Chapter 14

DIDEROT’S PROMISE

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Indeed, the purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race.

—DENIS DIDEROT, Encyclopédie, 1755

BY THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, THERE WAS more demand for paper in the Western world than ever before in history. The public was reading books at an unprecedented rate, and volatile politics had made newspapers and broadsides extremely popular. Papermakers and printers could barely keep up.

Parchment and vellum were still in common use for fine publishing. In 1801, for example, the Didots, one of France’s leading publishing and printing families, released a luxury edition of the works of Racine in three large volumes on vellum with illustrations by leading artists.

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A case for holding a typeface. The larger and nearer sections were for the most used letters. With a well-arranged case, a skilled printer could set up 1,500 letters an hour. Diderot, Trade and Industry, Volume II.

Printing was still being done on wooden presses that were not substantially different from the one Gutenberg had built three and a half centuries earlier. If Gutenberg had walked into a late-eighteenth-century print shop, he would have felt at home. In fact, print shops were often located in a printer’s home. The large wooden turn-screw press dominated. Nearby would be the type cases. There would be a stock room for storing paper, a vat for soaking the paper before printing, and a store, as most printers also sold their books.

But there were a few new trends: having a separate room for typesetting and the use of “stereotyped printing,” a French innovation developed by François-Ignace-Joseph Hoffmann. Traditionally, while a page was being printed, type would not be available for composing the next page—type was scarce and expensive. But Hoffmann cast a single metal block of the set page—a matrix. This matrix could then be used for printing while the type was torn apart and set up for the next page. Hoffmann busied himself with this new technique, printing an inordinate number of pamphlets and broadsides denouncing the French monarchy, until his shop was shut down in 1787.

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Stamping mill for tearing rags into fiber. Diderot, Trade and Industry, Volume II.

Aside from the Hollander beater and the medieval innovations of waterwheels and wire molds, papermaking in late-eighteenth-century Europe was not that different from what it had been like in ancient China. A French paper mill on the eve of the French Revolution still involved women sorting rags, a pulper—usually old water-powered stampers—a vat, a vatman, a coucher, waterleaves pressed between felt by sturdy men, a presser with a big bar to compress the felt, women hanging paper to dry, a sizeman cooking up sizing, women examining sheets and removing the flawed ones, and a loftman wrapping the sheets into reams. These workers all had very specific skills, and there were strict rules about which jobs were for women and which for men.

According to a survey conducted by the French monarchy, eighteenth-century France had about 750 paper mills, distributed around the country so that every region had its own local paper supply. From these surveys, French historian Henri-Jean Martin calculated that the 750 mills represented about 1,000 vats and that each vat produced about 2,000 reams of paper annually. He estimated that France had 10,000 workers producing 2,500,000 reams of paper, 500 sheets each, which would be about 100 sheets per capita. An important and ever-increasing share of this was used for government work.

In prerevolutionary France, paper workers had more power and were more assertive than most other workers because they were few in number and highly skilled. They were known to walk off the job and spend an afternoon in a nearby tavern, returning only at mealtime. They had a reputation for being independent and unruly, and they ignored government regulations. Their unique skills, the source of their power, were carefully preserved, seldom shared, and usually passed on to a son or daughter. They had their own rituals and festivals, known as modes, and to be in the profession meant to know these modes. Apprentices were expected to learn the modes, which included recognizing when to slip someone a coin and when to buy a round of drinks. A marriage or death or birth required some coins. Eating fat on a holy day resulted in a fine.

Certain food was expected on certain dates. The foods varied in different regions. Management had to know the rules too, and failure to comply with one would result in an angry workforce demanding the mill master’s resignation. According to historian Leonard N. Rosenband, the mill at Dauphiné was required to provide both a regular meal and a coq d’Inde, an Indian rooster otherwise known as a turkey—an “exotic” bird from the Americas—on New Year’s. A pig’s ear was required for Mardi Gras, doughnuts for Palm Sunday, and a carp for Good Friday.

Nonetheless, papermaking was a hard and often itinerant life. It was frequently seasonal and demanded long hours when the mill was in operation. Everything would stop whenever the water level in the river got too low, or there were not enough rags, or the mill was needed for an agricultural purpose. Then the papermakers would wander the French countryside in search of another mill that needed them.

The percentage of a publisher’s expenses that went toward paper was high by modern standards; the cost of the paper comprised more than half the price of a book. And this despite the fact that the publisher did not have the expense of binding. He sold sewn pages, which the buyer, after carefully inspecting the quality of the paper used, took to a bookbinder. Real connoisseurs, those who demanded the highest quality of paper, took their books to binders who could tool covers of Moroccan leather and add elaborate, possibly marbled, endpapers.

The French monarchy felt threatened by all the reading going on in France. An estimated 40 percent of the prisoners in the infamous Bastille were involved in the business of books. Reading was becoming a major pastime—and not just of books, but also of pamphlets and magazines. By 1750, 150 periodicals were being read. Book lending and even book renting were popular in France, and reading rooms and libraries were fashionable meeting places. Historian Raymond Birn, who studied eighteenth-century French book ownership, concluded that in 1700, 23 percent of salaried workers and 30 percent of servants in France owned at least one book. By 1780, those figures had increased to 30 percent of workers and 40 percent of servants. In eastern France just before the Revolution, a third of death notices listed books among the deceased’s property.

Everything in France seemed to require paper. Even the lengthy list of books banned by the monarchy was itself printed on paper by the book guild and distributed to all booksellers so that no one would accidentally sell contraband.

DENIS DIDEROT WAS one of the more unusual rebels in a revolutionary age. He wanted to change the world with an encyclopedia. He said that a good one should have “the character of changing the general way of thinking.” He also wanted to catalogue crafts, the manufacturing of the age. He wrote:

Let us at last give artisans their due. We need a man to rise up in the academies and go down to the workshops and gather material about the arts to be set out in a book, which will persuade artisans to read, philosophers to think on useful lines, and the great to make at least some worthwhile use of their authority and their wealth.

Greatly influenced by Francis Bacon, Diderot believed that science and technology would free society from the shackles of an outmoded order. His beliefs were a distillation of what at the time was modern thinking, a merging of Bacon and Newton with Rousseau and Voltaire. “No man has received from nature the right to rule others,” he asserted. “Liberty is a gift from heaven and every individual of the race has the right to enjoy it as soon as he attains the enjoyment of his reason.” His promise for the future was that technology would replace the oppression of religion and the reigning aristocracy, to help build a democratic society.

Diderot’s encyclopedia was the first book of the industrial revolution. Technology had not yet changed; manufacturing was still done largely by hand—papermaking being a case in point—and in shops, not factories. But his book announced that the social order was in the process of changing and would give birth to a technology that had not yet been seen, a technology that would set them free.

The Encyclopédie was composed of twenty-eight volumes, with 71,818 articles written by 100 contributors—all members of the encyclopedia movement who shared Diderot’s beliefs—along with 3,129 illustrations. It included a lengthy, well-illustrated and detailed explanation of papermaking, which is not surprising given that paper had long been ranked as one of France’s top industries. The first volume was published in 1751, and the project continued for nearly thirty years. Ironically, in 1777 there was a crisis in paper supply, and the publisher, Neuchåtel in Switzerland, struggled to procure 36 million sheets of fine, thick, white paper; the project nearly stopped.

The challenge to papermakers in France, as in America, was how to keep up with the demand for their product. French papermakers were also preoccupied by their Dutch competitors, who seemed able to produce more and sell more—and even made inroads into the most traditional of French paper markets. The Dutch began selling French candy makers the violet paper that they traditionally rolled into cones for selling sugar. The Dutch were also starting to outsell the French, both in France and internationally, in fine paper for artists, which was a long-standing French specialty. The Dutch reputation was so favorable that some French mills used watermarks such as “armes d’Amsterdam” to imply that they were Dutch.

Dutch paper was a bluish-white color with a velvety finish created by a unique finishing process called échange; the process involved gentle pressing in the drying room and a reshuffling of the stack of paper after each small pressing so that a sheet was always touching a different one than it had touched on the previous pressing. This left a very soft grain to the paper. Not being privy to the Dutch technique, the French tried to get a similar finish by burnishing their paper with smooth stones. But French paper never had the soft luster of the Dutch product.

