essay on paper invention

The Invention of Paper

Who Invented Paper, and When?

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Try to imagine life without paper. Even in the era of emails and digital books, paper is all around us. Paper is in shopping bags, money, store receipts, cereal boxes, and toilet paper. We use paper in so many ways every day. So, where did this marvelously versatile material come from?

According to ancient Chinese historical sources, a court eunuch named Ts'ai Lun (or Cai Lun) presented the newly-invented paper to the Emperor Hedi of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 105 CE. The historian Fan Hua (398-445 CE) recorded this version of events, but archaeological finds from western China and Tibet suggest that paper was invented centuries earlier.

Samples of even more ancient paper, some of it dating to c. 200 BCE, have been unearthed in the ancient Silk Road cities of Dunhuang and Khotan, and in Tibet. The dry climate in these places allowed the paper to survive for up to 2,000 years without entirely decomposing. Amazingly, some of this paper even has ink marks on it, proving that ink was invented much earlier than historians had supposed.

Writing Materials Before Paper

Of course, people in various places around the world were writing long before the invention of paper. Materials such as bark, silk, wood, and leather functioned in a similar way to paper, although they were either much more expensive or heavier. In China, many early works were recorded on long bamboo strips , which were then bound with leather straps or string into books.

People world-wide also carved very important notations into stone or bone, or pressed stamps into wet clay and then dried or fired the tablets to preserve their words. However, writing (and later printing) required a material that was both cheap and lightweight to become truly ubiquitous. Paper fit the bill perfectly.

Chinese Paper-Making

Early paper-makers in China used hemp fibers, which were soaked in water and pounded with a large wooden mallet. The resulting slurry was then poured over a horizontal mold; loosely-woven cloth stretched over a framework of bamboo allowed the water to drip out the bottom or evaporate, leaving behind a flat sheet of dry hemp-fiber paper.

Over time, paper-makers began to use other materials in their product, including bamboo, mulberry and different types of tree bark. They dyed paper for official records with a yellow substance, the imperial color, which had the added benefit of repelling insects that might have destroyed the paper otherwise.

One of the most common formats for early paper was the scroll. A few long pieces of paper were pasted together to form a strip, which was then wrapped around a wooden roller. The other end of the paper was attached to a thin wooden dowel, with a piece of silk cord in the middle to tie the scroll shut.

The Spread of Paper-Making

From its point of origin in China, the idea and technology of paper-making spread throughout Asia. In the 500s CE, artisans on the Korean Peninsula began to make paper using many of the same materials as Chinese paper-makers. The Koreans also used rice straw and seaweed, expanding the types of fiber available for paper production. This early adoption of paper fueled the Korean innovations in printing, as well. Metal movable type was invented by 1234 CE on the peninsula.

Around 610 CE, according to legend, the Korean Buddhist monk Don-Cho introduced paper-making to the court of Emperor Kotoku in Japan . Paper-making technology also spread west through Tibet and then south into India .

Paper Reaches the Middle East and Europe

In 751 CE, the armies of Tang China and the ever-expanding Arab Abbasid Empire clashed in the Battle of Talas River , in what is now Kyrgyzstan. One of the most interesting repercussions of this Arab victory was that the Abbasids captured Chinese artisans, including master paper-makers like Tou Houan, and took them back to the Middle East.

At that time, the Abbasid Empire stretched from Spain and Portugal in the west through North Africa to Central Asia in the east, so knowledge of this marvelous new material spread far and wide. Before long, cities from Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan ) to Damascus and Cairo had become centers of paper production.

In 1120, the Moors established Europe's first paper mill at Valencia, Spain (then called Xativa). From there, this Chinese invention passed to Italy, Germany, and other parts of Europe. Paper helped spread knowledge, much of which was gleaned from the great Asian culture centers along the Silk Road, that enabled Europe's High Middle Ages.

Manifold Uses

Meanwhile, in East Asia, paper was used for an enormous number of purposes. Combined with varnish, it became beautiful lacquer-ware storage vessels and furniture. In Japan, the walls of homes were often made of rice-paper. Besides paintings and books, paper was made into fans, umbrellas, even highly effective armor. Paper truly is one of the most wonderful Asian inventions of all time.

History of China, "Invention of Paper in China," 2007.

" The Invention of Paper ," Robert C. Williams Paper Museum, Georgia Tech, accessed Dec. 16, 2011.

"Understanding Manuscripts," International Dunhuang Project, accessed Dec. 16, 2011.​

Wei Zhang. The Four Treasures: Inside the Scholar's Studio , San Francisco: Long River Press, 2004.

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History Cooperative

Who Invented Paper? The History of Paper and Paper Making

The invention of paper is attributed to ancient China. Papermaking is traditionally believed to have been invented by Cai Lun, a Chinese eunuch and official during the Eastern Han Dynasty, around 105 CE. Cai Lun’s contribution to papermaking involved the refinement of the process, making it more consistent and practical for widespread use.

This invention had a profound impact on the world as it made written information more accessible, leading to advancements in education, communication, and the preservation of knowledge. Papermaking technology eventually spread to other parts of the world and played a pivotal role in the dissemination of information and culture.

Table of Contents

Who Invented Paper?

Cai Lun, a Chinese eunuch and government official during the Eastern Han Dynasty (around 105 CE), is often credited with inventing a more standardized form of paper. He is known for refining the papermaking process by using a mixture of mulberry tree bark, old fishing nets, and other materials to create a pulp that could be formed into sheets.

