"Newsprint" is the most well-known role in the history of paper, and in the West, the rise of popular newspapers in the 19th century shaped an important public sphere and fueled the influence of political opinion. In China, the popularity of newspapers and periodicals in the late Qing Dynasty profoundly reshaped people's understanding of the current situation and even time and space, allowing people to truly "open their eyes to see the world".
The above impact on newsprint is not only brought about by the "content" of the text carried by the newsprint. As early as the last century, media scholars such as McLuhan reminded us of the material and technical aspects of media influence. The German literature and history expert Rothal Müller inherited this perspective to some extent. In his book A Cultural History of Paper, he focuses on the "paper" medium itself, tracing the complex social interactions behind its evolutionary history.
From Mueller's account, it is not difficult to find that changes in factors such as raw material base and printing and papermaking technology have a revolutionary impact on the development of paper forms. The forms of different papers are also deeply involved in the social and political environment. For example, in the famous Dreyfus incident in France, the "tabloids" that emphasize "social gossip" have become an important role in influencing public opinion through various kinds of gossip and anecdotes. To borrow elizabeth eisenstein, Müller is trying to portray a kind of paper "as a driver of change." The following is an excerpt from the Cultural History of Paper, with deletions and changes, and the subtitle is added by the editor.
The Cultural History of Paper, by Rotar Muller, Edition: Guangdong People's Publishing House, Chuangmei Factory, 2022-2.
1
Paper machines: The promise of "unlimited productivity" is associated with the rise of newsprint
"Paper is the material means of all our spiritual communication, the intermediary of the exchange of ideas, the carrier of thoughts, feelings and emotions, and the faithful carrier of the results of human research. No other material in the world has undergone such a dramatic change as paper, and no other material can be like paper, through the hands of a diligent industrialist, from the most primitive state of nature to the perfect end goal. It makes sense to describe the production and manufacture of paper here, since we can be sure in advance that the peculiar mechanism of the web making machine is unlikely to upset our readers. This is the opening line of Die Maschine des endlosen Papiers .com. In the autumn of 1834, the Leipzig magazine Pfennig Magazin der Gesellschafl zur Verbreitung gemeinnütziger Kenntnisse introduced the paper machine and the paper cutter in two illustrated articles. The magazine, published every Saturday, takes its name from the British weekly magazine Penny Magazine of the Practical Knowledge Dissemination Society, published in London in 1832. Finney Magazine, like the Paris-based Scenic Spots, was founded in 1833 and had a circulation of 35,000 copies in its first year. A magazine of eight pages, with four to six illustrations, costs just 11 pfenni — it costs almost twice as much to send a letter from Leipzig to Dresden — and it costs just two talles to subscribe a year. Such a low price can only be maintained by high circulation.
Just a few years after its establishment, Finney Magazine had a circulation of 100,000 copies. When the publisher F.A. Brockhaus acquired it in 1847, the magazine's high-speed printing press was steam-powered to ensure the timely publication of the illustrator weekly. The entertainment and teaching of the 18th-century Enlightenment were balanced here. The introduction to the paper machine and the paper cutter, like Balzac's novel, shows the readers of the magazine the material composition of the reading they hold in a materially self-reflective way. These two articles amply refute the idea that the road to modern mass media is a steep slope of intellectual and linguistic degradation. The depictions of the essays are vivid and precise, and it is through this precision that the narrative literature of the 19th century depicts natural phenomena, everyday affairs, and civic life. Finney Magazine's description of the paper machine (the full-page illustration that accompanies the article is constantly quoted) is the culmination of this paper mill journey. It further explains machines as "miracles" achieved through the human mind.
The paper machine could produce an endless amount of paper that didn't seem to require manpower, and the inexhaustible nature that Melville took to tie to Dante's punishment of hell manifested itself as a commitment to unlimited productivity. When discussing the British Pennies Magazine, we already realize that the combination of modern printing technology and paper machines is decisive for this type of newspaper. The Stannop press that Balzac designated for the Angoulême printing house in France was already made of iron, and it was the last branch of the traditional Gutenberg printing that could achieve "one-off" printing by using larger metal pressure plates, but its principle was still the old "flat pressure plane" - the way the pressure plate was stamped on the plate. Friedrich Koenig's high-speed printing press meant a transition to roller printing. Koenig was inspired by the printing process of mechanized weaving mills. The drum was an element that played a decisive role in the revolution of printing technology in the 19th century.
