Paper, the medium that made the modern world part 3: Special papers

From hygiene to industry, Martin Pitt looks at how paper evolved into an everyday essential

UNSURPRISINGLY, the Chinese were the first to use paper to wipe their bottoms. First with unwanted documents (recorded from 579) but later specially made for the privileged. In 1393, 720,000 sheets (60 × 90 cm to be cut up) were produced for the Imperial Court, with 15,000 especially soft and perfumed ones for the royal family.

In 1792 American bookbinder Robert Bailey Thomas (1766–1846) published the first of an annual Farmer’s Almanac. When he discovered that copies were being used as toilet paper in rural outhouses, he obligingly sold them with a hole in the corner to hang on a nail.

American inventor Joseph C Gayett (1817–1895) marketed the first commercial toilet paper in 1857, made of hemp paper treated with aloe (for lubrication and disinfection) and marketed as an anti-haemorrhoid medicated product. In 1890 American E Irvine Scott (1846–1927) and his brother Clarence began selling toilet paper in perforated rolls instead of sheets.

In 1893, the Sheffield ironworks Newton & Chambers began selling a fraction of coal oil as a disinfectant, naming it Izal, an anagram of Liza, the daughter of their chemist, Jason Hall Worrall (1860–1945). In 1920 they introduced Izal medicated toilet paper to government agencies, so it was used in schools and public buildings and sold to the public from 1922 to 1986. It was a strong brown paper, shiny smooth on one side (so not very good at removing faeces) and very rough on the other, generally hated by people of mine and my parents' generations. 

It was in the US in 1928 that a soft toilet paper called “Charmin” (from the word charming) was first marketed by the Hoberg Paper Company, aimed at the female market. Britain got its first soft toilet paper in 1942 with “Androll”, later renamed “Andrex” after St Andrew’s Mill in Walthamstow. It was the first two-ply paper, an idea borrowed from two-ply disposable handkerchiefs (see below). In both countries, the post-war building boom gave more households access to private indoor toilets, boosting demand for toilet paper – especially softer varieties. From 1954, coloured rolls (starting with pink) appeared, later being chosen to match the 1970s fashion for coloured bathroom suites. Concerns about pollution from the dyes mean white is now general.

Meanwhile in British government buildings, Izal reigned supreme. In 1970, the civil service commissioned noted bacteriologist Sir Graham Wilson (1895–1987) to compare softer toilet paper with Izal, finding that softer paper could be penetrated by a finger when wet – unlike Izal. So he advised against its adoption “until the routine washing of hands after defecation becomes a universal practice”.

By this time, Izal was at least not brown, but translucent like tracing paper, though its water resistance meant it did not break down easily so was disliked by drainage engineers and sewage works. My son had to put up with Izal in the school toilets in the 1990s. Girls had nice soft pink paper but the boys lost access to it after they began wetting it and throwing it at the ceiling. Production ceased in 2010.

China is still the country that uses the most toilet paper, though the US uses more per person. A world total of 44m t a year is rising with increased living standards and population. A tonne uses 17 trees and 125 L of water.

Facial tissues

Wealthy Japanese had been using soft paper as single-use handkerchiefs since the 18th century and probably earlier. They were sometimes monogrammed and ordinary people would snatch them up as souvenirs of the celebrity. Japanese actors and geishas used a special paper to absorb oil and sweat by patting without disturbing makeup. Versions are sold as makeup blotting paper today.

The boxes of tissues common today were introduced in 1924 by Kimberly-Clarke as facial tissues for the removal of makeup. The tissue had originally been components of gas masks for World War One. A survey in 1926 revealed that 60% of customers used them for blowing noses. In 1930 they started advertising “Don’t Carry a Cold in Your Pocket” and this became the predominant use. Though available in the UK from that time, World War Two and the subsequent austerity meant they were not common until the 1960s. As a child I remember the misery of carrying around a wet handkerchief when I had a cold. Izal toilet paper was of little use.

Today China is the biggest producer and the US is the largest user, with about 25m t used globally and increasing.

Paper towels

In 1907 the Scott Paper Company of Philadelphia introduced disposable paper towels for public toilets, promoting them as more hygienic than cloth ones which were shared. The same company introduced paper towels in rolls for the kitchen in 1937, and in the 1950s a stronger, coarser roll for industrial wiping. There are many companies producing them now, with an overall 15m t a year globally and the US being the largest user.

Blotting paper

Writing with a quill or pen on paper took a while to dry. A common solution for the impatient was fine sand. Around 1795 in Berkshire, a batch of writing paper was produced without size (glue) to control its absorbency and was set aside to be repulped. A visiting official took a sheet to make some notes and found the ink spread. He pointed this out to the mill owner, William Russell Slade (1766–1801), who made the inventive leap to turn it into a product, blotting paper. The family leased several mills as demand grew and received a medal at the 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle (world fair).

Paper was mostly made from rags and it was particularly difficult to bleach paper made from red cloth. For a blotter, this did not matter. So, pink blotters became standard in 19th and early 20th century offices. Companies also provided blotting pads printed to advertise their products, with other things of use or interest. Pads of letter paper commonly included one sheet of blotting paper. I recall a sheet of blotting paper being provided with exam scripts. The typewriter, quicker drying fountain pen ink and the ballpoint pen all reduced demand.