French mill owners sent industrial spies to Holland to steal Dutch papermaking ideas. More openly, in 1768, the French government sent its manufacturing inspector for papermaking, Nicolas Demarest, at his own request, to observe papermaking in Zaanland. On his way back, he stopped in Flanders to see water-driven Hollander beaters. But when he returned and presented his findings, they were greeted with considerable resistance. The British and the Dutch were much more open to new ideas than were the French, who in general tended to cling to old ways. While some French papermakers did seek out and buy Hollander beaters, many others insisted that the beaters cut fibers too short and made inferior paper.

THE MEN AND women of the French Revolution knew that their cause was going to require a lot of paper. Like the American Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, this movement had to be “sold” to the general public, and that would take books, newspapers, pamphlets, broadsides, posters, satirical drawings, sheet music, and even playing cards. One set of cards printed in 1792 featured the king card with a red cap (a symbol of the Revolution) instead of a crown, the queen labeled “Liberté,” and the jack “Égalité.”

But when the Revolution first erupted in 1789, it was books that were needed the most. In 1785, only 900 book titles had been published in France, but in 1789, 1,500 titles were published—a record number that France did not reach again until 1825. The great social change that Diderot had predicted burst forth in 1789, a year of astounding events in France. Crudely armed crowds stormed government buildings, a new constitution was written under siege in a tennis court, and a violent peasant revolt tore apart the countryside. Hundreds of posters, flyers, and pamphlets circulated, and 185 new daily newspapers started up. The following year, another 335 papers were launched.

Since the old French monarchy had only one newspaper, the French Revolution was the true birth of the French press. Most of the new newspapers did not have a huge circulation, or at least not a huge press run, but that was simply because the presses were not capable of it. A few printers had larger shops. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, publisher of the two leading papers, Mercure de France and the Moniteur, had twenty-seven presses and ninety-one workers, and also published books. The Gazette Universelle put out 11,000 copies on ten presses. Historians estimate that all the revolutionary newspapers combined did not produce a half million newspapers on any given day.

Pornographic attacks on the regime, both in words and pictures, were also well circulated. An especially popular subject was the alleged lasciviousness of the queen, who was frequently depicted in various erotic acts, the illustrations accompanied by reports of her probably fictitious orgies. It began a tradition of outrageous, off-color political satire that has continued in France till this day. The satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, which became famous as the victim of a January 2015 terrorist attack, followed in this same tradition. Broadsides were particularly important in popularizing the revolution as well. More than half the French population was still either illiterate or barely literate. Heavily illustrated and written in spare, simple language, the broadsides targeted the lower classes.

The French government, which had previously always controlled what was printed, was helpless in the face of this flood of printed matter. Even when they closed down a few known print shops, dozens of others sprang up in the back streets. Those opposed to the revolution, however, resisted in kind, with their own posters, pamphlets, and newspapers. The more the revolutionaries printed, the more their opponents printed. A bishop made a speech, and two thousand copies of that speech would appear on the street that week. Michel Vernus, a French historian who specializes in the Franche-Comté region in central France, found that between January and May 1789, during the great debates of the Estates-General, whose dissolution began the Revolution in May, 200 booklets and pamphlets were printed in Franche-Comté alone, with an average press run of 1,000.

And yet, in this age of paper, printing, and reading, oral culture had still not vanished. The revolutionaries presented public readings, announced with the pounding of drums, and the general population was pressured to prove their loyalty to the cause by attending. Oral culture met printed culture in the phenomenon of revolutionary songs. It started with the song now known as “La Marseillaise,” which was composed by a French Army officer, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, in 1792.

The lyrics, first printed in two newspapers and later performed, did not elicit a strong reaction at first; they are almost bizarrely violent calls for watering the French countryside with the “impure blood” of tyrants. But the song was not written for the revolutionaries, and neither was it meant to be a national anthem. It was written as a marching song for French troops going off to fight Austria, against whom war had just been declared. The song’s title was “Chant de guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin” (War song for the army of the Rhine).

But on July 30, 1792, troops from Marseilles marched into Paris singing a stirring rendition of the new song. Parisians loved it. The troops fanned out in the capital and taught people how to sing it. It was printed and distributed throughout the country. This was the birth of printed songs in France. Other “revolutionary songs” followed. Soon, for any song to become popular, it had to be distributed first in print.