Over the course of several decades, the new combination of roller high-speed presses and paper machines has replaced the centuries-old manual presses and handmade paper. This intermittent technological innovation is largely incentivized by newspaper publishing. As Balzac understood, modern journalism has found a partner with whom it can forge an epoch-making alliance, much like the alliance forged between the 15th century and letterpress printing. However, this alliance can flourish only if a balance is struck between the increasingly efficient capacity of printing presses and the output of paper machines. It is realized that the limitations of the supply of raw materials for paper machines affect this balance. As we may recall, David Sexia's research was based on this. So let's see how he solved this problem.
French 19th-century writer Balzac
2
David Seych and Friedrich Gothrob: The Complex Factors Behind New Inventions
David was already in debt because of his friend Lucien's forged bills in Paris, weighing him down. On the way to meet lawyer Bertie Grau, he absentmindedly chewed on a nettle that had been soaked in water in the factory. On the way back from talking to the lawyer, he suddenly felt that there was a ball in the gap between his teeth, so he took it out and put it on his hand, and found that "that small piece of paste was stronger than the various pulps that he had tried to make before." The main disadvantage of using plants to make pulp is that it is not elastic, for example, paper made of hay is particularly brittle, almost metallic, and makes a metallic sound in the hand. A serendipitous discovery like his is only encountered by a man who boldly explores the laws of nature." "I'm going to replace this unconscious chewing with machines and chemicals." He said to himself.
While Balzac was writing the final part of Disillusionment, friedrich Gottlob Keller, a textile and bookbinder, compiled in Saxon a notebook from 1841 that he had been writing, with notes on all his technological innovations. He hoped to get some profitable inventions through these notes. One of the ideas is to "make paper from wood fibers produced by grinding". Decades later, Keller described his success in his autobiography, and after a series of failed attempts to obtain wood fibers chemically, he recalled that when he was a child, he would properly polish cherry cores and make necklaces, and the wood fibers separated from the polishing would be dried and turned into small flakes. This memory reminded Keller of the idea that wood could be broken down into fibers by adding water while grinding. Keller records the time when he produced the first piece of wood pulp paper from ordinary whetstone in his factory: November 1843. In the summer, balzac's disillusionment, the third book, The Inventor's Ordeal, was serialized in the Parisian magazines L'tat and Le Parisien.
Accidental discovery was a common theme of 19th-century inventor anecdotes. The inventions of david Seych and Friedrich Gothrob Keller both found inspiration from history. Both have caught a thread that has run through the literature on papermaking technology since the second half of the 18th century, namely the search for plant-based raw materials. People at that time did not ignore wood and nettles. In his Attempts and Cases of Making Paper of the Same Quality Without Rags or Reducing Additives, Jacob Christian Schaeffer examines in detail the possibility of using a variety of woods. By the 19th century, when the use of plant-based raw paper became more and more urgent, the shift from intuitive, experimental concepts to economic viability was driven by several factors.
First, these ideas are carried out in reflection closer to science and procedure. Casually chewing on a plant, the flashes of childhood memories—these may sound like very small-probability individual events. But in fact, behind these inspirations is the high-speed technological reflection mechanism, which is represented in Germany by the General Technology Newspaper, the Comprehensive Technology Core newspaper and the Polytechnische Journal. David Secha was able to come up with his methods thanks to the theoretical knowledge he had learned in Paris and the technical knowledge of the Dido Press. Keller's inspiration was deeply rooted in his extensive reading of comprehensive technical journals. People are always looking for alternatives to costly consumer goods and raw materials. As mechanization and industrialization continue to advance, these studies have always been linked to the goal of achieving cheap mass production. The basic idea of the Keller process – the addition of water at the same time as grinding to extract pulp from wood fibres, rather than just adding wood chips – was born in this context.
Most importantly, however, the impetus for innovation in papermaking raw materials is stronger. In the 18th century, the shortage of rags —another manifestation of increased demand for paper — could be mitigated by relaxing the rules and regulations for rag trading and acquiring concessions. But in the 19th century it was different. With the technological advancement of paper machines and printing presses, coupled with the growing demand for paper in the press, the shortage of raw materials has intensified.