READ MORE: A Full Timeline of Chinese Dynasties in Order

Cai Lun’s innovations marked a crucial step in the evolution of paper as a writing and printing medium. However, it’s important to note that papermaking was a gradual process that evolved over time , and Cai Lun’s work represents a significant milestone rather than the sole invention of paper. Different forms of early paper and writing materials were used in various parts of the world before the widespread adoption of paper as we know it today.

Earlier Forms and Uses of Paper-Like Substances

Before the craft heralded by Cai Lun, ancient civilizations had embarked on their quests to document the intangible, inscribing their stories upon a myriad of surfaces, from the rigid constraints of clay tablets to the perishable papyrus of the Egyptians. The predecessor of paper, papyrus, was a medium primarily reserved for the elite and the sacred, given its labor-intensive process and the scarcity of materials. This thirst for a more versatile and accessible medium was, to a remarkable extent, quenched by the advent of paper, transcending boundaries in how knowledge was created, preserved, and shared.

READ MORE: Ancient Egypt Timeline: Predynastic Period Until the Persian Conquest

Recognition and Adaptation of Paper Invention Across the World

Paper, with its boundless potential, did not remain an exclusive secret of the Chinese empire for long. Through the Silk Road, explorations, and conquests, the knowledge of papermaking began to seep into the expansive terrains of the world beyond. The gradual percolation of this technology into the Middle East, and subsequently into the heart of Europe, symbolizes not merely the migration of an invention, but the ushering in of an epoch where ideas could be immortalized and disseminated with hitherto unimagined ease and efficacy.

When Was Paper Invented?

Paper was invented around 105 AD, under the auspices of the Han Dynasty, when Cai Lun unveiled his refined method of papermaking. Although ostensibly novel, Cai Lun’s method was an enhancement of existing knowledge, coalescing diverse practices into a unified, scalable methodology that metamorphosed isolated practices into a wide-reaching industry.

READ MORE: Ancient Chinese Inventions

Spread and Adaptation of Papermaking Technique Through the Centuries

As centuries unfurled, so did the craft of papermaking, intricately intertwining with the fates of empires and the aspirations of scholars, merchants, and artisans. By the 8th century, the technique infiltrated the sophisticated realms of the Islamic world, particularly in places like Samarkand and Baghdad, becoming synonymous with the illustrious academic and artistic achievements of the epoch. This subtle convergence of craft and intellect propelled the methodology westward, where it would eventually anchor in the scientific and cultural environments of Europe.

Notable Milestones in Early Paper Production

The introduction of water-powered paper mills in Spain during the 12th century signified a tangible departure from manual labor, unleashing a cascade of possibilities for mass production and broader accessibility. Likewise, the advent of the printing press in the 15th century intertwined with the availability of paper, propelling an unprecedented proliferation of knowledge, and scribing indelible marks upon the unfolding narrative of humanity.

Historical Documentation and Evidence

Submerging into the reservoirs of historical documents, tangible artifacts narrate the intricate journey of paper through time and space. From the delicately inscribed scrolls safeguarded within the cavernous folds of ancient libraries to the meticulous records of merchants traversing the serpentine trails of the Silk Road, historical documentation enshrines the migration and adaptation of papermaking. Diverse evidence, such as the resilient manuscripts of the Islamic Golden Age and the voluminous tomes of European scholars, not only validate the chronology of the paper’s journey but also offer glimpses into the transformative influence it wielded across varied domains of human endeavor.

The Process of Ancient Papermaking

Early paper creation involved using various organic and natural materials. Unlike the sturdy yet pliable papyrus plant, early Chinese paper incorporated raw materials and resources such as mulberry bark, hemp fibers, worn fishing nets, and old rags. This amalgamation of materials was macerated into a pulp, setting the stage for a process that delicately balanced artistry and practicality, leading to a material that was at once durable, malleable, and elegantly fine.

Techniques and Steps in the Original Paper Production

Initially, the collected materials, enriched by their varied origins, were submerged in water, transforming into a homogenized pulp through a meticulous process of fermentation and maceration. This pulp was then suspended in water and carefully ladled onto a flat, woven surface to form a thin layer. Nature’s own elements, air, and sunlight, caressed this fragile layer, coaxing it gently into a form that was robust yet whisper-thin, ready to cradle the ink and embody the thoughts of countless generations.

READ MORE: Who Invented Water? History of the Water Molecule

Innovations and Variations in Different Regions

There were various adaptations of this creation and each region had its own version. In the Islamic world, for example, craftsmen embraced the abundant flax and linen, diverging from the traditional Chinese materials, yet paralleling the essential techniques. Whereas, in medieval Europe, the introduction of mechanized mills and the adoption of various locally available materials, such as cotton and linen rags, reshaped the craft, tailoring it to their own technological abilities and needs.

READ MORE: Who Invented the Cotton Gin? Eli Whitney and Cotton Gin Impact on America

The Transition to Modern Papermaking

With the European introduction of the paper mill, driven by the inexorable currents of flowing water, the craft began to intertwine with industrialization. As centuries cascaded forward, further innovations, such as the invention of the papermaking machine and the adaptation of wood pulp in the 19th century, symbolized a stark divergence from the manual, artisanal practices of the past, melding the craft into the ever-accelerating pulse of the industrial age.

The Global Spread and Evolution of Papermaking

The knowledge about the techniques of papermaking found their way into civilizations far removed from the rich landscapes of China and Chinese papermakers. The agents of this dissemination were myriad: traders, explorers, and conquerors traversing the sinuous paths of the Silk Road.

Adaptation and Enhancements in the Middle East

When the gentle echo of papermaking reached the vibrant, intellectual arenas of the Middle East, it was embraced, nurtured, and included in their academic and artistic pursuits. The Islamic world, with its inherent reverence for knowledge and script, nurtured and enhanced the craft, introducing new materials and refining techniques to produce finer, more exquisite paper that became a coveted medium for the prolific scholarly and creative outputs of the time.

