Excerpted from New Scientist: The Origin of (almost) Everything, written by Graham Lawton and illustrated by Jennifer Daniel. The 1850s was a golden decade for household cleanliness. It witnessed the ...

And now a page from our “Sunday Morning” Almanac, October 7, 1806, 212 years ago today … a date for an achievement that was anything but singular. For that was the day carbon paper was patented by the ...

From school notebooks and storybooks to newspapers and artwork, paper is a silent hero of everyday life. But have you ever stopped to think where paper actually came from? Long before printers and ...

Every week my column gets printed on paper. Sometimes I use paper to dry my paws. Or clean up after I use the litterbox. I asked my friend Xiuyu Wang who invented paper – and why. He ’s at Washington ...

While the Chinese have been credited with the invention of paper some 2,000 years ago, this improvement takes the humble material to a whole new generation. A research team at the Shanghai Institute ...

Two new books about the history of paper — both tell the same story, right? Well, not really, and, in their differences, the books reveal much about the writing and reading of history. Consider this ...

A French accountant invented the machine that made modern paper possible. His employer sent the design to England behind his back. Two English brothers paid for the development and got their name on ...