Stills from the movie "The Genius Catcher"
Balzac wrote articles for the newspaper of Mile de Girardin around 1830. After Girardin founded La Presse in 1836, Balzac was also a contributor. Like Le Siècle, a daily newspaper founded by Armand Dutacq in the same year, The Zeitung was also a strategy of taking a small profit and selling more. At that time, the booking price of French newspapers was usually 80 francs per copy, while the two new newspapers, Le Monde and Le Zeitung, cost only 40 francs. They do this to attract new audiences, expand the sales market, and make up for the loss of the price reduction through the increase in sales volume. At the same time, they also rely on advertising businesses and new strategies to ensure audience loyalty. Girardin's basic philosophy is to combine novelty and narrative, that is, to process news through narrative, thereby increasing the value of information. He introduced literary, narrative, and entertaining forms into the politically centered medium of the press, replacing the traditionally dominant rhetorical and polemical argumentative essays. His most famous innovation was the creation of the "serial novel". This form soon caused a great sensation, not only because of the first year of the serialization of Balzac's novel La Vieille Fille (Old Girl), but also for some short essays that reflected the daily life of readers. The innovations of both newspapers were very successful at the time. The Newspaper soon sold more than 10,000 copies, and in 1842 the Circulation of the Century reached 35,000 copies. This is the background of the era when "Disillusionment" came out.
Balzac once wrote: "All the great fruits of industry and knowledge advance at an extremely slow speed and imperceptible accumulation, just as geological motion or other natural processes." In order to be perfect, writing—and perhaps language—must be tested as much as printing and papermaking. "In this analogy of technological progress and natural development, there is actually the recognition that invention is not something that happens overnight, but that it may happen over a longer period of time. One reason for this is that the idea of process technology can only be realized if contracts, patents, and other economic and cultural factors are relatively mature. David Seych and Friedrich Gothrob Keller are similar in this regard, both hoping to apply the invention to actual production without the necessary capital and mature infrastructure. The result will be the case with Louis Nicolas Robert and his paper machine: the inventor has no control over his invention.
In the case of Keller, heidenheim papermaker Heinrich Voelter took his patent, and Heinrich, along with local engineer Johann Matth us Voith, developed an industrial-grade wood grinder and a refining device for "refining" the ground wood after several initial failures. Wood pulp was originally an additive to rags and was used as an additive, rather than as an alternative material in the usual sense. From the idea of Keller to the realization of the wood grinding process, there was a gap of about 25 years. The 1867 World's Fair in Paris witnessed a breakthrough in wood pulp technology in the international paper industry.
3
The revolution in raw materials for papermaking and the transformation of geographical centers
This is the first step, but it has not revolutionized the raw material base of paper. Because paper made only of pure wood pulp is easy to become brittle, it will quickly turn yellow under the action of light. Therefore, when producing finer paper, it is also necessary to use rags as a stabilizer. It was not until the 1880s that this function of rags was replaced by cellulose, a substance that was also extracted from wood. Cellulose is a product of the rise of chemistry. Since the end of the 18th century, people have expanded the raw material base for paper production by bleaching the rags with chlorine and provided new impetus for the search for alternative materials. The story of Balzac's fictional inventor David Seych is also true history. He was the first inspiration for plant experiments from a chemist during the French Revolution. The occasional breakthrough from nettle prompted him to constantly try to achieve what he had accidentally created with physical force by chemical methods. This reflects the fact that with the introduction of the paper machine, chemists also joined the ranks of engineers and mechanical technicians.
In 1838, the French chemist Anselme Payen detected cellulose in wood. Since then, journals such as the Polytechnischen Journal have continued to document new experiments and processes for the production of cellulose for papermaking. Since the 1880s, the rapidly developing chemical pulp industry has further replenished raw materials, and a large number of pulp mills have successfully eliminated straw as an alternative raw material. Paper made of rags continued to circulate, but since then, the combination of mechanical and chemical pulp and the use of steam (as a power rather than a heat source) have characterized the large-scale industrial production of paper. High-quality chemical pulp replaces rags added to mechanical pulp to produce higher quality paper.
