Making Paper Out Of Trees (100% From Scratch)

[Music] paper is a pretty inexpensive commodity that's easily used and just thrown costing as little as half a cent for each sheet of paper today we are only becoming conscious of our paper usage as environmental waste especially as we head further and further into the paperless digital world this makes it hard to imagine that for a significant period of time there wasn't a concept of paper and its invention was a pretty big game changer in history today we're gonna explore that and see how much it would cost to make a sheet of paper starting all the way from scratch with a tree everything we use comes from 8 000 generations of collective innovation and discovery but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the stone age to today that's the question we're exploring each week i try to take the next step forward in human history my name is andy and this is how to make everything beyond the things we attempt to make in our videos another big challenge is just trying to produce the videos themselves and managing all the different footage that comes in countless different formats today's sponsor can help take care of some of that pain of managing and working with video wondershare uni converter can convert over 1 000 different file formats whether video image or audio it can help optimize your exports for youtube instagram and even help you make gifs or gifs it also features a video downloader a screen recorder and its own video editor all those are very useful tools when it comes to making videos in fact i use it to make this ad itself solve all your video conversion needs with a free trial of unit converter today so far our focus has primarily been on the near east with some of the first developments of humanity's discovery of agriculture bronze and iron but now we begin to start to expand our focus a little more to the east as we cross into what is considered the four great inventions of china several of which we'll be covering in our upcoming videos today we start with the invention of paper previously we explored some of the predecessors of paper they used in the near east clay tablets and papyrus both of which offered some challenges with their frailty and expensive production methods in china however a cheaper and more effective solution was found by the production of paper using the inner bark of mulberry trees soon afterwards hemp was added usually from old cloths or fishing nets so let's attempt to recreate their process and invent our own paper for that we'll need to source the fibers to make the paper we'll need to construct an instrument to help break down the fibers and we'll need a frame and loose cloth to use to form the sheets of paper first up we need the mulberry bark and hemp fibers while we're using silkworms earlier this year we discovered some mulberry trees nearby this inside part is the part that eventually breaks down and gets made into paper paper was first made using the mulberry tree we found one we're gonna take a few branches and take it back to the studio and see if we can make some paper hopefully it works no that one's alive oh there we go big boy get the axe don't film this beautiful thought i'd bring the sticks out for a beautiful day at the lake a nice way to make sure that the sticks are going to be ready to be debarked is to soak them so i'm going to throw them in the lake wait a day come back and then start the debarking looks like there's some ice beautiful day let's just throw it out and see if it works make a pocket to slip the sticks into needing a bit more bark we trimmed a large branch and proceeded to cut up and also soak it the rest of the wood will be useful for some of the other tools we'll be needing to make next up some urban harvesting a wild cannabis hemp all right all along the train tracks here we have found a very special crop that we'll be using to make paper okay i think we can just kind of okay [Music] [Music] next to break up the hemp beat it with a stick this helps separate the hard inner core from the stringy outer fibers that we're [Music] after [Music] thoroughly soaked the mulberry branches should be ready to be debarked these sticks smell bad so we're going to peel the bark off and eventually we're going to only want the inner bark and taking the dark bark off and then as you can see this one will separate out get rid of it [Music] okay [Music] follow fibers prepped next comes the laborious process of breaking down the fibers even more we'll start first by boiling everything over a fire meanwhile let's prep the final tools we'll need for making paper using the saw we forged in my last video cut the mulberry branch down into some pieces to form a large mallet we can use to beat and break down the fiber [Music] hammer [Music] [Music] [Music] next the decal basically just need to construct a square frame to hold a piece of cloth the fibers will collect on so let's use my saw to cut some square pieces of lumber so [Music] next to attach them let's try and forge some crude iron nails [Music] hello that's a nail [Music] [Music] it's a good workout [Music] it's pretty solid [Music] for the loose cloth we still have the fabric left over from when kate built a warp weighted loom and wove it the tool is all built back to the boiling