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Yesterday our whole family, except for Nicholas and my Dad, drove up to a mountain near Shasta lake, I don’t know the name of the mountain but, I do know it is somewhere near Shasta Lake because we saw Shasta lake from the top of the mountain. We followed the map coordinates Jonathan sent to us to get to the bottom of the right mountain, then we drove up the gravel road to the top. We had been invited by my brother Jonathan; we weren’t the only ones Jonathan invited. He also invited some of his other friends. We had dinner there, and we ate venison stew, rice, and sweet potatoes. It was a beautiful view when it started to get dark because we could see Redding slowly light up way down below. We drove back down when it started to get dark. All of the other cars followed us till we got to the bottom of the mountain then we each went home our separate ways.

My favorite part was when I saw sunlight descending on the lower hills through the separated clouds.

Here is some videos and pictures my Mom took there:

Ts’ai Lun was born around 50 AD in China. He is the first paper maker that established paper in China.

The story of Ts’ai Lun is that he started work for the imperial Chinese Government, at a very young age, and he was put in charge of inventing new types of weapons. Ts’ai Lun was so good at his job that he rose quickly in the ranks. Because the emperor especially liked his weapons being the best. 

The current way of writing during his time was on either bamboo slabs or silk. The problem with those is that bamboo is not as easy to store because each slab of bamboo is like one page in a book. The problem with silk is that it was expensive to buy.

Around 105 AD he was inspired to make paper because he saw the paper wasps make their nests with paper. The wasps made paper by chewing wood fibers from logs and mixing it with saliva. With that, they formed their nests.

Ts’ai Lun created paper by mixing tree bark, scraps of cloth, scraps of hemp, and old fishing nets. Then he mixed that with water and mashed it into a pulp. Then he strained out all other the water from the pulp to turn it into paper

Here is the process in a video:

Parchment was made out of animal skin. The way the Egyptians would have made it is by shaving off the fur of the animal skin, then they would stretch the skin in the sun under tension. The upside of the parchment is that it preserves longer than the papyrus paper and it would not be easily torn apart because it was made animal skin.

The downside of parchment is that it would curl when there was humidity. The way they would deal with the problem is that they would use wooden book covers with straps to keep the parchment from curling.

The ancients were probably using parchment starting in 500 BC 

Here is an example of high-quality parchment book: 

Here is a funny skit about a monk trying to use a book for the first time:

Without paper, people would not be able to write down what they had learned. They would not be able to have books to keep on a bookshelf because if you had a rock and you spent the time trying to chisel a whole book into a stone, it would take a super long time to chisel and would be too heavy to hold or to send to someone.

The first type of paper was papyrus. Papyrus was made by the Egyptians out of a plant called papyrus. The way they would make papyrus was to cut the plant lengthwise and then they would press the juices out. After that, they would soak the strips in water for a few days. And then they would weave the wet strips together. After weaving, they would press the weave for three days to press out any extra water. Finally, they would let the weave dry in the sun for one day. This would give usable papyrus that you can write on.

I’m amazed at how flat the papyrus paper ends up being. 

Here is a video on making papyrus: