Once the bark was gathered, Shen Bing asked the soldiers to chop it into pieces.
I used a short ax and put it on the sawn log section to chop, just like chopping dumpling fillings.
The soldiers thought this was to practice their strength, so they all enjoyed the chopping.
It wasn't until Shen Bing put all the chopped bark into large wooden barrels and soaked it in lime water that they discovered that this was not the case.
Wei Wei asked curiously:
"Captain, these barks..."
Shen Bing couldn't explain clearly either.
Because this was his first time making paper, although he knew the process, he was not sure whether he could succeed, so he only replied:
"I have my own magic."
Shen Bing made up his mind to make up an excuse and get away if he couldn't do it.
Then Shen Bing also threw in some rags, wheat stalks, red vines and fish nets that were also chopped into small pieces and mixed them together.
Then the pulping begins.
The process of pulping is actually similar to the principle of making rattan nails. The purpose is to remove impurities and leave only fibers.
The difference is that rattan armor requires entire fibers that can be used to weave armor, while papermaking requires broken, short, small fibers that can be beaten into pulp.
This process takes the longest time. The ancients had a time-consuming method of pulping:
Chop the straw and other materials into pieces and soak them in gray water, then pat them into lumps on the sunny stone slab.
Then let it withstand natural wind, sun, rain, decay, oxidation and other processes. After a few months, it becomes a pulp, which can be made into papyrus by rubbing it and adding water.
Although this method is convenient and labor-intensive, it takes too long and Shen Bing cannot wait that long.
A faster method is to use high-temperature cooking to disperse the wood fibers instead of clumping together.
This is a bit like a modern pressure cooker. After cooking for a long time, the lean pork, chicken, etc. will be broken into pieces, then mashed and roasted to remove the moisture, and the meat floss will be obtained...
Papermaking also requires this effect, which involves boiling the barkwood fibers that are still clumped into pulp.
Although this time is much faster, it will still take more than ten days.
To be exact, it should be sixteen days.
Steam it for eight days first, then wait until the wood fiber has melted, and then crush it to remove resin, mud, sand and other impurities... This can improve the quality and color of the paper.
Then soak it in lime water and boil it for seven, seven, forty, nine days... Cross out this sentence, it is for alchemy.
Steam and cook day and night for fifteen or six days and it's almost done.
Now move on to the next step: put the cooked ingredients into a stone mortar for pounding rice and mash them.
Then put the mashed stuff in a wooden bucket and add some water depending on the situation. Stir, stir, stir... Stir until it becomes a paste.
This is to allow the short wood fibers to be fully intertwined, so that the paper produced will have a more uniform thickness and more tension.
There should be a bleaching process at this time, which can make the paper look more comfortable.
But Shen Bing’s requirements were not that high, so this step was omitted.
Finally, apply a layer of the paste on the copy board, dry it in the sun or dry it, and then peel it off to become a piece of paper.
Not to mention, Shen Bing was quite nervous when he was showing and removing the paper.
The reason was that he had been thinking about it for so many days and still couldn't come up with any good excuse. Moreover, the soldiers were asked to take turns watching the fire, boiling and washing for so long. It was a bit unreasonable to say that it was just a joke.
If this fails, it will damage his prestige as a captain!
If I had known earlier, I shouldn't have been so high-profile and should have done it secretly. Even if it failed, not many people would know about it.
But Shen Bing was still lucky.
After the paper was dry, peel it off... Although a section was broken in the middle and the paper was still yellow, it still took shape.
This made Shen Bing extremely happy, he finally had paper to use.
Wei Wei looked at the piece of paper in Shen Bing's hand in a daze. He didn't understand the use of this thing that Shen Bing had worked on for so long.
Shen Bing didn't say much. He picked up the pen, dipped it in some ink, and scratched a few strokes on the paper... Shen Bing didn't dare to write. Just kidding, writing calligraphy in front of the ancients wouldn't be just a trick?
Perhaps because the wood fibers are not dense enough, the ink spreads quickly.
Shen Bing secretly thought that the pulp should be thicker next time.
Wei Wei was stunned when he saw this scene:
"Captain, this thing...can actually write?"
Shen Bing replied:
"Otherwise, why do I spend so much time making this thing?"
"You want to try?"
As he spoke, Shen Bing peeled off another piece of paper, this time peeling off the whole piece because of his experience.
Wei Wei took the pen in response, and after a moment's hesitation, he started writing, but what he wrote was Qu Yuan's Nine Songs.
I didn’t expect that the general Wei Wei also had such literary talent.
The writing was like dragons and phoenixes dancing, with strength penetrating the back of the paper, and flexibility and stretch... Shen Bing looked embarrassed and secretly rolled up the paper he was trying to write on and stuffed it into his sleeve.
After a while, Wei Wei put away the pen happily, looked at his work with satisfaction and sighed:
"This thing is very good, just like that silk..."
"No, I think it's better than that silk."
"Especially if this thing is made of tree bark, wouldn't it be..."
Thinking of this, Wei Wei looked at Shen Bing with wide eyes.
Shen Bing nodded, the era of large-scale papermaking is coming.
On the surface, papermaking only makes writing convenient and cheap.
But in fact, it is far from that simple when you look closely. Its emergence is even more important than modern computers.
The reason is that in ancient times, the lack of suitable written carriers greatly restricted the dissemination and learning of information and knowledge.
For example, if a farmer wants to record and disseminate the method of making the Shenbing Waterwheel and the Overturning Wheel in detail, then the text and pictures must be simplified as much as possible.
Because only in this way can the difficulty and time of writing on bamboo slips be reduced.
If there were too many texts and annotations, just making the waterwheel would probably require a bag of bamboo slips.
Even so, Xu Yingna needed dozens of people to work overnight and it would take several months to complete "On Agriculture" and distribute it throughout the country.
Moreover, after simplifying the pictures and texts, there is still another problem: they are difficult to understand.
Even after seeing it, I don’t know what to do, I just know that there is such a thing.
This is also the reason why many people wanted to go to Shen Bing's engineering camp to learn on the spot.
Even if someone learns it and wants to record the preparation method and pass it on to future generations, there will still be a problem of simplification, so it is often lost after being passed down for several generations because the information becomes less and less.
But it's different with paper.
Paper has the advantages of being lightweight, easy to carry, cheap, and capable of recording a large amount of information.
So you can record the production process in detail, as detailed as you want.
After future generations see this method, they can follow it step by step, so they can learn it easily.
Therefore, knowledge and technology can easily complete the spread of space and time... Space refers to the breadth in the same period, and time refers to the time span.
Therefore, papermaking is not just as simple as making a piece of paper, but an information revolution, the first information revolution in human history.