17th CENTURY

Technical progress continued in the 17th century. Smoothing the sheets by hand, using a creasing knife or ‘blood stone’, was supplemented by the use of a smoothing hammer (similar to a forging hammer). This led to a split in the craft between the tradition-conscious ‘smoothers’ and the modern ‘stampers’ who refused to recognise one another as fully-fledged papermakers. Towards the end of the 17th century, a new and much more efficient beater, called a ‘hollander’, was invented. This supplemented, or even replaced the stamping mill and further divided papermakers into two new camps.

The tremendous upsurge in papermaking during the Reformation in the 16th century, coupled with the introduction of printing with movable type, soon led to a serious shortage of raw materials and to regulations governing the trade in rags. The systematic search for substitute materials met with little immediate success. In the early 18th century straw was certainly used as a raw material but failed to make headway on quality grounds. Only the invention of groundwood pulp by Saxon Keller (1843) and of chemical pulp (first patented in 1854 by Mellier Watt) solved this problem.