first modern paper was invented in 105 C.E. by a Chinese court official called Ts'ai Lun. He made sheets out of mulberry bark, rags, and hemp waste mixed with water. Paper continued to be made primarily of rags until the early nineteenth century, when mechanized papermaking took off. Soon, demand for paper far outweighed the supply of rags, and wood was explored as a substitute.
In order to make paper from timber, the plant fibers must be turned into a pulp, which is then spread onto a flat screen. When the fibers dry, they stick together forming a sheet of paper.
In 1866, Benjamin C. Tilghman invented the sulphite process, where wood is heated in a liquor containing an excess of sulfur dioxide to create pulp. Then in 1884, German inventor Carl F. Dahl found that using caustic soda and sodium sulphate in a "white liquor" resulted in a much stronger pulp. This pulp produced paper that was more resistant to tearing and so the process was named kraft after the German word meaning "strength".
The kraft process had the advantage of being capable of pulping pine trees. It also had higher recoverability than the sulphite process so the chemicals could be recovered for future use, making it more efficient. It overtook the sulphite process as the dominant form of pulping and is still used today.