Introduction and Development in Europe

Europe welcomed paper as a harbinger of connectivity and knowledge dissemination. Paper mills, exploiting the energetic torrents of European rivers, breathed life into an industrial approach to papermaking. As time meandered through the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, the proliferation of paper became synonymous with the dispersion of knowledge, creativity, and the inexorable forward march of innovation and discovery.

The Role of Paper in the Proliferation of Knowledge and Communication

With making paper, knowledge was no longer a fleeting whisper, tethered to the ephemeral. It could now traverse time and space, leaping from the vibrant minds of scholars, artists, and thinkers into the collective consciousness of entire civilizations. From the meticulous scrolls of medieval scribes to the mass-produced pages of enlightenment literature, and further into the hearty newspapers of the modern era, paper became an unassuming yet powerful catalyst, propelling societies into new realms of collective knowledge, awareness, and cultural evolution.

Impact of Paper on Society and Culture

Paper, in its humble existence, fortified the preservation and dissemination of knowledge, allowing the intellectual pursuits of one epoch to whisper wisdom into the ears of subsequent generations, and enabling the perennial flow of understanding that shaped the contours of society and thought through time.

Artistic Expression Through Paper

Beyond mere communication, paper tenderly cradled the artistic soul of humanity, offering a canvas where imaginations danced free and emotions found form. Calligraphy, painting, and origami, these delicate articulations of human creativity, found a welcoming space upon the accommodating expanse of paper.

The Economic Implications of Paper Production

The emergence of paper subtly yet irrevocably altered the economic landscapes of societies. Its pivotal role in facilitating complex bureaucracies, enabling expansive trade networks, and propelling the proliferation of printed material, erected an unseen yet foundational pillar upon which the economic dynamics of civilizations found stability and mobility. Further, the interplay between paper money and economic stratification surfaced, allowing for a nuanced and multifaceted medium of exchange, altering the economic interactions and hierarchies within society.

The Role of Paper in Education and Government

Paper was an unassuming accomplice in the evolution of educational and governmental structures. The educational realm, now enriched with textbooks, research papers, and written examinations, blossomed into a more accessible and structured entity, democratizing knowledge across various strata of society. Meanwhile, governmental machinations, facilitated by the written record, policy documentation, and bureaucratic correspondence, became more intricate and accountable.

The invention of paper is traditionally attributed to ancient China, with Cai Lun often recognized for his significant contributions to the development of papermaking around 105 CE during the Eastern Han Dynasty.

While paper as we know it has evolved and improved over time, Cai Lun’s innovations marked an important milestone in the history of papermaking. However, it’s essential to recognize that papermaking was a gradual process that involved the refinement of techniques and materials over centuries, and various forms of writing materials were used in different parts of the world before paper became the dominant medium for writing and printing.

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Ch. 5 Early Chinese Dynasties

Invention of paper, learning objective.

• Analyze the importance of paper and its invention
• Cai Lun (202 BCE-220 CE), a Chinese official working in the Imperial court during the Han Dynasty, is attributed with the invention of paper.
• A basic process is still followed today that consists of creating felted sheets of fiber suspended in water, then draining the water and allowing the fibers to dry in a thin matted sheet.
• Early paper was used for wrapping and writing, as well as for toilet paper, tea bags, and napkins.
• After the Battle of Talas in 751 CE, during which the Chinese were defeated, two Chinese prisoners are believed to have leaked the secrets to making paper.

bast fibers

Fibrous material from the phloem of a plant, used as fiber in matting, cord, etc.

A material prepared in ancient Egypt from the pithy stem of a water plant, used in sheets throughout the ancient Mediterranean world as a surface for writing or painting.

While the word “paper” is derived from papyrus, the early Egyptian thick writing sheets, it is made quite differently. While papyrus is made from the dried pith of the papyrus plant that has been woven, paper has been disintegrated and reformed.

During the Shang (1600-1050 BCE) and Zhou (1050-250 BCE) dynasties, bone, bamboo, and sometimes silk were used as writing tablets. Cai Lun (202 BCE-220 CE), a Chinese official working in the Imperial court during the Han Dynasty, is attributed with the invention of paper. However, earlier examples have been found, and he may have simply improved upon a known process. Legend states that he was inspired by the nests of paper wasps.

Portrait of Cai Lun. This portrait of Cai Lun depicts the invention of paper.

Cai Lun’s paper was made using mulberry and other bast fibers along with fishnets, old rags, and hemp waste. The bark of the Paper Mulberry and Sandalwood were often used and highly valued during the period. His basic process of creating felted sheets of fiber suspended in water, then draining the water and allowing the fibers to dry in a thin matted sheet is still followed today.

Chinese Hemp Wrapping Paper. These examples of Chinese hemp wrapping paper date from 100 BCE.

Uses of Paper

Paper was often used as a wrapping material. Paper used to wrap bronze mirrors has been dated to the reign of Emperor Wu in the 2nd century BCE. Paper was also used to wrap poisonous medicines. By the 3rd century CE, paper was commonly used for writing, and by 875 CE it was used as toilet paper. During the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE), paper was folded and sewn into tea bags, and used to make paper cups and napkins. During the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE), the world’s first known paper money was produced, and often presented in special paper envelopes.

The Oldest Paper Book. This is the oldest paper book, dating to 256 CE.

Spread of Paper-making to the Islamic World

After the Battle of Talas in 751 CE, during which the Chinese were defeated, two Chinese prisoners are believed to have leaked the secrets to making paper. A paper mill was soon established, and many refinements were made to the process.