This eruption of paper and printing—books, pamphlets, broadsides, posters, and flyers on the street—was a phenomenon associated with all the great political upheavals of France. It was seen during the revolutions of 1848, and again during the student and labor uprisings of 1968.

AS DIDEROT HAD predicted, huge social changes pushed technology forward. One of the first technological innovations, one that completely altered paper art and illustration, was developed, probably by accident, by a young writer in Bavaria named Alois Senefelder. Born in 1771, the son of a Munich actor, his ambition was to be a playwright. But he failed to find a publisher for his plays. He decided to publish them himself, and built a makeshift press for printing copperplates. Copper was expensive, however, and so he started experimenting with a limestone slate known as Solnhofen stone. The stone was inexpensive and commonplace in Bavaria. Using nitric acid, Senefelder was able to produce a slightly raised image on the stone that he could ink and print.

But it was difficult to keep the ink off of the lower cut-away parts that were intended to be white space. He experimented with various solutions, and eventually came to realize that he did not need raised and lowered areas with stone as did etchings and woodcuts. The trick was to use substances that would attract or reject ink. Since ink was oil-based, water would reject it. He could use a dampened stone and draw with a greasy, water-resistant crayon. When inked, the crayon part would be printed and the wet areas around it wouldn’t. Senefelder had invented the first chemical printing process.

He further developed the technique—by using a range of crayons, a soluble but greasy ink known as touche, and various pens and brushes. He found talented artists to work with him and wrote a manual that became the standard textbook for this type of print, which became known as a lithograph. Lithographs were less expensive than copper printing, and did not require the skill of wood engraving. In 1801, Senefelder took his invention to London to be patented. Lithography became a new popular form, a very affordable kind of art, especially because the stones would not wear out and could be washed off and reused. Even today, lithographs are one of the least expensive art forms. By the 1820s major artists were embracing lithographs, especially for book illustration; French painter Eugène Delacroix, for example, illustrated an 1828 edition of Faust.

Lithography also led to another important invention in this age of discovery. As early as 1793, Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and his brother Claude had become interested in the idea that light could be used to create permanent images—somewhat like a fixed shadow. In 1813 they began experimenting with lithography and the possibility of applying their ideas about light imagery to Senefelder’s invention. These experiments took time. The brothers’ primary interest was in the idea that if a volatile fuel were exploded in a controlled chamber, it would release energy that could be harnessed, an invention that they called a pyreolophore, but that we now call an internal combustion engine. They built one that powered a model boat on rivers. It was the prototype of the engine that still powers boats and automobiles today.

Starting in 1816, the Niépce brothers also worked sporadically on their idea of fixing a shadow image. They found that a certain asphalt compound was light-sensitive, and in the 1820s they produced the first photographs, which they called heliographs. The oldest-known permanent photograph, an image of a man leading a horse, dates from 1825. The heliograph was an image fixed on polished pewter coated with a thin layer of bitumen, or asphalt, dissolved in lavender oil. The image had to be exposed in the camera for at least eight hours, the brothers said, but it may have taken days.

Nicéphore Niépce took his invention to the Royal Society in London, whose members were not impressed. He then partnered with Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who developed a technique for capturing images on silver-coated copper sheets. Silver salts were extremely light-sensitive. Daguerre’s copper images—daguerreotypes—along with lithography, enjoyed tremendous popularity, whereas heliographs were completely ignored.

Then in 1840, an Englishman, William Henry Fox Talbot, learned to capture light images on paper coated with silver salts, a process attempted unsuccessfully by the potter Thomas Wedgwood in 1800. From then on, photography on paper developed. But Joseph Niépce was forgotten. He had the distinction of authoring two of the most important inventions of the nineteenth century, the internal combustion engine and the photograph, without ever becoming famous. Once again, history shows that creating important inventions and becoming a “famous inventor” involve very different skills.

A LITHOGRAPH REQUIRED a stiffer ink than other types of prints, as well as a printing press that applied the image to the paper with greater pressure. By the early nineteenth century, the old Gutenberg press was finally changing.

In a notable example of the technological fallacy, numerous historians credit the dramatic increase in reading at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the improved capacity of the printing press, along with the dramatic increase in the capacity of nineteenth-century paper mills. But others, not succumbing to the fallacy, correctly point out that this dramatic growth in reading began before any of these advances in technology. Cambridge professor William St. Clair observed, “The technological changes, the evidence suggests, came after the expansion of reading was already well under way, and were more a result than a cause.”

