Some scientists believe that the root of the Russian concept of “paper” came from the Tatar word “bumug”, which indicates “cotton”. without a doubt, this happened due to the fact that the ancestors owed a wide acquaintance with paper specifically to the Tatar-Mongols, who kept records of the conquered territories on this material. The European peoples got acquainted with paper by a different method, through the Arabs, and the term for its designation has a second origin. In many European languages, the name is consonant with the predecessor material, with the word “papyrus”.
It is unlikely that our distant ancestors had the opportunity to imagine how widely paper for the office will take among their descendants. Since a couple of centuries ago, paper pages were a very rare and expensive material with a complex and time-consuming production process. Let’s see how it was.
At a time when not only the modern svetocopy paper, but also its progenitor, made of cotton rags, did not yet exist, mankind used papyrus to keep records.
This material was made on the territory of Egypt as early as 3500 BC from a reed plant from the banks of the Nile. A white core was extracted from the lower part of its trunk and narrow strips were separated with a knife. This raw material was left to swell in water, after which it was rolled out on a board with a wooden gurney, then soaked again. This sequence was repeated again until the papyrus became a translucent material with a cream tint. Stacked strips on top of each other were dehydrated using a press, and then dried. The last finish was created by means of a smoothing stone.
If we say specifically about the paper that was stored in scrolls, was bound in a notebook or, at a later time, in books, then its history dates back to the 2nd century before ne. Specifically, the first documentary evidence refers to this time, but of course, the material was produced earlier. Chinese Tsai Lun is considered the father of paper production, because he managed to collect and improve the methods of paper production.
He also invented his own personal method, which involved creating paper pages by dehydrating fibers on a special grid. This method allowed to produce a new material from almost any raw material of plant origin.
The Chinese development of production was quite simple, and manual labor was very inexpensive, and these events allowed a lot of paper to be created, as a result of which it spread widely in China as an ergonomic material for other purposes and writing.
The development of paper production made its way to the territory of Europe in about 11-12 centuries from the Arab states. Thanks to the Italians, the paper production process was adapted to local conditions and took a sequence of improvements.
