Bull's Head and Mermaid - The Bernstein Project - Österreichische ...

types of wood as well as to one year old plants. And highly
resinous pinewood could be processed well, too. The result
of the digestion with the caustic sodium lye, with an additional
of sodium sulphate was a dark coloured kraft pulp,
which was not easy to bleach, but showed high strength
values, because of which it was well appropriated for packing
papers and for linerboards. Concurrently to it, Oswald
Meyh invented the brown mechanical pulp in Zwickau in
1872.
A new base of material supply for paper manufacturing
could be organised and the scarceness of resources lasted
centuries could be eliminated due to all the processes listed
above which became what they are today, by many additional
improvements.
The First Papermaking Machines
Rags were used exclusively as a raw material for papermaking
till the beginning of the 19 th century. One hundred
years later paper industry started using yellow straw pulp,
bleached straw pulp, ground wood pulp, chemical wood
pulp and waste paper in large quantities. In the late 19 th
century the paper production in Germany had grown about
fifty times, while the number of its employees had increased
about four and a half times. A considered use of
technology and a significant change of the base material
had modified the relations in the papermaking completely.
The single processing steps of the manual paper productions
can be found even by modern paper machines but in
heavily changed form. The paper pulp suspension is drained
through an endless wire sieve. A press section follows
where the new paper is further dewatered by various presses
between felts or similar fabrics. The dry section is positioned
at the end of the paper machine where the new paper
is dried by heat and is rolled into an endless roll.
Ill. 15: Model of Robert’s papermaking machine in the Papermuseum
Duszniki / Poland
24
Although in the context of the construction of the first
paper machine other names are mentioned among others,
e.g. the Austrian Ignaz Theodor Pachner Edler von Eggenstorf,
still the Frenchman Nicolas-Louis Robert (1761–1828)
is considered generally the inventor of the first Fourdrinier
wire paper machine (Ill. 15). He constructed a prototype
machine between 1796 and 1798. Using this prototype the
first paper machine was built in a large scale a few months
later. This allowed the production of up to five meters long
and sixty centimetres wide paper.
His first paper machine had already an endless wire sieve
but no press and dry section. Neither Robert nor the later
buyers of his patent L. Didot and the brothers Fourdrinier
had any financial success because of the significant shortcomings
of his construction. Only the mechanic Bryan
Donkin (1768–1855) in England succeeded to set in motion
a paper machine built after Robert’s idea in 1808.
Donkin had already built thirteen more machines until
1809. Thus the Fourdrinier wire paper machine was
successfully introduced to the industrial paper production.
It was his engineering company, the Donkin & Co, which
in the years 1818/19 set up the first paper machine in
Germany for the ‘Patentpapierfabrik der Königlich Preußischen
Seehandlung’. The Allgemeine Handlungs-Zeitung
reported in 1820 about these products: ‘... the force, regularity,
equality, with which the machinery works, is not
possible for the human hand, the ’machine works, continuously
every day like the others, and her paper is consistently
the same, and it produces from less qualitative rags
paper of better quality than usual for traditional paper
mills’.
At this time, the cylinder paper machine presented the
only technological alternative to Fourdrinier’s wire paper
machine. The mechanic Joseph Bramah (1748–1814), an
all-round inventor, received an English patent in 1805.
Adolf Keferstein (1773–1853) from Weida (Saxony) built an
own cylinder paper machine with a steam heated drying
cylinder in 1819. It was used for the production of 60 cubits
of endless paper. Thomas Crompton got a patent for a
drying cylinder in England in the same year following a report
by Keferstein about his invention in a newspaper.
Only by this and Illig’s pioneering invention (to get the
watery pulp already glued, instead of sizing the finished
sheets) a continuous production of paper became possible
(Ill. 16).
Paper Sizing According to Moritz Illig
Unsized papers are inappropriate to write on with ink or
similar water-based writing materials. Such papers are imbrued
and the script runs. The paper became ink-resistant
only by gluing. We have knowledge about sizing of papyrus
by dipping it in glue made of fine flour and wine vinegar or
of acidified bread crumbs already from antiquity. Later – up
to the 14 th century – starch alone was used for sizing paper.
Since that time and probably for the first time in Fabriano
or Nuremberg, paper has been sized by animal glue. For the
preparation of such a glue, sheep feet or leather waste
were cooked under addition of alum. The paper sheets
were pulled through this glue, pressed again, dried and