Stills from the movie The Washington Post
As rags ceased to be important, the paper industry gradually separated from its old partner, the weaving mill, and its descendants, the textile industry. In 1867, the year of the Paris World's Fair, the German Journal of Integrated Technology published an excerpt from Anselm Payne's paper "On the Structure and Chemical Composition of Wood Fibers" (Ueber die Strulur und die chemische Confitution der Holzfaser), concluding with a description of the emerging industry of cellulose production: "Even from a forestry point of view, This new industry is also of great interest as it opens up new sales channels for the products offered by conifer cultivation. "In fact, the forest replaced the rag trader as the new supplier of raw materials for papermaking.
From a forestry economic point of view, the paper industry fills the gap left by the withdrawal of traditional timber buyers from the market. In the 19th century, coal replaced wood in the fuels of the smelting industry and general industry, while in the construction industry, steel was increasingly used instead of wood. Thus, at this historic moment when the paper industry is making demand, forests have become a source of raw materials that can be used for papermaking and have facilitated the transition from papermaking to industrial production. Increasingly powerful large-scale machinery can be combined with ever-improving methods for extracting chemical raw materials. The new scale of production multiplies the demand for energy and capital, requires sound logistics to transport raw materials and finished products, and combines profitability and scale of production at a higher level. As paper production readjusted, a shift in geographic center came with it. In places with high population densities, it is easiest to find raw materials from rags to make paper.
As mechanical and chemical pulp become raw materials for papermaking, sparsely populated but densely wooded areas such as North America and Northern Europe are becoming increasingly important. France, the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, the traditional European papermaking countries that were still in the leading position when the paper machine began to start in 1800, began to take a back seat in the world. From its Chinese and Arab origins all the way to the period of mechanization and industrialization, the dependence of papermaking on water did not change, it promoted the transformation of the geographical center. Although the importance of water as a power source has declined, the large supply of water remains indispensable for industrial production. The abundant forest resources of Northern Europe and North America, combined with abundant water resources, have contributed to the rise of these regions in the world paper industry. As early as pre-industrial times, papermaking was not an idyllic picture: the rags inside the paper mill stinked and the polluted water flowed outside the factory. With the development of industrialization and the production of mechanical pulp and chemical pulp, water consumption and pollution increased. Chemical residues from paper mills are discharged into the natural environment along with wastewater.
It was not until the last 30 years of the 19th century that the old European paper industry was revolutionized due to changes in the raw material base. From the perspective of papermaking history, the era we live in did not start from paper machines and high-speed printing machines, only after the supply of raw materials is not limited, mechanized papermaking that began in the late 18th century can fully realize its potential, and paper has become a large-scale production and ubiquitous industrial product. Although the supply of paper will still be limited by economic or political factors, such as the wartime and post-war shortage economies, as was the case in the Thirty Years' War, in principle, the cultivation of renewable raw materials can meet the growing demand for paper in industrial society. Around 1800, the per capita paper consumption in Germany was only 0.5 kg. By 1873, that number had grown to 2.5 kilograms. But this four-fold increase is only a prelude. In the last quarter of the 19th century, after the expansion of the range of raw materials for papermaking, the per capita consumption of paper jumped from 13 kg to 18 kg.
Stills from the movie "The Genius Catcher"
4
Zola, the French "Little Daily" and the Dreyfus affair
In the second installment of Disillusionment, published in 1839, Balzac fictionalized a newspaper that the journalist Rossdo called the Notre Petit Journal, and Lucian de Luppenpore caused a stir with the articles in the supplement. After Balzac's death, the newspaper named after him appeared, le Petit Journal, which represented France's transition to the era of mass media. Founded in 1863, the Little Daily emphasized its "apolitical character" in order to avoid paying taxes on political newspapers. As you can see from the name, The Little Daily is different from those "big" and exquisite media. Its "small" is reflected not only in the affordable price, but also in the halving of the page specifications. This newspaper only took 5 students, that is, 1 Su, to create the so-called "One Su Media", which is the French version of the British "Penny Newspaper".
