Mondo Knows Facts
Wood pulp made newspapers cheap enough for everyone
Ground timber replaced rag paper in the 1840s with Friedrich Keller's grinding process Paper had long been made from linen and cotton rags, which were scarce and costly. Friedrich Gottlob Keller showed in the 1840s that ground wood could make usable pulp, and chemical treatments later improved it. Cheap paper, together with fast presses, produced mass circulation daily newspapers and the penny dreadful. It sits in Mondo's history collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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Tags: paper, newspapers, printing
Wood pulp made newspapers cheap enough for everyone: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Ground timber replaced rag paper in the 1840s with Friedrich Keller's grinding process. The figure is taken from Library of Congress, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a history fact?
- Yes. It sits on the History shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.