10.11

“THERE’S NOTHING TO READ”

Regardless of whether they’re made from paper or electrons, books are critical to civilization. Obviously the guide you’re currently reading makes that case literally, but even books of fiction are vital: they are, after all, the stories humans write about themselves.

Paper is the technology that will turn trees into the thin, flexible, easily burned substance upon which you will commit all your discoveries and achievements to posterity. It’s also good for wiping your bum. Once you’ve got it, printing presses are the machines on which the knowledge of your civilization will be distributed, debated, shared, and stored. They are an absolutely transformative technology, and critical for any civilization that wants its ideas to have wide and affordable distribution, reliable reproduction, and the ability to survive outside the limits of fragile mortal bodies, which we regret to inform you are precisely the kind of bodies you’re stuck with.

10.11.1: PAPER

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

—You (also, Ursula K. Le Guin)

WHAT IT IS

A cheap thing to write on

BEFORE IT WAS INVENTED

People wrote on the skin of animals (aka “parchment”), which meant that if you were alone and wanted to write a book, you first had to either raise or hunt down an animal and then slaughter it, which obviously slowed the creative process down just a little bit

ORIGINALLY INVENTED

2500s BCE (parchment)

300s BCE (paper in China)³³

500s CE (toilet paper in China)

1100s CE (paper in Europe)

PREREQUISITES

fabric or metal (to produce a fine-mesh screen), wood, rags, or other natural fibers, waterwheels (for grinding pulp), sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydroxide (optional, speeds up pulping), pigments (optional, but you’ll probably want ink once you have all this paper lying around; see Section 10.1.1: Charcoal)

HOW TO INVENT

Before you invent paper, you can jot down notes on animal bones, strips of bamboo sewn together into scrolls, parchment (if you’ve got the time and inclination to de-hair skins and stretch them until they’ve dried; see Section 10.8.3), silk (if you’ve domesticated silkworms), wax tablets (you can get the wax from bees, or by boiling fat in water, letting it cool, and using the waxy stuff—”tallow”—that solidifies on top), clay tablets (which you then fire if you want the information to stick around; see Section 10.4.2), or on papyrus (see Section 7.16). But these media are all heavy, awkward, expensive, hard to transport, or some combination of the above. What you really want is something light, convenient, cheap, and ubiquitous enough that even if it doesn’t literally grow on trees, it’s at least made out of their ground-up bodies. What you really want is paper, which gives your civilization not just books, magazines, and newspapers with the printing press but also unlocks playing cards, paper money, toilet paper, paper filters, kites, party hats, and more.

The basics of paper making are pretty simple: you’ll be taking plant fibers, breaking them up, and then re-forming them into thin sheets. Anything with cellulose in it will work, and as all plants that photosynthesize produce cellulose as part of that process, it’s one of the most common organic compounds in the world. One large tree can be transformed into upward of 15,000 sheets of paper, but there are lots of other sources for cellulose: old clothing and rags, for example, will also make great paper, either on their own or as a way to bulk out wood fibers. Heck, you could’ve made paper from the lint you collected from your dryer, back in the future where dryers were a thing!

The first step in making paper is to produce a pulp, which is done by breaking your raw material into small pieces (i.e., turning your wood to chips or tearing your rags into shreds). You can let them soak in water for a few days to get the fibers loosened, before grinding or beating your plant fibers down into, well, a pulp. To speed this process up you can add sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydroxide (see Appendices C.6 and C.8, respectively) to water and simmer your wood chips or rags in there, which chemically separates the plant fibers.* Once you’ve got a watery pulp, stir it to get the fibers moving, then drag a mesh screen up through it—you can make it with either metal or threads (see Section 10.8.4)—which will collect some of the fibers in a flat layer. Flip your screen upside down to remove the pulp, press it to remove the water and force the fibers together, and let it dry. You just made paper! And once you’ve used your paper, you can recycle it by repeating the same process: just tear your paper up again, break it down into fibers, and press a new sheet.

CIVILIZATION PRO TIP: The basic papermaking process (breaking down plant fibers, layering them on a screen, drying them out) hasn’t really changed in the thousands of years since paper was invented. Even though you’re hopelessly stranded in time, the paper you’re making will still share a connection with all other paper on the Earth you left behind, which has a nonzero chance of making you feel at least marginally better!

