Dr. Steven Mann

So we make the stuff in the beater and then we pump it into here, into this chest.

And this is the place where the world's first paper machine was commercially run and built around 1803.

The process is the same.

Paper was invented by Ceylon 105AD.

He's known as the father of papermaking purely because he was the guy who actually wrote down the methodology for making paper.

The vast majority of paper is made from trees.

So you select the right type of tree.

And the first thing you do is to so-called pulp the tree, which is reduce it to individual fibres.

You then throw it into water to disperse the fibres and then put it through a process where you mechanically work on the fibres.

You essentially bash them.

The bars on the roller.

interact with the bars on the bed plate and the fibres get squashed in between.

The fibres get stretched, they get compressed, they get bent and they get twisted and all those actions damage the inside of the fibre and that makes it more flexible.

So the fibres come up onto this continuously moving plastic mesh where the water drains through.

Yeah, it's a sieve conveyor belt.

See, it's nice and shiny because there's lots of water.

The water content's slowly reducing.

When you get to this point here that we call the dry line, and then you've got your sheet of paper that's now 20% fibre, 80% water.

This is where the chemistry comes in and it's the difference between something like a cotton napkin and a cotton piece of paper.

So with a cotton napkin you've actually got tremendously long threads of cotton and you physically weave them together so they're just mechanically held together.