Entrepreneurial German housewife Melitta Benz (1873–1950) changed the world with a disk of blotting paper. She didn’t like the harsh taste and floating grounds of percolated coffee, so got a flat-bottomed brass cup, drilled holes in it and covered it with a disk of blotting paper from her son’s schoolbook. Pleased with the clear liquid which filtered to a cup underneath and its better taste, she patented it in 1908 and formed a company to produce the holders and sell them with discs of commercial filter paper, receiving a medal at the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. In 1930 she introduced the conical filter which is common today. The percolator on hot plate was more efficient in extracting bitter oils and broke down bean fragments into a dust which was entrained. The cleaner, less gritty, drip-brewed product was the beginning of the worldwide coffee culture we have today.

 

Filter paper

In 1790 French pharmacist and chemistry professor Nicolas Deyeux (1745–1837) prepared a paper from a mixture of wool, hemp and cotton and used it for qualitative filtration. In 1808, Swedish chemical pioneer Jöns Jacob Berzelius (1779–1848) went one better, developing a paper suitable for quantitative analysis — the basis for much of his work (see TCE 970: Signs and Symbols). Made from pure cotton with a uniform structure, it entered production at a local paper mill in 1815 and is still produced today.

For quantitative analysis the paper must be consistent and have a low ash content so the precipitate can be ignited and weighed. Other countries with strong chemical research (notably Germany, France and Britain) soon began producing their own, so it was German laboratory paper that Melitta Benz used.

Paper filters began to be used for filtering air and oil in internal combustion engines from the 1950s and are almost universal today. Paper filters are also a disposable part of many vacuum cleaners. For these various uses, about 140,000 t per year is used.

Cigarette paper

The tobacco pipe is messy and requires maintenance but allows the poorest person to indulge with the cheapest and roughest tobacco. By contrast, the cigar is convenient, disposable and expensive, defining the user as superior. It consists of tobacco wrapped in processed tobacco leaves. The cigarillo was a small version. It was the production of specially made paper and later manufactured packs of ready-made that made the cheaper and more convenient cigarette into one of the major products of the 20th century, producing great wealth for manufacturers and ill-health for millions (and many domestic and industrial fires).The cigarette began with poorer people reusing tobacco from discarded cigar butts, wrapping it in any paper to hand. A more refined version, known as the papelette, used clean paper and became common in 18th-century Spain before spreading to Spanish South America. In about 1770 in Alcoy, Spain, mills began to produce thin, porous paper especially for rolling

cigarettes. They used the new technologies of metal pulping vats and Hollander mechanical beaters. Spanish soldiers spread the habit to other armies and countries, notably France and the Spanish possessions in the Americas. From the mid-1800s, small businesses rolled cigarettes by hand for sale to the better off. It was in the US in 1881, that a 22-year-old college dropout (whose family owned a woollen mill) James A Bonsack (1859–1924) was granted a patent for a machine to do the same. In 1884, tobacco mogul James Buchanan Duke (1856–1925) licensed two machines, each producing 12,000 cigarettes per hour and sacked his hand-rollers. He amalgamated with competitors to form the American Tobacco Company, which controlled 90% of the market and forced the farmers to cut prices. His attempt to take over the UK market resulted in the formation of a rival conglomerate, Imperial Tobacco Company. In 1911, the American Tobacco Company was forced by the government to split into separate smaller companies beginning a long period of commercial rivalry.

From 1890, cigarette companies started competing by including cards with pictures, and sometimes information, on things they thought might be of interest to men – famous people, sports, war, nature etc. A new hobby of collecting sets began. In the US, baseball was a major theme. Similar trading cards were also put in packets of gum in the US and packets of tea in the UK later. Production ceased during World War Two to conserve paper but there was a revival in the 1950s and 60s. I remember being sent to buy cigarettes for my father and buying the one with the cards inside instead of his preferred brand (I was well underage but this was normal).

 

Tobacco industry

The man known as the founder of public relations, Austrian-born American Edward Bernays (1891–1995) ran what is often regarded as the greatest ever marketing campaign in 1929. The US tobacco market seemed saturated. Pretty well every man smoked from quite a young age. However, it wasn’t considered feminine. Women who did smoke were viewed as promiscuous. New York even had an ordinance forbidding them to smoke in public. He set out to change this. It was at the huge Easter Sunday Parade in New York that he paid lots of women to smoke cigarettes and told them to shout the slogan “Torches of Freedom” along with influencing reporters and promoting opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines. He carefully selected women who he said should be “good looking, but too model-y” and hired his own photographers to get pictures and distribute them widely. Abraham Brill (1874–1948), an Austrian-American psychiatrist (the first in the US), obliged by saying that women desired cigarettes because of an oral fixation and were stressed by being denied what men enjoyed freely. By 1935 women had risen from 5% to 18% of smokers, reaching 33% in 1965. The torches of freedom campaign was revived in other countries in the 1970s. Bernays went on to work with the CIA on propaganda and other persuasive techniques, as well as industry.

The tobacco industry today uses 1.7 m t of paper a year in cigarette paper and packaging.

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In the next article, I will deal with more constructive uses of paper and card.