Social gossip (faits divers) occupies an important place in the Small Daily. Like Dickens's London, journalists shuttled through the big city in search of accidents, suicides, unexplained deaths and crimes. As early as "Donkey Skin", Balzac described social anecdotes as a challenge to literature: "May I ask you if in the vast sea of literature you can find a book as talented as this little news: 'Yesterday at four o'clock in the afternoon, a young woman committed suicide from the height of the Bridge of Art into the Seine. 'In the face of this Parisian style of simplicity, all tragedies and novels are eclipsed..." From September 1869 to mid-January 1879, a series of reports on the murder of a family of eight, from the capture of the murderer to the execution, increased the circulation of the Little Daily from 357,000 to 594,000 in just a few months. Considering the production capacity of the daily newspaper, such a circulation will be possible only when both the printing press and the paper production reach a new level of technology. The Emile de Girardin, who worked with Balzac, was one of the key figures in the French press from the July Revolution to the Second French Empire to the French Third Republic. The improvement of printing speed can help him realize the concept of small profits and quick sales of newspapers.
His partner in the engineering world is Hippolyte Augufe Marinoni. In 1848, he supplied The News for Girardin with a printing press that quadrupled its daily output. Soon after, he saw Jacob Worms, an immigrant from Germany, build the first rotary printing press at a Paris printing house. The rotary printing press was also built for The News, but was not used on a large scale at the time due to political restrictions. Drawing on Worms' suggestions and the British mechanical techniques he devoted his life to, Marinoni developed a French version of the rotary printing press for the Little Daily. Eventually, William Bullock of the United States perfected the rotary press to the point of full automation. The principle of Gutenberg printing is planar pressure plane, and Koenig's rapid printing is to use cylinder to plane, and now, the realization of cylinder to cylinder printing means a qualitative leap. The flexibility of paper is the prerequisite for achieving this leap forward, which is not only reflected in the combination of web paper and printing press produced by paper machines, but also in the printing process. In the process of popularization of rotary printing presses, in terms of printing patterns, gypsum casting was replaced by paper-type cast lead plates. The paper supply and cutting equipment after the paper is printed are also integrated around the counter-rotating drum of the press.
The Brockhouse Encyclopedia of 1894 described the independent continuity of the operation of these new machines: "When the ordinary high-speed printing press works, each sheet of paper must be fed separately, so the four-speed, eight-speed high-speed printing press requires a lot of manpower, and after a long period of time, people began to wonder whether it was possible to automatically feed the machine, and then after each piece of paper was printed on both sides by means of a curved printing plate around the cylinder (cast lead plate), Cutting machines cut into a specified format and then folded or tiled, resulting in a significant increase in productivity (up to 20 000 sheets per hour). ”
Like Koenig's high-speed printing press in 1810, the British Newspaper Of Times in 1856 was the first customer to use a rotary press. It can be seen that periodical media and printing and papermaking technology innovation are closely related. Rotary presses are perfectly matched to the increased yield of papermaking as it moves away from raw material constraints. The combination of the two fits perfectly with the expanding newspaper industry.
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According to journalism, the innovation of the union of paper and the printing press has brought benefits in four respects, which are precisely the four elements that constitute the medium of the newspaper: periodicity, that is, the reliability and frequency of regular publication; timeliness, which depends not only on the speed at which the telegraph office transmits information, but also on the speed of printing; universality, that is, the unspecific coverage of different objects through the dissolution of boundaries and internal differences in form; and openness, that is, non-exclusivity and accessibility to the public. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the daily newspaper did not yet need to compete with radio and television, it was able to rise to become the core mass media of industrial modernity, thanks first and foremost to low prices and high circulation. Without the resulting social expansion of newspaper consumption, timeliness, periodicity, and universality would be greatly reduced.
Compared with the newspapers of the 17th and 18th centuries, a new medium emerged. With the industrialization of paper production and the removal of raw material restrictions, newspaper publishing has also promoted the synchronous circulation of unbound paper. These newspapers rush into society every day and then into the realm of non-circulation. It's a bit like the paper telegrams of the Telegraph Office, where their material form disappears once the editors re-edit them into newspaper reports. There was a popular joke in the 19th century: a newspaper in the morning is toilet paper in the evening. The joke contains the idea that with the rise of periodical media, the proportion of paper that has not survived has grown exponentially in the large amount of paper available to the masses. Even if libraries and archives had bound newspapers into annuals and stored them, they had not mitigated the mass disappearance of such paper. The constant disappearance of newsprint is the opposite of intermittent influences.