The expansion in reading was not simply a by-product of the revolutions in France and America, but a widespread phenomenon. It could even be argued, as Diderot did, that the spread of reading and its accompanying spread of knowledge led to rebellion against the old order. This was why that old order, the aristocracies and clergy of Europe, were tremendously fearful of this increasing popularity of books and newspapers and reading in general. In the late eighteenth century, people of all economic classes, rural and urban, the well educated and the little educated, men and women, young and old—everyone started reading more. People were also reading more for entertainment and much less for instruction. People were no longer reading just one book but reading one book after another. More and more newspapers were being published.

As with all changes, there was considerable discussion about their repercussions. Not everyone believed, as did Diderot, that reading was a positive and liberating experience. Some believed, as Cervantes had noted with irony, that too much reading could ruin a person. This fear of reading was connected with the desire to oppress, as is evident in the many arguments over time claiming that reading was not good for the working class or for women or for slaves.

Books were being produced at an unprecedented rate. More books were being published than people wanted, though publishers naturally tried to avoid this. Some books didn’t sell at all, including some by famous poets. Percy Bysshe Shelley, like many poets today, was never published by a commercial publisher in his lifetime. William Blake, revered today as both a poet and an illustrator, had only a few hundred copies of his books published in his lifetime, many of which never sold. The phenomenon of the remainder book—excess stock sold at deep discounts—emerged, a particularly ignominious development for authors. In England, old books started turning up at groceries and cheese shops, where their pages were used for wrapping. Book pages also proved useful for lighting pipes, fireplaces, and lamps. At worst, they supplied toilets.

A NUMBER OF eighteenth-century discoveries were emblematic of the nineteenth century. The use of coke—baked carbon with sulfur removed—improved metal and eventually led to steel. The steam engine was first invented in 1698 by Thomas Savery in England to pump water out of mines. In 1712 a blacksmith, Thomas Newcomen, designed a steam-powered piston-driven engine for the same purpose. The steam engine was greatly improved in 1765 by James Watt, who created a revolution in powering machines. Then in 1804, the British Royal Navy built a steam-powered conveyor belt for the production of a type of crackers called ship’s biscuits. It is impossible to say when the “Industrial Revolution” began, but once steam-powered conveyor belts were in use, it was well under way.

One of the first steps forward in printing technology was the building of presses out of iron instead of wood. In 1800, Lord Charles Stanhope built an all-cast-iron printing press and placed it in the printing shop of William Bulmer, a close friend of Thomas Bewick, the famed wood engraver. Because it was made of unyielding metal, it only required 10 percent of the force used in old wooden presses. Also, it could print 480 pages in an hour, about double the production of the old wooden press.

Soon afterward, in 1804, a German inventor named Friedrich Koenig moved to London and began working on an even more efficient press. In 1810 he produced a printing press powered by a steam engine, which could print 1,100 pages an hour; four years later, The Times of London began using it. Later models of the press could print on both sides of a sheet of paper at the same time. In 1843, Richard M. Hoe, a New Yorker and the son of a manufacturer of steam-powered presses, designed a press with a rotary type cylinder. It was far faster than the flatbed type press used earlier—millions of copies of a page could be printed in a day.

NOW THERE WAS both the demand and the capacity for much more printing, but where could additional paper be found?

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century, steam engines made their way into paper mills, replacing waterpower. This meant that paper mills could operate at the same pace year-round regardless of the water level in the rivers. But since steam engines were coal fired, it also meant that papermaking was dependent on the price of coal.

The problem of the demand for rags outstripping the supply had not been resolved, but was slightly eased when German chemist Carl Scheele, working in Sweden, discovered chlorine in 1774. Chlorine is a gas that when mixed with lime becomes bleach. This meant that while rags were in higher demand than ever for paper production, papermakers were no longer restricted to using white rags to make white paper. They could bleach colored rags. The ever-resourceful American papermaker Joshua Gilpin, returned from his fact-finding travels in Europe and set up a bleaching house in 1804 at the Brandywine Mill, thereby introducing bleaching to the United States.