While paper was invented in China around 300 BCE, the means of its production were kept a closely guarded secret to prevent other civilizations from benefiting from it. By the 500s CE, paper in China had become so routine that people were wiping their bums with it (thanks, toilet paper), but it would still take more than half a millennium before Europeans would learn of its invention, let alone rub it on their dirty, dirty poo bums. It wasn’t until 1857 CE that toilet paper was first produced commercially in the United States (before, any old paper could be used, and tearing pages from books was not uncommon), and it was only in 1890 CE that toilet paper was sold in rolls instead of in stacks. To make going to the bathroom more comfortable for members of your civilization—and to prevent them from resorting to cleaning themselves with wool, rags, leaves, seaweed, animal furs, grass, moss, snow, sand, seashells, corncobs, their own hands, or a communal sponge on a stick*—you’ll want to consider inventing toilet paper ahead of schedule.

10.11.2: PRINTING PRESSES

The preaching of sermons is speaking to a few . . . printing books is talking to the whole world.

—You (also, Daniel Defoe)

WHAT THEY ARE

A way to disseminate information en masse both quickly and cheaply, which is great if you want to get into the dissemination-of-information-en-masse business

BEFORE THEY WERE INVENTED

Books were extremely expensive, so only rich people read them, which meant all the non-rich people who might’ve come up with amazing ideas if only they could metaphorically stand on the shoulders of giants found that they couldn’t,* and so civilization wasn’t becoming nearly as great as it could if it were harnessing the full potential of every human brain within it, which is complete baloney

ORIGINALLY INVENTED

33,000 BCE (stencil paintings of hands)

200 CE (woodblock printing)

1040 CE (moveable type in China)

1440 CE (moveable type in Europe)

1790 CE (rotary press)

PREREQUISITES

pigments (for ink, see Section 10.1.1: Charcoal), paper (for printing), pottery (optional, for building letters), metalworking (to build the press, though this is technically optional and they can be built out of wood), glass (for eyeglasses, so that everyone can read papers, even the farsighted, who might not even realize they’re farsighted until you ask them to read tiny letters on paper held in their hands)

HOW TO INVENT

If you’ve got pigment (which you can get from charcoal in Section 10.1.1), and you’ve got something you can cut (like paper, but even large leaves work), then you can make stencils of words—and therefore mass produce books—in any time period you care to name.* The earliest stencils humans ever made were of their hands, and some of them survived on cave walls into the modern era. If only someone at the time had thought to invent writing, those same ancient humans 35,000 years ago could’ve used stencils to carry their ideas, their beliefs, their hopes, their dreams, their successes, their failures, their stories, and their legends into the modern era, instead of just making a record of what their hands looked like. And in case you’re wondering what human hands looked like 35,000 years ago, we can tell you with absolute certainty: they looked like hands.

We didn’t even need a time machine for that one.

Stencils work okay for printing, but it’s hard for fine shapes (which means your books are going to be large-print), plus you need some form of spray-paint (early humans used their mouths; you can use pigment blown through a tube with a nozzle on the end using the bellows described in Section 10.4.2). To avoid these problems, you may want to skip ahead a few tens of thousands of years to woodblock printing, first invented in China around 200 CE. This involves carving an entire image in reverse onto a single block of wood, which is then coated in ink and pressed onto papers, silks, or anything else you care to print on.* Woodblock printing works great for art, but for language it has several downsides, not the least of which is how hard it is to correct a mistake. Mess up on a single letter and you may have to re-carve your entire page out of a new block of wood! Nobody’s got time for that, and this slow, labor-intensive process means producing a book takes years. And even once you’ve carved out every page for your book, you still face the challenge of storage: a 2.5cm-thick piece of wood means you need over 404,128.224 cubic centimeters of storage space for this book alone!

For writing you’ll probably want to jump ahead straight to moveable type. Here, rather than carving an entire page, you instead produce stamps of individual letters, which you put together on frames to create a stamp for a whole page. Besides solving the problem of storage—you’d only need to hold on to tiny letters, instead of giant wood pages—it also rewrites the economics of printing. Arranging the letters into a page takes minutes, compared to the weeks or months required to carve a page out of wood, so books can be produced more cheaply, and a much greater variety of books could be printed. Before moveable type, most of the texts being printed were religious texts: things that didn’t change and that had a huge, enthusiastic, and sometimes legally mandated audience. After moveable type, anyone (with enough money to pay for it) could print anything, which set off one of the largest cultural changes civilization had seen until the invention of the Internet hundreds of years later.