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The history of paper

Paper was invented in China before it was introduced in Europe during the late Middle Ages, but no one really knew what happened in between

CHRIS HATZIS Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

What do you get when you take a fresh, green reed, cut it into lengths, lay it out on a flat surface and press it all together? Not a particularly tasty salad - but you may have just invented papyrus, the new vegan alternative to animal-based parchment. But how did we get from Ancient Egyptian scrolls to modern-day office paper? Perhaps our guests today can help us understand.

JONATHAN BLOOM I'm Jonathan Bloom. I am retired as the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and I am soon-to-be retired as the Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

SHEILA BLAIR And I am Sheila Blair and I am also the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College Emerita and soon-to-be retired Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. We should say this the first time from these two universities that we have shared equally two endowed chairs.

JONATHAN BLOOM I was going to say will the real Hamid Bin Khalifa Professor stand up.

CHRIS HATZIS Jonathan and Sheila were both at the University of Melbourne recently to deliver the 2019 Miegunyah Distinguished Visiting Fellowship Lecture on the history of paper. They also found some time to chat with our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.

ANDI HORVATH Welcome to the studios.

SHEILA BLAIR Thank you.

ANDI HORVATH Can I call you Sheila?

SHEILA BLAIR Absolutely.

ANDI HORVATH And Jonathan?

JONATHAN BLOOM Yes, absolutely.

ANDI HORVATH Now, your expertise is broad but one little area of research that I'm fascinated to talk to you about is your research into the history of paper. Now, that must be a tricky one to do because surely the history of paper wasn't written down on paper and therefore it becomes very hard to actually trace. So, tell me about how you got interested in the history of paper first.

JONATHAN BLOOM Well, my background is in the history of Islamic art and I was studying the history of architecture and I kept reading about how people said oh well, there are these plans, that architects use plans and I said if they used the plans, where were they, and none of them survive, and if they used them what were they written on? Nobody could answer that question and so I started looking.

I had had no interest really in the history of paper and I followed the lead and I realised this was a subject that really people hadn't been looking at very much. What we knew was that paper had been invented in China and we knew that paper had been made in Europe from the late Middle Ages but we didn't realise no one had really studied what happened in between. So, what I did was I started looking at what happened to paper between its invention in China and its introduction into Europe and use for printing. That's how I got interested.

SHEILA BLAIR And I work particularly on what's written on that paper. My expertise is the history of calligraphy and writing and what I had never realised until Jonathan started working on the paper support is how much the quality and the size of the paper changes what you can write on it and how quickly you can write and therefore what you write down.

ANDI HORVATH Okay. Let's go back before paper. We had papyrus, which is a reed?

JONATHAN BLOOM Right. The word papyrus is used both for the reed and for the material made from the reed. A lot of our confusion about paper and the history of paper comes from the fact that we use the same word for all these things and our word paper actually comes from the word for papyrus. However, the material paper doesn't come from papyrus, which is entirely different kind of writing material.

What you did was you took the reed and you cut it into lengths - it was fresh and green - and then you sliced into strips like with a vegetable peeler or something, or a very sharp knife, and then you laid the strips on a smooth surface at right angles to each other. Then you pressed it and the sap still in the reed, gummed it all together and made a sheet. Then you pasted these sheets together to make a scroll and then you could write on that.

ANDI HORVATH If we weren't using papyrus, we were using parchment.

SHEILA BLAIR Right. Which is the skin of various animals, particularly sheep in the parts of the world that we work on but it can also be calfskin. It's defined variously. There are problems. First of all, you have to kill the sheep in order to get the parchment, it's heavy, but you can make it anywhere, and that's different from papyrus that comes only from Egypt. Egypt had a monopoly and if you wanted to write on papyrus, which you can only do on a scroll, you were stuck.

ANDI HORVATH Now, who was writing? Surely some people were drawing on it first, weren't they?

SHEILA BLAIR Well, people were writing all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Persians and in China as well, so there's a long history of writing. The problem with all of these materials before paper is that they're hard to move around, they're heavy or they're expensive and also you can't make a book in the sense of a codex that we have that opens. Have you ever tried to tell anyone turn to page 22 of a papyrus scroll? Yeah, you're unrolling, unrolling, unrolling, so they are not very good for the learning purposes.

ANDI HORVATH Yeah. You couldn't do it with a clay tablet either; you'd be flipping clay tablet.

SHEILA BLAIR Yep. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ANDI HORVATH But I do love the fact that they wrote on clay tablets and today we still write on tablets except they're digital.

SHEILA BLAIR Right. With a stylus.

JONATHAN BLOOM We also have - they've found these little books that are notebooks basically, which are made of very thin sheets of wood with a hollow in the middle of them and you filled the hollow with wax and then you would write with a stylus, a sharp instrument, on it. So, if you were let's say composing poetry or your shopping list or something, you would write with the stylus on the wax tablet. It would last long enough for you to remember or to copy it onto something more permanent and then you just used the blunt end of the stylus to smooth it out. It's sort of like your original PalmPilot or something.

ANDI HORVATH Wow, nothing's changed since ancient times, in some ways.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right, right.

ANDI HORVATH Now, what happened between China inventing paper from wood pulp, is that right, and linen?

JONATHAN BLOOM No, no, no. From vegetable fibres or from the - the Chinese used the inner bark of various shrubs that they would cook up and beat up and make into fibre. What happened after that was the Chinese, particularly Chinese Buddhists, took paper from south-eastern China where it had been invented and brought it to other parts of their world. As they were looking to collect Buddhist texts, they moved towards India, so they went around the Himalayas through Central Asia and then down into India, spreading paper with them. Then when they got these texts they would then take them to Japan, to Korea, to Vietnam, so paper was spread throughout East Asia because of Buddhism.

