Jonathan

Three days later, Jonathan was looking at a pile of old, white looking hemp clothes.

They were not the cheapest things available, but they were optimal, or at least Jonathan hoped they were, for making a useful paper. They had more than a kilogram of material, which would almost certainly be enough.

But now they would need to begin the process of turning the raw material into paper.

First, they needed to figure out how to turn the hemp cloth into useable feedstock for paper making. They wanted small fibres, and if cloth consisted out of anything, it where woven fibres. Those fibres consisted of more fibres, but that was not important right now.

Instead, it was important to figure out how to free the fibres and get them out of the cloth.

One of the advantages of buying older clothes was how cheap it was. A disadvantage were the already woven fibres.

Buying yarn directly would ease some of the steps, but it would also increase the costs.

Besides that, most fabrics were dyed after they were woven into a cloth, which meant that they would get a browner colour in their final paper.

It might still be a cheaper way of doing it, but that was for another time to consider.

“So how do we get the fibres out of the cloth?”, Lignum asked after Jonathan explained all of this: “You have a solution or?”

“Yes, or at least I think I have one. Do you know what is happening when you cut cloth? It tends to disintegrate, especially if you did something horribly wrong, or right, in our case, I assume. So we will cut the cloth to get it fraying as much as possible in the shortest amount of time. We should, of course, consider how difficult it would be for the person doing the job because what we need is mass production. SO it should be easy and repeatable. For a really long time repeatable. Being able to do this for multiple hours without tiring would be the goal, but optimization comes after we managed to get it going in the first place. The next step would be untangling the now freed fibres. Here I am hoping that we can get that done through soaking the cloth, but it might be that we need to bring movement into the water. I am hoping that, if that’s the case, blunt force is enough, but if not, we will need to think. I must remind you that this is an experiment. I am pretty sure that we will make a mistake, or more likely, multiple mistakes, but we cannot change this.”

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They got to work. The scribe suggested that they first should try cutting the cloth in half and see if that would be enough. Everyone agreed and sat down, grumbling to get to work. It would not be easy, or fast, but hopefully, they could get it done by noon.

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Jonathan was bored.

The task everyone was doing right now was not too difficult, as they had access to pretty sharp blades, but it was tiring and this was dangerous. They had sharp blades, and being tired whilst handling such objects was not the smartest idea in the best of times, but it was an especially bad idea if you were doing a monotonous task with those blades.

It increased the chance for mistakes, and mistakes could hurt, maybe even cripple.

Jonathan decided for himself, that if this worked, the blades needed to be not as sharp.

Experimentation would show how blunt they could make the blades, but that was for later.

He grabbed to the place next to him where he put all of the cloth he should prepare and grab air. He searched a bit, blindly, but found nothing. He looked and he was finished. He looked at the others and they had at most three or four pieces left.

He stood up and began preparing the next step, with the help of Timothy, who had finished before him. They filled a container with water and began throwing in the feedstock.

While they were doing this, all others finished their work and helped. After everything was in the container they began to stir the mass of wet cloth.

It worked, but not great. But hitting it had an interesting effect.

It forced the fibres away from each other. Normally that is not a problem, but with the damaged threads it helped tremendously. But the force needed was big and because of the nature of what they were dealing with, that was not a fast process.

They got some help from day labourers, which worked, but automation was certainly needed.

A problem for later, Jonathan decided, he wanted to finally have paper, so that he had a working process to present to the king. His hope was to then give it to other craftsmen so that they would make the optimization happening.

This process took more than two days of work, but he knew that this could be made much faster, and if they managed to industrialize it with for example water power, this could be no problem.

Then they tried the sieves.

First, they had some problems with the technique which needed to be used, but after some tries, and jousting Jonathan’s memory, it worked.

The biggest sieves had problems. They were too big. It could be done, but not with any kind of speed.

The smallest sieves had a different problem. They were so small that the water could not really flow out, which made them useless.

The middle ones worked best.

After that was done they carefully put the feedstock onto the felt pieces, one at the bottom, one at the top, next piece of paper, and began pilling heave things on top. Water flowed out, at the beginning in great amounts, but later only a dribble, until nothing seemed to come out.

Jonathan decided to let it sit until tomorrow and then look at it.