How is paper made for kids

Trees are the most common ingredient for paper these days, but people have been taking notes and creating artworks for a very long time using lots of other kinds of surfaces and materials. Humans painted pictures on cave walls during the Ice Age.

The oldest known drawing, found on a small rock in South Africa, was made 73, years ago. Written language came a long time later. The Sumerians , in what is now Iraq, and the Egyptians used pictures in the first written languages more than 5, years ago. These people etched cuneiform and hieroglyph pictures that formed their languages into rock.

They also wrote on slabs of wet clay, using a pen or brush made from a reed. Sometimes they baked these slabs hard in ovens to preserve them. Ancient Egyptian manuscript written and drawn on papyrus, dating to B. British Museum The Egyptians pioneered the first paper. Papyrus came from a foot-tall 4. They cut the stalk into thin strips, pressed them together and dried them into the long rolls you can now see preserved in museums. They wrote in ink, which didn't smudge or blur on this new paper.

Papyrus made it easy to carry their writing with them in rolled up scrolls - much easier than carting around heavy clay tablets and rocks. Wood tablets covered in beeswax became a popular writing material in Greece, Rome and Egypt. Children used them in school as you might use notebooks today. Heating the wax made it easy to erase the writing and reuse the tablets.

Wax writing tablets from a Greek school 'notebook' used around 2, years ago. British Library The Romans took the next step, making books with papyrus pages. Special manuscripts used pages made of treated calf skin.

In China, ancient writing materials included bone, bronze and wood. But then, a little more than 2, years ago, the Chinese invented a different kind of paper. Early on, it was made from the hemp plant , washed and soaked in water until it was soft. Then it was beaten into a gooey pulp with a wooden mallet and smoothed into a flat frame to dry.

It took Europeans another years to finally start making paper. They cut up, soaked and treated linen and cotton rags. When you showed the picture of a finished paper roll, it gave me an idea. Companies can reuse their cores by using a hydraulic stripper so that they can save on manufacturing costs.

Your email address will not be published. How is Paper Made From Trees? Related posts. Thanks for your feedback Vijayalakshmi, We will try to incorporate more pictures in the article. Excuse me kids are smart to know that paper is made by trees. This has helped my friend THomas A lot with his explaination homework.

This helped me with my homework. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. People still make paper from cotton , linen and hemp for special purposes. Writing started long before the invention of paper. People wrote on many kinds of material. They wrote on cloth, on the stone walls and on wood. In Mesopotamia the Sumerians wrote on clay tablets, many of which have survived today. In Europe, people wrote on vellum.

Many centuries ago — as early as the 3rd millennium BC that's over BC — people in Egypt made a kind of paper from the papyrus plant. This is where the word 'paper' comes from. The people of Greece and Rome learned to do this too. The Romans wrote on parchment made from animal skin , on waxed tablets and on wood see Vindolanda. They had previously used bamboo and silk.

The material used in this ancient paper included cotton rags , hemp, various plant fibres and old fish nets. The oldest existing paper with writing on it was found in the ruins of a watchtower in the Great Wall of China. It dates to about AD. Paper-making was regarded by the Chinese as so valuable that they kept it secret as long as they could. People in Japan learned how to make paper with fibres of the mulberry tree, around AD. This is called Japanese paper or Washi. An opportunity occurred after The Battle of Talas in Then an Arab army captured soldiers of the Chinese.

There were some paper makers among the captured soldiers. From them, paper-making spread throughout the Islamic world. In , a paper mill was built at Samarkand. People learned to use linen as paper raw material and to use starch made from flour as an additive. The Italians used hemp and linen rags. In the first Italian paper mill was built at Fabriano and, until the 14 century, Italy was a paper supplier in Europe.

In the first watermark was introduced in Bologna.