SHEILA BLAIR The reason that Jonathan knows so much about how paper is made is because he actually made it, and this was thanks to me. Because our son came in fifth grade and said I need a science project, mom, and I was immensely involved writing my book on calligraphy and didn't want to get involved so I said go to your father and ask him if he can make some paper. Jonathan, explain how you did it.

JONATHAN BLOOM Well, it was our son's project so we had to choose materials to make it with. So, we went and we used old paper egg cartons, we used old newspaper. We used reeds from the garden. We used…

SHEILA BLAIR Lint from the dryer.

JONATHAN BLOOM …lint from the dryer, complete with dog hair, and we ground it all up in a blender, these things in a blender. The garden reeds had to be cooked first. They made terrible paper, because it took far more work than we were able to do. I wouldn't recommend using a very good blender.

SHEILA BLAIR We bought a special one just for this because I looked in the kitchen and said no [laughs].

ANDI HORVATH Fair enough.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right. Then I made a screen the size of a little picture frame that had wired netting, wire screening on it and then we dipped it in a vat full of this pulp and made it and then we compared all the different papers that we made. It was a great success. I think he won the science fair project.

SHEILA BLAIR He did.

JONATHAN BLOOM He did it all, of course.

ANDI HORVATH He had expert help, though.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right. Advice.

ANDI HORVATH Now, tell us about the gap between China and Europe. It took almost two millennia to get there, from what I read in your book.

JONATHAN BLOOM It's a little bit less than that but what happened was the Chinese had taken paper to Central Asia. In Central Asia, which is very, very dry, when the Buddhists there wanted to make paper they didn't have all these plants, these semi-tropical plants that you had in China and so they learned that you could make paper from other materials such as waste fibres like cotton or linen rags or various other plants, flax or hemp, whatever they had. This was a major achievement.

The Muslims in the late 7th and early 8th century encountered this culture of paper, which had been used not only for religious purposes but we have letters that merchants sent or government documents and stuff. The Muslims at this point had this - just were beginning this enormous empire that stretched from Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean and they desperately needed material on which to write down who owed what, who was due what for government purposes, taxation, whatever.

SHEILA BLAIR Because there are certain advantages that paper has over parchment. Parchment, surprisingly enough, is easy to change. You can get out your little knife and cut away the 10, if your tax rate is 10 percent and change it to five.

ANDI HORVATH So you can Photoshop it?

SHEILA BLAIR Yeah. Whereas paper traditionally that's unsized, or even sized paper, the ink soaks in and you can't change the numbers. Paper is also much lighter, so if you're sending out tax rolls, tax documents from Baghdad all the way to Spain or Central Asia, much easier on a paper document and you can make paper pretty much anywhere that you have flowing water. You don't need a flock of sheep, you don't have to kill them, you don't have to eat all that kebab afterwards because you've just done in your entire sheep population.

ANDI HORVATH Got it.

JONATHAN BLOOM We know for example that by the late 700s paper was being made in Baghdad in Iraq and by 800 we know it's made in Syria and by 850 in Egypt and then by 950 all the way to Morocco and by 1000 it's in Spain, which is - I think I calculated it's something like 300 miles a year, just over the course of two centuries or something, which is absolutely extraordinary for - which shows just how important this new material was.

ANDI HORVATH Now, I get it that it's so important because if we think of our mobile phones, it's our outsourced brain, right. I don't need to remember phone numbers. Back then paper must have been the outsourced brain. You couldn't remember all your tax interactions or costing or accounting; now you had a medium.

SHEILA BLAIR Well, and also for literature. This is the first time we start writing down as opposed to the oral tradition of passing on. You get more uniform versions of things whereas before, things like the Iliad in the classic tradition or the Shahnameh in the Persian tradition could grow or shrink depending on who was reciting them and whether they needed to expand or couldn't remember or needed mnemonic devices and suddenly you start getting more codified versions.

You start getting literary, you start getting books written down, but it's much slower for Muslims to adapt, or adopt paper for writing down the Quran, God's word revealed to the Prophet Mohammed, because of religious restrictions. So, Quran manuscripts continue on parchment much longer than other literary traditions which soon adopt paper.

ANDI HORVATH Surely there was a co-evolution of what you wrote with as well on paper.

JONATHAN BLOOM Absolutely. We think of ink as one kind of thing but in Arabic there are actually two different words for ink, one for the kind of ink that you use on parchment, which is made with metallic salts, and stains the parchment, and the other one, which is carbon black, like lamp black or something, you know, soot, which you use on paper. You could - they also used it on papyrus.

What's interesting is you can see in old documents, you can see that this shift wasn't always understood because sometimes people used the metallic type of ink on paper and it ate through the paper and so you see little holes where the writing is, whereas the carbon wouldn't eat through it, but it didn't work on parchment because it just stayed on the surface and could be easily scraped off.

SHEILA BLAIR Over time, Muslims also learned how to make better and better paper, so paper which had been quite brown in the early period becomes whiter and whiter. It gets bigger and bigger, never bigger than about a metre because you can't pick up the screen evenly; it tilts and then you get an uneven sheet. But when it gets bigger and whiter, this is the period when the Mongols have come in from the east and you get illustrated books, because you've got space to put in beautiful paintings, so you get larger and larger paintings. You can see how the materials change the way that you do literature and also that you do art.