fibers adding the soda ash all right now we'll bring that up to a boil all right so now that we've boiled the paper well the soon to be paper in order to break it down i'm gonna use this mallet give it a few good wax so this process is actually going to take a while oh god we have processed this quite a bit already but it could still use a couple more cycles of boiling it giving it one two a couple more smacks and getting all these big chunks out so right now i'm gonna go through and pick out the bigger chunks that didn't get broken down this guy gone this don't want to see ya hey [Music] over the next few days we continue to alternate between boiling and mashing it and picking any large chunks out of it so these are our paper fibers after they've been boiled and they're still a little bit too long so we're going to attempt to chop them up and so they'll process a little easier all right it's kind of working all right so that uh kind of turned out to be a little bit of a mess as the kopesh is historically more of a slashing tool versus chopping and it really you can tell so i think i'm just going to do some handy work here and try to break it up by hand make it a little more manageable [Music] all right so we have a nice mush here of mulberry and hemp fiber next we can add to the water and create a nice slurry that will then pull the screen through loosely woven cloth on the wood frame that should collect a nice even layer of paper onto the screen so then dump it onto the felt here and then stack some rocks on it do press out any water let it dry overnight and by morning should hopefully have some paper [Music] not great what a beautiful piece of paper [Music] so [Music] [Applause] so i think that worked the druckel is not not the greatest uh very crude instrument but it seemed to have done its job straighten the water held up to the frame it was very hard getting it to be kind of attachable and detachable so that makes a little bit more difficult when you have to like remove it and just have crude nails to hold it on but it did work we got a decent sheet of paper see how well it dries under the weight well the paper dries let's get ready to write on them by turning back to my written language i started at the beginning of the year as with any major developing civilization it was important that we achieved the milestone of inventing our own written language and record so replicating the process many languages took i pretended written language was entirely forgotten and built a new one based off a phonetic sound each represented by a pictograph then simplified them to be easier to draw since then i left my language to my discord channel to work on evolving it for me as all written language has through thousands and thousands of years of use now checking back on it several months later i have a new generation of text that has gotten simpler and clearer to write and then the process starts to lose any relation to the original pictographs very similar to the evolution of the modern alphabet i'll let these guys dry overnight and now i can take off the weights and see how they turned out [Music] not so good [Music] okay so after drying overnights we have the completed sheets of paper getting an even consistent thickness to it is definitely a challenge some of them are a little less compacted um but the end result is definitely paper so it's definitely uh an art to be learned but this is definitely a piece of paper definitely succeeded could ride on this pretty satisfying how how well it actually turned out years ago i tried then to do a wood pulp paper and failed miserably before this we kind of explored some of the options of clay tablets and papyrus that had issues of being really difficult to produce and a bit fragile so paper is uh pretty durable and most importantly it's relatively cheap to produce kind of revolutionize things by making it uh cheaper and easier to use however that's after you've kind of already figured out the system and are able to maximize it to make some huge batches to figure it out on our own and build all the tools it took about 28 hours of labor to uh make just a single sheet of paper so using modern minimum wage 228 dollars kind of expensive paper was very useful and was widely used in china after its invention possible uses were both for writing and also as wrapping paper so we're going to use our paper and use the newest generation of our language to write a letter and lauren's gonna wrap some presents for patrons [Music] if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you've enjoyed these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching you

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 895,824

Keywords: HTME, DIY, Fun, Learn, Teach, Maker, History, Science, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, Agriculture, how to make everything, making paper, paper from scratch, making paper from scratch, how paper is made, homemade paper, handmade paper, how to make paper, how to make paper from scratch, hemp paper, hemp paper making, mulberry tree paper making, mulberry tree paper, paper making, paper making process, paper from trees, making paper from trees, brow tidy ox, diy, paper

Id: FwuAGJdEXMQ

Length: 16min 51sec (1011 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020