The Making of Paper. In this mill manufacture goes further than in many. Sulphite is made into paper. Not the highest grades, for the refuse of a woollen mill up stream pollutes the water, so that an expensive system of filters would be required if the manufacture of the better papers were attempted.
The first step in the process of paper making is to bring out the rolls of sulphite and throw them into a tank with plenty of water. A central revolving shaft bears heavy arms under water that mix the contents of the tank into a uniform, pulpy consis tency. The motion is continuous and vigorous, giving the tank its name—" the beater." This is the stage in paper making where the character of the product is determined. Usually a definite order limits both quality and quantity. Here colouring is put in. "Fillers" of clay, talc or starch add consistency and weight. "Sizing" of alum and rosin or of animal glue bind the fibres and make the paper take a higher polish. There is a recipe for each paper in the sample book. The beater corresponds to the cook's mixing bowl in the kitchen.
From the beater the pulp is drawn off into the "stock chest," another vat with a slowly moving paddle that keeps the ingre dients thoroughly mixed. This is close to the paper machine, and the liquid contents of it are screened again to take out still smaller impurities, if the paper is required to be free from specks and other small blemishes.
The Mill. The paper mill is long and narrow, with many cylindrical rollers, some covered with revolving bands of cloth that act as carriers—others of bare, shining steel. The fluid pulp that drains through the screens falls on a moving sheet of bronze wire netting, woven so fine that only the water goes through. This netting is like the linen roller towel under the first screens—it is an endless apron, and leads around the lower one of a pair of rollers, bringing to them a thin but continuous layer of wet wood fibre. The upper roller is wrapped with cloth, to which the film of fibres sticks while the wire net turns back clean to the point of begin ning. Its sole duty is to bring the pulp to the first pair of rollers, and there, giving it up, return for more. Pressed into a sheet by the close-set rollers, the fibres cling to each other and give up more water to the absorbent cloth. The sheet may now be called paper. It gains strength and compactness as it is drawn from one set of rollers to another; it ceases to drip water into the trough below. Taut and firm it winds through a maze of a dozen hot rollers, and the last sign of moisture rises in steam. Next it goes through rollers called calendars, whose high pressure gives the paper a polished surface almost equal to their own. Now
knives trim the margins, cut the sheet into required widths, and wind it on wooden spools for market. The machine relinquishes these to men who'weigh and mark the spools and stack them aside.
There is need of but few men in a mill where the machinery is so intelligent. They are needed when the sheet breaks, which occasionally happens. Ordinarily the machine makes pulp into paper in an incredibly short time, and without help or guidance.
There seems to be no waste in this mill. The first screen ings are made into coarse wrapping paper such as hardware and furniture are done up in. Though ugly and spotted, it is fairly strong. The second screenings make a finer grade of paper. The trimmings and broken sheets go back into the beater, and come to the mill again as pulp. Each sort of waste accumulates, waits its turn, and is in time converted into paper that matches it in quality.
There is 'much paper making along our northern border, and much grief that there is a duty that restricts the importation of wood from the ample spruce forests of Canada. The American paper makers would have the duty taken off their wood sup plies and laid on Canadian paper, sulphite, etc. This is "human nature"—self interest.
The mills of northern New York are often highly specialised. Paper mills all about Carthage get their sulphite and ground wood from a single factory. A firm in Watertown makes exclu sively the coloured, super-calendered paper used for the covers of magazines. There is a mill in Carthage which makes nothing but tissue paper. It is a new mill and a growing business, but its daily output already averages seventeen tons of marketable product. Some of the largest mills make only wall papers. Others make in vast quantities the paper on which the great dailies are printed.
Certain woods are adapted to special uses. Our postal cards are all made of the soft yellowish wood of the tulip tree, also known as the tulip poplar or whitewood. Cottonwoods and their relatives—the true poplars—likewise the basswoods or lindens, make excellent paper. Their wood is white and soft and the fibres are small and uniform in size.
A pulp mill or paper plant cannot be shifted from place to place as a sawmill can. It is too elaborate and expensive. The forests about it are soon stripped of suitable material, and then the item of transportation of wood enters the expense account, and adds greatly to the cost of pulp and paper. A Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, mill, having exhausted its own woods, is now making pulp out of spruce that grows on the mountains of Virginia.