ANDI HORVATH This is like the equivalent of the late 20th century evolution of Google and Web.2 I suppose, to stretch the metaphor a bit. The information age has started. It's now democratised information.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right. We have these stories about libraries in the Middle Ages and for example, the library of the ruler of Spain in the late 900s, just before the year 1000, is said to have a library that had 400,000 books in it. Now, this is an old saw that people repeat over and over again, and 400,000 is such a big number and it's a crazy number, and you say okay, maybe it's inflated by a factor of 10. Let's say he only had 40,000 books; that is still 10 times more books than the largest library in Europe had at that time. The reason is of course because of paper and the culture of paper; that is, in Europe at that point they were still copying books on parchment whereas in the Muslim world they were copying them on paper. There was also a…

SHEILA BLAIR I would just say copying is the key word there because they were copying one-to-one on parchment. You had a book, you had it next to you and you literally copied it. Whereas the Muslims had a different system of oral transmission where the teacher got up and dictated; all the students wrote it down. Afterwards they brought up their books and he gives them an A, yes, okay, and then they are allowed to go home and dictate the book to 10 of their students. The difference would be an arithmetic versus a geometric progression and all of us who remember from our math classes, the difference in…

ANDI HORVATH It's compound interest.

SHEILA BLAIR You got it [laughs].

JONATHAN BLOOM So you see there are these stories in mediaeval texts about how the caliph said oh, do we have any books by so-and-so and the librarian comes out and says yes, sire, and he brings out 100 copies of a book. It's because of this system of multiplication of texts, which meant that this was a much more - it doesn't mean that everybody knew how to read and write but it made mediaeval Islamic society much more literate and conscious of the written word than contemporary societies elsewhere.

SHEILA BLAIR It also in terms of art requires some shifting from the way we think because Arabic and all other languages that are written in Arabic scripts go from right to left. We constantly think of looking at something - even if we don't know it, when we walk into a room we go from left to right and you have to overrule that when you're looking at most of the things that we look at in the lands where Islam was the major religion.

ANDI HORVATH This is a very exciting story of how the first information age began. Did you end up answering your question which you first set out to explore, which was how did the architects share their skills and trade information?

JONATHAN BLOOM Well, I think it happened slowly, because building and the arts were not particularly prestigious in the Muslim world. The only art that really was considered…

SHEILA BLAIR Art.

JONATHAN BLOOM …art was calligraphy. So, the access to paper was initially restricted - it was limited. It was initially expensive; you couldn't just use it and throw it away, but as it became more and more common, more and more people used it and so you can see, if you look really carefully at different kinds of arts, how they shifted from artists or artistically-inclined people started shifting from one medium to another.

For example, in the 12th century in Iran you'll have this incredible fluorescence of beautiful painting on ceramics. Then in the 14th century, the period that Sheila was just talking about, that you have this incredible painting on paper. What happens is the ceramics are oh, okay, and you get the - the feeling is that if Ahmed was a really good artist in one century, he would have gone into pottery and decorating pottery but in the following century, it was going to be you paint on paper.

ANDI HORVATH And paper is transportable.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right, so ideas could move very quickly from one place to another. But making drawings, making plans is encoding information and I think this is a whole development that we don't really have the evidence for except in the buildings that survive, and so we have to look into them and try and see - it's not only that someone sat there and drew a plan but you had to have people who could understand how to read it too and decode the information.

SHEILA BLAIR The same thing, we don't know with all these wonderful illustrated books, who used them? They were made mostly for the court. They were expensive. Did they actually read them or were they prestige gifts to give away or hold them up and say look, I have this wonderful copy. So, we tend to look at the pictures but maybe other people there were looking much more at the words.

There is also a shift by the time you get to the 15th, 16th and particularly 17th centuries that you can establish a dynastic style because you can work out a particular plant motif or a flower on paper and you can then hand it to your ceramicist and say paint me a lot of ceramics that look like that. You can hand it to someone in the textile world and say make me textiles that have that design on it. You can send it out across your empire and all your mosques in the Ottoman Empire can have minarets that look more or less the same - not quite the same but more or less - and you can have a style and you can mark your territory with that style.

ANDI HORVATH When was the heyday of paper? I had a go at trying to imagine this; I thought maybe it was about 1996 where we weren't quite in the digital era. I remember standing at a photocopier photocopying lecture notes. When, according to you, was the heyday?

JONATHAN BLOOM If you look at the statistics, I think we're using as much paper today as we've ever used.

ANDI HORVATH So we've not moved towards the paperless office at all?

JONATHAN BLOOM Well, no - I remember - there's actually a book I think called The Myth of the Paperless Office, which is - and the argument is I think that paper has certain affordances, that is that it allows us to do things in certain ways that are very good and very useful. That's not to say that the smartphone isn't useful but it's often easier to jot something down on a piece of paper than it is to pull out your phone and then start typing away on it.

SHEILA BLAIR In terms of art also it's much easier to doodle or sketch on a piece of paper and now you see even architects are presenting to museums, oh, the sketch of this building I made over lunch on a paper napkin, and that's become part of the archive of the artist.

ANDI HORVATH Because we are much more conscious about our paper usage and recycling it.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right.

ANDI HORVATH I read somewhere I think in your book that someone quoted the amount of paper that was being used per day was something huge. It just destroyed my brain cells when I thought about it.

JONATHAN BLOOM Right, right. I sat around one time calculating how much office paper was used and it would cover the United States several times over or something, you know what I mean.

ANDI HORVATH Yeah.

JONATHAN BLOOM We use it in different ways. I think clearly there are fewer newspapers being printed because we can get our news in other forms, but we both find that when we get an article digitally we often want to print it out because it's so much easier to read as a - or many books are easier to read.