Newsprint was ubiquitous in 19th-century comics, and in 19th-century novels many newspaper readers and journalists appeared, and whistleblower reports preserved in police archives recorded newspaper readers talking about social anecdotes, political news, and editorials. These reflect the continuous supply of newsprint to the social organism every day.
The Little Daily is a model of the "Iron Triangle" of the paper industry, printing technology and periodical media. It started out in the four-page format of the "big" newspaper, but instead of adopting the standard dimensions of 43 cm × 60 cm, it was halved to 43 cm × 30 cm. However, the concept of "small" and light tabloid news is not limited to small physical formats. In 1873, Emile de Girardin began to serve as president of the newspaper management company until his death in 1881. In 1882, Hippdyte Aagufe Marinoni, a key technical figure in the press, took his place. At the 1889 Paris World's Fair, Marinoni showed off his new rotary press. This press can double-sided print, cut and finally fold into newspapers of various sizes of webs. Beginning in 1890, thanks to the abolition of the paper tax in 1886 and the removal of restrictions on papermaking materials, the Little Daily newspaper switched to a larger section.
In 1890, the circulation of the newspaper exceeded one million copies, and an eight-page supplement was added, published weekly, and priced at the same price as the regular edition for only 5 students. With its coloured images in the pictorials, the Little Daily became one of the top news agencies in the European mass media. It was one of the main microphones for the technological progress of the French Third Republic, a propagandist for telegraphs, phonographs, telephones, cars and the Tour de France, as well as a loudspeaker for nationalism. Perhaps at first its emergence was "non-political", but from the end of the 19th century it has undoubtedly become a political force.
Newspapers have nurtured new news material, scandals and sensational events. It featured all sorts of pictures: bombings and railroad accidents, everyday life in the colonies, portraits of senior generals, photographs of state visits, circus tourists injured by lion attacks. On January 13, 1898, Mile Zola wrote with the book "I Accuse...!" J'accuse!) published an open letter to the President of the Republic, Félix Faure, on the front page of the L'Aurore newspaper. At this time, the Little Daily became the anti-Dreyfus mouthpiece. The Dreyfus Affair was not just a national event, it was also one of the first modern media warfares. Personal feuds between Hippolyte Auguste Marinoni and Georges Clemenceau, then editor of Aurora, were also embroiled in the news war. That striking title is what Clemenceau added. As a result of Zola's article, the circulation of the Aurora newspaper increased from the usual 20,000 or 30,000 copies to more than 300,000 copies. But the Little Daily, which fights with it, has a circulation of one million copies. And Le Petit Parisien, France's second-largest popular newspaper, sided with Dreyfus with its million-share circulation.
Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was a French-Jewish officer who was misjudged as treason in 1898, leading to the Dreyfus Affair.
The minor daily newspaper supplement published a series of images of the Dreyfus incident, the most famous of which was the cover image of Dreyfus stripped of his rank and broken saber on January 13, 1895. The Little Daily's anti-Dreyfus campaign did not include more than an anti-Semitic campaign against Dreyfus, it also launched a campaign against Emile Zola, calling him "the protagonist of an anti-patriotic scandal" that also permeated his literary work. In February 1898, the army tried Zola, and the Little Daily newspaper reported on it under the title "Zola Incident". In the spring of 1898, the Little Daily itself became part of the incident. In particular, on May 23, the day Emile Zola appeared in court at Versailles, editor-in-chief Ernef Judet published a defamatory biography of Zola's father, Fran ois Zola. In this article, Emile Zola's father is described as a thief and a parasite. This attempt to counter Zola's political appeal by defaming an element of his private life not only led to Zola's accusations against the Edmois, Marinoni, and Judai, but also led Zola to publish a series of articles about his father in the Aurora newspaper under the title "François Zola". In novels such as Thérése Raquin, Zola inherits Balzac's mantle and brings the world of real society into the world of fiction. Now he writes for the newspaper, defending his father's honor and avenging the Little Daily and its slander. He told the reader unequivocally that he had not read the newspaper since he left France after the end of the Versailles Trials on 18 July 1898 and would never read it again.
Excerpt/Liu Yaguang
Editor/Yaguang Liu
Proofreading/Wu Xingfa