Moveable type existed in China around 1040 CE, but it really only took off when the technology reached Europe a few centuries later. That was due to another innovation: the alphabet. Chinese writing used not a small set of letters representing sounds like phonetic languages do but rather a large set of characters representing ideas, with more than 60,000 different characters found in a single book. Each system of writing has advantages and disadvantages, but Chinese’s disadvantage when it came to moveable type was significant: it’s a lot cheaper and easier to keep and sort through a set of 26 different characters than it is of 60,000.*

The letters you’ll be printing—your type—can be carved from wood, but this has downsides: wood wears down with regular printing, its grain can sometimes show in the final result, and wood distorts when it absorbs printing ink. Fired clay was used in China and produces strong, durable letters. You can print with either wood or clay letters, but you can also use them as prototypes for new metal type by pressing the letters into either fine sand or a soft metal (copper works well), and then pouring liquid metal into that impression. Printers eventually settled on a standard metal to forge type with: an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony called “type metal” that produces strong, long-lasting letters.*

To typeset, letters are put together into a wooden frame.* Once that’s completed, printing is done by coating them in ink and pressing them onto paper. To mechanize that, and to get equal pressure applied across the large flat surface, you’ll want to invent the screw press. The screw press is simply a giant vertical screw* connected to a large flat surface at its bottom. Handles are attached to the screw at the top, allowing the screw—and therefore the pressing surface—to be raised or lowered by rotating those handles, which transforms that easy rotational force into stronger downward force. They look like this:

Figure 34: A screw press: an apparatus used in both printing and wine-making, though usually not at the same time.

And as a bonus, once you’ve got a screw press (which is ordinarily invented around 100 CE), you can use it for all sorts of other things. It works for pressing wood pulp to remove moisture—useful when making paper—but it can also be used in tastier pursuits to press grapes when making wine, or to press olives when making olive oil. Attach it to something smaller than a large flat pressing surface and you can use it to punch holes in metal too.

An innovation that helped make printing presses as successful as they were was the substitution of water-based ink—typically made from soot, glue, and water—with oil-based ones, usually made from soot, turpentine (which you can get by distilling pine resin), and walnut oil (which you can get by pressing walnuts in that screw press you invented two paragraphs ago). Oil-based inks better adhere to metal type, and they don’t soak into paper as deeply, which prevents words from becoming blurry. To ink your letters, you can dab them with a flattened ball of ink-soaked leather on a stick (the number of dabs controls how much ink your letters get: an improvement over simply dipping the letters in ink, which douses them in the maximum amount of ink every time), but if you’re smart, you’ll invent the ink roller, which is a cylinder that can be rolled over your type to distribute ink.*

The faster your press can operate, the more books you can produce. Multiple people working together can operate a simple press at peak efficiency: typesetters set up pages in advance, one printer coats the letters in ink while another feeds in the paper, while yet another lowers the press onto paper to produce the image. Hey, you just invented the assembly line! Your screw press will initially be powered by hand, but it’s easy enough to adapt them to steam or electrical power when you have that technology. And when you have the engineering to build it, you’ll be able to adjust your press to be a rotary press, an invention that first showed up in 1790 CE. Here, instead of flat type being pressed onto paper, gently curved type is attached to a giant wheel, which rotates onto a strip of paper, pressing letters as it goes.* While a standard printing press requires breaks as each new sheet of paper is inserted, a rotary press can operate indefinitely, as long as there’s enough paper and ink to feed it.

The easiest thing to print at first will be posters: notices that can be “posted” publicly (hence the name), allowing fast, cheap, and accurate mass communication across your civilization. Fold, cut, and bind poster pages together and you’ll produce books, and the more copies of a book that are printed, the more likely that information will survive across time. When printing becomes cheaper, it’ll be possible to bind a smaller number of pages together on a regular basis to produce a disposable book, or “magazine.” These can take the form of scholarly journals that allow scientists to collaborate and share discoveries no matter where they happen to live, or as news and entertainment periodicals to help people to stay informed of current events and celebrity bloopers. Printing will eventually become so cheap, in fact, that it’ll one day be profitable to use the lowest-grade paper to print single-use, disposable documents on a weekly or even daily basis, and these will be your world’s first newspapers.

The printing press will allow your civilization, and the people within it, to become their best selves: entertained, educated, informed, and up-to-date, so it’s really great you thought to invent it just now.