SHEILA BLAIR And to flip back and forth. No matter how much they say just push on this button and you'll go to the footnote or something, sometimes you want to have them actually open right next to each other, which you can do with at least three or four fingers. I get a little irritated when there are 10 things you're supposed to be holding on, the note, the illustration, the index, the bibliographic reference, you feel like you are Shiva with seven arms, but that's harder. There have actually been studies done saying you learn material in different ways if you're listening to things on tape or if you're reading them in a book, or if you're reading them on your tablet.

ANDI HORVATH What surprises have you had in your research that really shook your world?

JONATHAN BLOOM Well, when I was working on the history of paper in the Muslim world, I saw that it first was used by merchants and government and commerce and such and then it moved on to literature and then the arts, the visual arts and stuff, and encouraged new approaches to notation of various forms, whether it's notation of artistic ideas or architecture or music or whatever. Then because I had to write a last chapter for the book. I wrote about what happened in Europe and I was curious about what happened in Europe, and of course, I couldn't do too much, but what I always thought was it would be really fun to write a book about paper after print.

The thing is that in Europe printing has always taken over the whole subject and what I've learned, and just slightly as from colleagues who are working on early documents on paper, is that there's a whole world of paper before printing in Europe where Europeans had this material but they didn't use it for the fancy religious books like [just as in the Muslim World] but they used it for correspondence, they used it for commercial documents, they used it for ledgers, for land - deeds dealing with land tenure and stuff.

For example, there's a merchant in Prato, in the Italian city of Prato from the 13th century, I believe, maybe 14th century, Marco Datini, and he left his house stuffed with documents. In the 19th century it was opened, and there are hundreds of thousands of paper documents there which include letters to his wife, et cetera. What these documents and others like it show is that the availability of paper in Europe allowed new groups of people to start writing - so women, for example, started writing. People wrote - kept books of bits of poetry, they kept these commonplace books where they would write down things. This is not the kind of stuff that gets collected in libraries, particularly, because they're not…

SHEILA BLAIR Or museums.

JONATHAN BLOOM Or museums. They're not great works of art, and so they've been destroyed over the ages but occasionally you find these things and you realise that paper probably had the same effect in Europe that it had had in the Muslim world.

ANDI HORVATH Sheila?

SHEILA BLAIR My great, great a-ha moment with paper was when I was a second-year graduate student and I was taking this seminar on a manuscript, the so-called Great Mongol Shahnameh, which had been cut up and the paintings, illustrated pages sold to 58 museums. It was a great topic. Some people worked on the Chinese sources, some people worked on European sources; I said I'll work on the text because I like languages and texts. I suddenly realised that one page in Cleveland and another page in New York had on their back sides, the unillustrated sides, contiguous text, and so did a third page in another museum.

I said well, you can't have a book that has contiguous texts in three different museums; what is going on here? I suddenly, in my a-ha moment, realised that a dealer, George Demotte in the early 20th century, who was selling the manuscript couldn't sell it as a whole and so he took the pages and he actually what we call delaminated them or pulled them apart, front to back, slapped on another something on the back side and then he could maximise his profits and sell an illustrated page. Up until that point, no one realised that you could actually delaminate 14th century paper, probably because it's so highly burnished.

Paper curators then told me oh no, this is a trick, people do it with dollar bills, it's something you learn when you're a paper curator, there are ways to do it and now that I know there are things to look at like big holes in a painting that's in one museum and corresponding holes in a painting that's in another museum, i.e. they were together at one point and damaged a bit when they were pulled apart. Since then, we've realised that there are lots and lots of manuscripts that this happened to and lots and lots of paintings.

One of the reasons people never realised this before is when museums used to display their pages of manuscripts, they cut out a mat and they just had a little box to show you the painting and they cut off all the text that went around it. What I've learned also is you have to look at the whole page and you have to imagine what it looked like in a book with a facing page. It's quite a different way of looking at this rather than just seeing a little box with a painting in it on your screen.

ANDI HORVATH You've got context.

SHEILA BLAIR Yeah, yeah.

ANDI HORVATH You've got juxtapositions.

SHEILA BLAIR And then you have in codices different ways that people signalled that the painting was coming up. Because you want to often have the painting in the middle of the page and you want to have the right line of text above it that says "Ruston picked up his bow and shot Isfandiyar" - and then there's a picture - you have to somehow juggle the text. One of the ways they did it with poetry was to start writing some of the lines diagonally so it stretched out the text, but also if you're thinking of a codex and you're turning the pages you're reading, you're getting this little clue like 'illustration coming up, get ready'. So there's a visual key to reading this text.

ANDI HORVATH Yeah, there's a key. Almost giving instruction to the reader.

SHEILA BLAIR And like when you're reading to your kids at night, getting them to almost the end of story [laughs].

ANDI HORVATH Got it. So next time we're picking up a blank sheet of paper, we're about to write a note on it but we've stopped to marvel at the piece of paper, what would you like us to think about?

JONATHAN BLOOM Well, I'd say that that piece of paper came from a bundle of paper, right. It was - you bought it in a bundle, and what's that bundle called? A ream. The word ream actually comes from the Spanish risma, which actually comes from the Arabic word for bundle. It is the only bit of evidence for this long story of the Arab role in the history of paper that survives in the English language today.

SHEILA BLAIR I would say look at those lines on the old pads of paper we used to get, those light blue lines. That's not the only way you can make lines. Traditionally, what Muslims did was put the piece of paper on a stringboard, press it over the board and you get little indentations and look closely, but that's how you can write such uniform straight lines if you're making a manuscript.

ANDI HORVATH Fascinating. The history of paper. Thank you, Professor Jonathan Bloom and thank you, Professor Sheila Blair.

