ShmoopTube

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By the 1200's papermaking had hit the european scene and it had a little

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[a faced piece of paper receiving a makeover] makeover along the way come on who wouldn't freshen up its a long trip

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from China to Europe while Arab cultures had first used water powers hammers to

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smash the cloth fibers in Europe the name of the game with paper mills these [paper mill with a flying fairy]

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were like pre-industrial factories that relied on water power and just a little

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bit of pixie dust this early water powered process was crazy slow and

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complicated but it was still efficient enough to make the price of paper in [graph showing drop of price in paper]

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Europe drop by about 400 percent so the process was nothing to sniff at

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especially because the whole thing smelled kind of bad today we all know

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that paper comes from trees not scraps of cloth but a medieval European would [a laughing medieval european at a present day man]

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have laughed us out of town if we told them that so when did the change occur

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well in the 1840s a German named FG Keller figured out how to turn wood

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chips into paper pulp which is kind of like a tree smoothie warning do not try [wood being placed into a woodchipper]

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ordering this at the juice shop seriously really learn from our mistakes when

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the 1890s they started using chemicals to break the wood down into pulp

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this made the whole process even faster once we could reliably turn trees into [a papermill factory]

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paper a whole new era of cheap printing came into being and a whole new era of

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deforestation when Lorax would not call any of this progress still paper was the

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big boss of pre electric communication there were basically two ways to

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[two diverging paths on a country road] communicate in the pre-modern world talk to someone or write something down and

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shockingly enough writing something down was only a possibility if there was

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something on which to write how could medieval people send long-distance [a monk writing on his own hand]

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messages without paper writing on their own hands may have been good for notes

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to self but folks would have had to chop off a hand to send that note to someone

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else and we can't think of any message that's quite that important okay so what [monk throwing a meat cleaver]

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did all this cheap paper mean well for one thing it meant that it was possible

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for writings to be copied and distributed much more easily than ever

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before and as more people started reading the writing society got a

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facelift some scholars have even claimed that paper [teacher pointing at the chalkboard]

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encouraged a new spirit of religious reform more and more people in Europe

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were soon able to read the Bible for themselves

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[A man giving a speech] and they started saying hey you Catholic priests they're kind of fudging on some

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things next thing Europe knew it had the

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Protestant revolution on its hand and some may think that there's nothing more

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boring than watching paper you know be paper but back in the day paper [piece of paper being lit on fire]

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ignited human thought in ways that forever changed who we are has it been

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worth the sacrifice of so many trees maybe maybe not but at least the trees

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have paper cuts as revenge [a tree laughing]

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