Pulp (paper) - History

History

Using wood to make paper is a fairly recent innovation. Paper making, using cotton and linen fibers, spread to Europe in the 12th century. Medieval historian Lynn White credited the spinning wheel with increasing the supply of rags, which led to cheap paper, which was a factor in the development of printing. By the 1800s, fibre crops such as linen fibres were still the primary material source, and paper was a relatively expensive commodity. The use of wood to make pulp for paper began with the development of mechanical pulping in Germany by F.G. Keller in the 1840s, and by the Canadian inventor Charles Fenerty in Nova Scotia. Chemical processes quickly followed, first with J. Roth's use of sulfurous acid to treat wood, followed by B. Tilghman's U.S. patent on the use of calcium bisulfite, Ca(HSO₃)₂, to pulp wood in 1867. Almost a decade later the first commercial sulfite pulp mill was built in Sweden. It used magnesium as the counter ion and was based on work by Carl Daniel Ekman. By 1900, sulfite pulping had become the dominant means of producing wood pulp, surpassing mechanical pulping methods. The competing chemical pulping process, the sulfate or kraft process was developed by Carl F. Dahl in 1879 and the first kraft mill started (in Sweden) in 1890. The invention of the recovery boiler by G. H. Tomlinson in the early 1930s allowed kraft mills to recycle almost all of their pulping chemicals. This, along with the ability of the kraft process to accept a wider variety of types of wood and produce stronger fibres made the kraft process the dominant pulping process starting in the 1940s.

Global production of wood pulp in 2006 was 175 million tons (160 million tonnes). In the previous year, 63 million tons (57 million tonnes) of market pulp (not made into paper in the same facility) was sold, with Canada being the largest source at 21% of the total, followed by the United States at 16%. Chemical pulp made up 93% of market pulp.