But what really changed the production capacity and economics of papermaking in the early nineteenth century began in France in 1798. A Parisian, Nicolas-Louis Robert, had tried to volunteer in the French Army to fight for the American Revolution, but he was rejected as being too frail. He didn’t go to America, but with persistence he managed, after four years, to be accepted into the French Army. Sometime between 1790 and 1794, he left the military and began working for the most famous Parisian printer, Pierre-François Didot. The Didots—sons and grandsons, brothers and cousins—were inventive printers and papermakers well known, among other things, for the Didot typeface. A handsome font of contrasting thick verticals and thin connecting lines, it is still in use today. The Didots sent Robert to Essonne, an area just south of Paris, where they had a paper mill dating back to the fourteenth century; it made high-quality paper used for printing money.

Robert had an idea for a machine that, rather than producing one sheet of paper at a time, would produce a continuous roll of paper. This was the same concept as that of the conveyor belt, though Robert had been experimenting with the idea a few years before the first conveyor belt was developed. His belt was not just a belt for moving an assembly, it was a screen with a “wet end” and a “dry end.” As the belt passed under a vat, a watery pulp was poured onto it. The belt then did a side-to-side shake, similar to the motion that a vatman performed, to evenly distribute the fibers on the screen. Farther down the belt, water was sucked out of the pulp, and the waterleaf moved on to a series of felt-covered drums called couch rolls for preliminary drying. From there, it traveled to a series of heated drums on which it dried further and then rolled off the belt. The screen belt was made of a fine mesh, so the paper resembled wove. Later, a roller called a dandy roll was added to the process; it left a watermark every foot or so on the strip of waterleaf.

Long rolls of paper would prove to be invaluable to the new, fast printers as they developed, because the printers would no longer be hampered by the need to feed in sheet after sheet of handmade paper. Pierre-François Didot rejected Robert’s first two attempts at such a machine, but he took the third one to his British brother-in-law John Gamble, who had it patented in London.

For fans of Denis Diderot, it would be nice to imagine that Robert came up with his machine so that more books and newspapers could be printed to enlighten and free the masses. But the truth was almost the opposite. He disliked the papermakers’ guild and the papermakers, with all their rights and privileges—as did many on the management side of papermaking—and was candid about his goal of finding a way to unseat them from their perch. This was one of the first signs to the careful observer that Diderot’s promised century was not going to unfold the way he imagined. Soon weavers would be in a death struggle with Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s automatic punch-card-operated looms, another French invention put into operation in Britain. The weavers, like the paper workers, were a highly skilled and well-organized group who had won many rights.

The continuous-paper-machine patent caught the interest of the Fourdrinier brothers, Henry and Sealy, papermakers who built several prototypes of the huge and complicated machine, and went bankrupt in the process. Then industrialist Bryan Donkin became interested in what he called the “Fourdrinier” machine. Donkin did not play a role in the technological revolution as imagined by Diderot. It was one thing to talk of using technology to topple the authority of the aristocracy and the Church, but who or what would replace them? Diderot and the French revolutionaries had assumed it would be “the people.” But as the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet once wryly observed, “The people, in its highest ideal, is difficult to find in the people.”

As the nineteenth century progressed, the old order was replaced by the Bryan Donkins of the world. His talent lay in identifying good ideas developed by other people and translating them into commercial practices, making a great deal of money in the process. Building the first industrial paper machine in 1804 and a better one the following year was but one example of Donkin’s business acumen. Another was seizing on the ideas of another Frenchman, Nicolas Appert. Appert had written a book in 1809 called The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years, which had been translated into English. He had learned how to preserve food by sealing it in a jar with a tight lid and then heating it. Only months after the book’s publication, a Londoner named Peter Durand, giving no credit to Appert, patented the idea. Durand listed a number of containers besides jars, including metal, that could be used for the process, and from that patent, Bryan Donkin built the first canned-food factory across the Thames from London. Among the other ideas that Donkin developed and made a fortune on were gas valves, a machine for measuring the speed of rotating engines (that is, in terms of revolutions per minute, or rpm), and an engine that could count.

