Paper mill
Their propensity to refer to any ancient paper manufacturing center as a "mill", without further specifying its exact power source, has increased the difficulty of identifying the particularly efficient and historically important water-powered type.
[8] Since Ibn Battuta does not mention the use of water-power and such a number of water-mills would be grotesquely high, the passage is generally taken to refer to human or animal force.
[12] Robert I. Burns remains sceptical, given the isolated occurrence of the reference and the prevalence of manual labour in Islamic papermaking elsewhere prior to the 13th century.
[1] Hill notes that paper mills appear in early Christian Catalan documentation from the 1150s, which may imply Islamic origins, but that hard evidence is lacking.
[17] A decree by the Christian king Peter III addresses the establishment of a royal "molendinum", a proper hydraulic mill, in the paper manufacturing center of Xàtiva.
In 1801, however, the drawings were brought to England by John Gamble and passed on to brothers Henry and Sealy Fourdrinier, who financed the engineer Bryan Donkin to construct the machine.
Later developments increased the size and capacity of machines as well as seeking high volume alternative pulp sources from which paper could be reliably produced.
During the year 1907, the Brown Company cut between 30 and 40 million acres of woodlands on their property,[28] which extended from La Tuque, Quebec, Canada to West Palm, Florida.
All our evidence points to non-hydraulic hand production, however, at springs away from rivers which it could pollute.European papermaking differed from its precursors in the mechanization of the process and in the application of water power.
Jean Gimpel, in The Medieval Machine (the English translation of La Revolution Industrielle du Moyen Age), points out that the Chinese and Arabs used only human and animal force.
"Donald Hill has found a reference in al-Biruni in the 11th century to stones "fixed to axles across running water, as in Samarkand with the pounding of flax for paper," a possible exception to the rule.
Hill finds the notice "too brief to enable us to say with certainty" that this was a water-powered triphammer.Thomas Glick warily concludes that "it is assumed but not proved" that Islamic Xàtiva had hydraulic papermills, noting that the pertinent Arabic description was "a press."
My recent conversations with Glick indicate that he now inclines to non-hydraulic Andalusi papermaking.Currently Oriol Valls i Subin't, director of the History of Paper department of the Museos Municipales de Historia in the Instituto Municipal de Historia at Barcelona, has popularized a version of that thesis, in which Christian paper mills multiplied marvelously along the Catalan rivers "from Tarragona to the Pyrenees" from 1113 to 1244.
As Josep Madurell i Marimon shows in detail, these were all in fact cloth fulling mills; textiles were then the basic mechanized industry of the Christian west.Fabriano's claim rests on two charters - a gift of August 1276, and a sale of November 1278, to the new Benedictine congregation of Silvestrine monks at Montefano.
In each, a woman recluse-hermit gives to the monastery her enclosure or "prison" - Latin carcer; misread by Fabriano partisans as a form of Italian cartiera or paper mill!
