13. Papermaking by 



Hand and by Machine 



The art of making paper by hand, although it is 

 still practiced commercially in England, 134 had 

 reached essentially its final form during Sellers's 

 boyhood years. It was during these years also 

 that papermaking machinery was being devel- 

 oped. While this chapter anticipates the author's 

 visit to England, its emphasis upon the state of the 

 art in the United States prepares the way for the 

 more detailed descriptions of English practice 

 that follow in subsequent chapters. 



John Dickinson (i 782-1869) I35 was, when 

 Sellers visited him in 1832, one of England's 

 foremost papermakers, owning at least four 

 machine paper mills to supply his vast paper 

 warehouse in London. The eldest son of a 

 captain of the Royal Navy, Dickinson had been 

 led to the paper trade through his father's 

 intimate acquaintance with the official stationers 



to the East India Company. Coming into the 

 trade when the Fourdrinier machine was in the 

 early stages of development, Dickinson had 

 conceived of an essentially different approach to 

 the problem of forming paper on a machine. 

 While carrying on a conventional paper business, 

 he developed the cylinder machine that he 

 patented in 1809, two months before his 27th 

 birthday. 



It was Dickinson who, in 1829, produced the 

 first smooth-surfaced "safety paper" for bank- 

 notes, incorporating between laminations bits of 

 I nightly colored silk thread. 



His prominence as a man of affairs was attested 

 to by his election, in 1845, as a fellow of the Royal 

 Society. He was active in business until 1857, 

 when at the age of 75 he retired. 



1 o realize the great value of the continuous 

 sheet of paper making, we have only to glance at the 

 long and tedious hand making process — the number 

 of limes that every single sheet of paper had to be han- 

 dled. Hand labor from the beginning of the process. 

 Before bleaching with chlorine . . . which was not 

 earlier than 181 7, the year Grandfather gave up 

 active business, every single rag had to be inspected 



131 An informative series of illustrations of hand papermaking 

 .is practiced now in an English mill and samples of handmade 

 paper are in Quentin FlORE, "Paper," Industrial Design 

 (November 1958), vol. 5, pp. 32 59. 



135 An obituary is in The Times (London), January 20, 1869. 

 See also The Finn oj John Dickinson and Company Limited (cited 



jte 126 above), 63 pp., and Joan Evans, The Endless Web: 



John Dickinson (s Co., Ltd., iSuj-iyjj (London: Cape, 1955), 

 about 300 pp. 



for on its color depended that of the paper. Even 

 the whitest rags after washing, dusting and cleaning 

 had to go through rotting process before, in the days 

 of the stamps, they could be pounded into pulp. I 

 refer to this to show the first important step was the 

 rag beating engine. After the pulp was made the vat 

 man with his hand mold had to dip sufficient to form 

 the sheets, then to so handle the mold as to drain off 

 sufficient water to leave the pulp of a consistency 

 so that it could, by the coucher, be couched (trans- 

 ferred) to a sheet of woolen felt and covered by another 

 sheet and so on until the pile or post was complete. 

 It would then go into the hands of the lay man whose 

 first duty was its wet pressing (screw press) to remove 

 all surplus water and leave the sheet in a condition 

 so that it could be separated from the felt. He 

 carried it to the drying loft, hung in nests of four or 



102 



