Danny Wright, age 9, of Louisville, Kentucky, for his question:
Who discovered writing paper?
The story goes way way back, thousands of years. It is hard to remember things that happened so long ago. People did not write down their inventions and discoveries. Later they forgot how these things happened. When they learned to read and write, they invented many kinds of paper. But almost everybody forgot to write down who invented it. Only one person told how he did it. He lived about 1,870 years ago. But this was a very long time after the very first person discovered how to make writing paper.
Many clever inventors lived 5,000 years ago. In those olden days, people lived in the wide valleys beside big rivers. Different groups lived in India and China, Egypt and the Middle East. This was the beginning of human history and each group grew up in its own way. They invented ways to grow crops and tend farm animals, to weave fabrics and mold metals, to build and draw pictures on their walls. They invented the most wonderful thing in the world.
They shaped some of their pictures into letters and used the letters to write and read words. This was a problem because they needed something to write upon. At first they used whatever was handy. Some wrote on patties of wet clay and waited for them to dry.
In Egypt, they had something better, right at hand. Tall, stringy reeds grew along the muddy bands of their river Nile. They dried these papyrus reeds, pressed them flat and pasted them together in long rolls. Their pages of papyrus made fine writing paper. But nobody wrote down who invented them. In other places, people wrote on fine fabrics or on dried animal skins. We don't know who invented any of these earliest writing materials.
Nowadays, we make our writing paper from wood pulp. The chips are chomped into woody fibers and mixed with watery ingredients. The soupy pulp is rolled and dried to make flat pages. This kind of paper was invented in China, way back in 105 A.D., which was 1,867 years ago. The Chinese say that Ts'ai Lun invented it. He was a Minister of Public Works and no doubt he had to write a lot of reports. This may explain why he tried this and that to make some good writing paper.
Ts'ai Lun made his soupy pulp from shredded wood and mulberry bark. He dipped it in a seive, made from a fine screen in a wooden frame. When the moisture drained out through the seive, it left a thin layer of matted woody fibers. This dried and became a fine page of writing paper but it was not the very first writing paper in the world.
Visitors to China admired Ts'ai Lun's paper and took the recipe back home. Then some Chinese prisoners of war showed the people of Bagdad how to make it. Later, the Crusaders saw this paper, on their way to the Holy Land. They took the recipe back home to all the countries in Europe. We have improved the old recipe. But we still make our writing paper from a soupy pulp of woody fibers.