1809 A LONDON stationer named John Dickinson, celebrated for developing a type of paper to use in cannons that would not catch fire, and for making artillery safer (for the person firing it anyway) and more efficient, patented his own idea for a continuous paper machine. Known as a cylinder machine, it consisted of a cylinder of fine wire mesh revolving in a vat of pulp. The motion caused the pulp to rise to the top in a thin film, which a layer of felt then carried off to the rest of the machine. Changes in the cylinder could facilitate the production of a variety of industrial papers such as heavy wrapping paper, building paper, boxes, and roofing paper. More and more cylinders—up to eight—were later added to the machine, allowing it to produce enormous quantities of paperboard, which is made from several layers of paper. At his paper mill in Hertfordshire, Dickinson also developed silk-thread paper. This was used for postage stamps and envelopes, including the first self-sticking envelope.

It was an age when it seemed as if machines were being built to do most everything. Thomas Cobb in Banbury, Oxfordshire, worked on a paper machine from 1807 to 1812 in his North Newington Mill by the Soar River. It was based on the new idea of conveyor belts. Mechanically operated molds drained pulp and made sheets. Once the sheets were deposited on the felts, the molds were washed and mechanically returned to the vat end of the belt. A Scot, Robert Cameron, developed a similar idea in 1816. There might be a market for such machines today because there is an interest in paper that looks handmade, but they did not catch on back then because they were designed to produce individual sheets; continuous rolls were what new industry wanted.

In search of an improved paper machine, the forward-thinking American papermaker Joshua Gilpin had traveled to Europe once again in 1811. There, he had tried to negotiate with Henry Fourdrinier for one of his machines, but Fourdrinier had greeted him with seeming distrust (in truth, he had already lost control of his company and was bankrupt). Gilpin would have done better to have approached Donkin, who had already placed eighteen working Fourdrinier machines in mills around the country. While in Europe, Gilpin also became aware of Dickinson’s cylinder machine, which was smaller, simpler, and easier to install than the Fourdrinier. But the problem that Gilpin encountered was that the Fourdrinier brothers, before going bankrupt, had realized the competitive advantages of the cylinder machine and had bought off Dickinson. They now had rights to that machine too, and they weren’t interested in doing business with Gilpin.

And so the resourceful Gilpin decided that he would steal the ideas for the cylinder machine. He could never have done this with a Fourdrinier, which was much more complicated, and he did not think any Philadelphia metalworkers would understand how to build it anyway. But he studied the cylinder machine, watched it work, drew sketches, found knowledgeable people with whom he could discuss the machine’s working parts, and studied the considerable amount of information that had been filed with its patent. Gilpin visited Dickinson to get a look at a working machine, but was unable to get close enough. Yet by an incredible coincidence, Gilpin’s foreman, Lawrence Greatrake happened to be in London on family business. The son of an English paper-mill owner in Hertfordshire, Greatrake visited Dickinson and the two seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Dickinson invited him to stay for several days and observe the machine. He would not let him take measurements, but Greatrake did manage to pace off basic dimensions. Back home at the Brandywine Mill, Greatrake and Gilpin’s brother, Thomas, then built and patented their own cylinder machine in 1816; that machine did not turn out satisfactory paper until 1818.

The era of machine-made paper in America had begun. In 1827, Peter Adams in Saugerties, New York, installed the first Fourdrinier in the United States. It made what was then considered among the best writing paper in the country.

IN THE EARLY part of the Industrial Revolution, France was the land of ideas and Britain was the land of manufacturing. There was no papermaking machine in France until 1811, and in 1827, there were only four. In the 1830s, papermaking machines were commonly used in France, but most were British-built. By 1819, the Germans were also importing British machines.

British paper workers were no happier about papermaking machines than textile workers were about automatic looms. In 1816 the papermakers of Maidstone petitioned the House of Commons to stop the building of Fourdriniers. In 1830 there were riots in High Wycombe, just north of London. Workers occupied mills and destroyed some equipment. Troops were called in.

With machine-made paper, production increased tremendously and the price of paper dropped. Owning a mill became far more profitable than it had ever been before, while working in one became considerably less so. The power of the papermaking guild and other workers’ organizations was considerably weakened.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Diderot had predicted that enormous changes were coming to society, that those changes would bring with them technology, and that technology, in turn, would make people freer. This is partly because he thought that technology would make information more readily available. But the dissemination of information alone does not set people free, and a new information technology creates a new ruling class. Technology by itself does not change the nature of society.

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