514 FULLING 



other experimenters followed, and then came Matthias Koops of England 

 who, in 1800, first made use of straw, wood, and various other vegetable fibers 

 on a commercial scale. He thus became the founder of industrial paper manu- 

 facture, but went into bankruptcy after three years. 



The step from experimentation and abortive industrialization occurred in 

 Germany, where, in 1840, Friedrich Gottlob Keller, a German weaver of 

 Hainichen, Saxony, obtained a German patent on a wood-grinding machine, 

 undoubtedly based on the experiments of Koops in 1800. 



Contemporaneous with Keller, but working independently, was Charles 

 Fenerty, a Nova Scotian. Experiments which he began in 1839 resulted two 

 years later in a groundwood sheet of paper made from spruce pulp. Halifax 

 thus was the site of the first groundwood paper in America. Fenerty was of 

 the opinion that both hard- and softwoods, especially spruce, fir, and poplar, 

 would be suitable for pulping, but the apathy on the part of Canadian paper- 

 makers precluded further development of his ideas. 



In the United States some of the earliest alleged uses of wood pulp have 

 been doubted by later critics. For instance, there is a claim that basswood 

 bark and wood were employed by Matthew Lyon of Vermont as early as 

 1798. And the Crawford Messenger, of Crawford County, Pennsylvania, 

 October 28, 1830, has repeatedly been referred to as the first American news- 

 paper printed on wood-pulp paper (aspen and lime), but later paper analysis 

 has shown that edition to have been printed on stock manufactured from 

 very short linen rag fiber. 



In 1854 John Beardsley of Buffalo, New York, submitted to a local news- 

 paper three specimens of paper which he had made from basswood. In 1857 

 Platner and Smith, at Lee, Massachusetts, also made some experimental paper 

 from wood. And in 1863 Stanwood and Tower, the mummy defilers, allegedly 

 produced groundwood pulp in their mill at Gardiner, Maine. This seems to be 

 substantiated by definite statements at the time that the Boston Weekly 

 Journal of January 14, 1863, was printed on "paper made of wood, a new 

 process." This has been accepted as the earliest authenticated use of wood 

 pulp in an American newspaper. 



Historically interesting as these earlier short-lived efforts may be, the real 

 beginning of commercial groundwood pulp in the United States was in De- 

 cember, 1866, when two wood-grinding machines, resulting from Keller's 

 pioneer work, were imported from Germany. The following spring they were 

 set up by Albrecht Pagenstecher at Curtisville, now Interlaken, near Stock- 

 bridge, Massachusetts. 



Chemical pulping of wood began in 1852 with Burgess and Watts' English 

 patent on the soda process, using caustic alkali at a high temperature. The 

 process was not well received in England, and the inventors came to the 

 United States, obtained an American patent in 1854, and set up operations 

 on the Schuylkill River, near Philadelphia. After experimenting with straw. 



