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(Munsey’s Magazine)

THE ACCIDENT THAT GAVE US WOOD-PULP PAPER

HOW A MIGHTY MODERN INDUSTRY OWED ITS BEGINNING TO GOTTFRIED KELLER AND A WASP

BY PARKE F. HANLEY

On the day when President Wilson was inaugurated to his second term, this country had its fiftieth anniversary of the introduction of wood-pulp.  Were it not for a series of lucky chances that developed into opportunity, this wood-pulp anniversary might have remained for our children’s children.

Have you ever given thought to the accidentalism of many great discoveries?  The element of haphazard is generally combined with a series of coincidences.  Looking back over the developments that led to gigantic contributions to our civilization, one cannot fail to be struck by the coordination of events.  Apparently there always has been a conspiracy of natural forces to compel men of thought and resourcefulness to add another asset to progress.

Your earliest school readers have been full of these—­for instance, Watt and his steam-kettle, Franklin and his kite.  Now the youngsters are reading that the Wrights derived a fundamental principle of aviation—­the warping-tip—­from the flight of crows.  With the awe comes a disquieting thought.  How far back should we be were it not for these fortuitous circumstances?

Among all the great things that have been given to the world in the last three-quarters of a century, few measure beside the wood-pulp industry.  With its related trades and sciences, it is comprised within the ten great activities of mankind.  In manufacture and distribution, it employs an army matching in size the Russian battle hordes.  Its figures of investment and production are comparable to the debts of the great war.

Yet it remained for a wasp and Gottfried Keller to bring us out of the era of rag paper.  Together, they saved us from a retardation of universal thought.  Therefore, let us consider the agents.

First, the wasp.  She was one of a family of several hundreds, born in the Hartz Mountains in the year 1839.  When death claimed most of her relatives at the end of the season allotted as the life of a wasp, this survivor, a queen wasp, became the foundress of a family of her own.  She built her nest of selected wood-fibers, softened them to a pulp with her saliva, and kneaded them into cells for her larvae.  Her family came forth in due course, and their young wings bore them out into the world.  The nest, having served its purpose, was abandoned to the sun and the rain.

Maeterlinck, who attributes emotions to plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect.  She would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of gravitation to Sir Isaac Newton.