SHEILA BLAIR You're welcome.

JONATHAN BLOOM You're most welcome.

CHRIS HATZIS Thank you to Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, Norma Jean Calderwood University Professors of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chairs of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. And thanks to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on March 12, 2019. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. Drop us a review on iTunes and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.

Before paper, we had papyrus - made from reeds in Egypt, or parchment - made from the skin of various animals. And then China invented paper in order to collect Buddhist texts. From there, over the next two centuries, the use of paper moved through Central Asia used by merchants, government and commerce.

But, how did we get from Ancient Egyptian scrolls to modern-day office paper?

Jonathan Bloom is the now-retired Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College. He is also the soon-to-be retired Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University .

Sheila Blair is the Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College Emerita, as well as the soon-to-be retired Hamid Bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia Commonwealth University .

Between them, they have explored how paper spread around the world, transporting ideas and information.

Episode recorded: March 12, 2019

Interviewer: Dr Andi Horvath

Producer and editor: Chris Hatzis

Co-producers: Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath

Banner: Getty Images

Subscribe to Eavesdrop on Experts through iTunes , SoundCloud or RSS .

Essay on Invention

Students are often asked to write an essay on Invention in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Invention

The magic of inventions.

Inventions are the creations of brilliant minds. They are new devices, methods, or processes made from innovative ideas. Inventions have shaped our world, making life easier and more interesting.

Types of Inventions

Inventions can be physical, like the telephone, or conceptual, like mathematical formulas. They can also be improvements of existing things, like the smartphone.

Impact of Inventions

Inventions have a great impact. They can change how we live, work, and play. For instance, the internet has transformed communication and information access.

Inventing the Future

Inventing is about solving problems and imagining new ways to do things. It’s a key part of progress and the future of our world.

250 Words Essay on Invention

The genesis of invention.

Invention is the cradle of progress, the heart of human advancement. It is the product of creative minds that strive to improve our lives and the world around us. Inventions, whether they are technological, scientific, or artistic, have shaped the course of history and continue to define our future.

The Role of Necessity

The axiom “necessity is the mother of invention” holds true. The need to solve problems or improve existing conditions often sparks the flame of invention. For instance, the invention of the wheel was driven by the need for easier transportation, while the development of the internet was a response to the need for global connectivity.

The Power of Curiosity

However, necessity alone can’t fuel invention. It’s the marriage of necessity and curiosity that truly births invention. Curiosity pushes us to question the status quo, to seek answers, and to venture into the unknown. It’s this curiosity that led to inventions like the telescope, which expanded our understanding of the cosmos.

The Impact of Invention

Inventions have a profound impact on society. They revolutionize industries, transform lifestyles, and redefine societal norms. The printing press democratized knowledge, the steam engine propelled the Industrial Revolution, and digital technology is reshaping our world today.

Conclusion: The Continuum of Invention

Invention is a continuum, a never-ending journey of discovery and improvement. Every invention is a stepping stone to the next, creating a chain reaction of progress. As we stand on the brink of a new era of innovation, the power of invention promises to continue shaping our collective destiny.

500 Words Essay on Invention

Introduction to invention.

Invention is a creative process that has been the cornerstone of human progress. It is the act of bringing ideas or objects together in a novel way to create something that did not exist before. Inventions have shaped and reshaped our world, influencing every aspect of our lives, from communication and transportation to healthcare and entertainment.

The Essence of Invention

The essence of invention lies in the recognition of a problem or a need, followed by the imaginative thinking to conceive a solution. It requires a blend of creativity, critical thinking, and often, a deep understanding of scientific principles. The invention process is iterative, involving trial and error, experimentation, and refinement until a workable solution is achieved.

Invention and Society

Inventions have profound impacts on society. They can stimulate economic growth, improve living standards, and even redefine societal norms. The invention of the printing press, for instance, revolutionized information dissemination, fostering literacy and the spread of new ideas. Similarly, the invention of the internet transformed the way we communicate, access information, and conduct business.

Invention and Technological Advancement

Technological advancements are often the result of inventions. For instance, the invention of the transistor led to the development of the digital computer, which has since revolutionized many fields, from data processing to artificial intelligence. Technological inventions, in turn, often spur further inventions, creating a cycle of innovation.

The Role of Invention in Scientific Discovery

Invention also plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Many scientific breakthroughs have been made possible by inventions. For instance, the invention of the microscope opened up a whole new world of microorganisms, leading to significant advances in biology and medicine. Similarly, the invention of the telescope has led to numerous astronomical discoveries, expanding our understanding of the universe.

Challenges and Ethical Considerations in Invention

However, invention is not without its challenges and ethical considerations. The process of invention often requires significant resources, and there is always the risk of failure. Moreover, some inventions can be used for harmful purposes or have unintended negative consequences. For example, the invention of nuclear technology has brought both the potential for clean energy and the threat of nuclear weapons. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the ethical implications of inventions and to strive for responsible innovation.

In conclusion, invention is a powerful force that drives human progress. It is a process of creative problem-solving that leads to new products, technologies, and scientific discoveries, with far-reaching impacts on society. However, it also brings challenges and ethical considerations that need to be carefully managed. As we continue to invent and innovate, we must strive to do so in a way that benefits society and minimizes potential harm.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

• Essay on My Inspiration
• Essay on Inspiration
• Essay on Industrialization

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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Paper History - Early Origins, Techniques and Uses

Only few short centuries, paper was rare, expensive and was used only for notes, letters and even more expensive books. Today, paper is all around us and we are in contact with it every day. If you have wondered how that came to be read all about paper history.

The Early Origins of Paper

History of Paper started in ancient china with the inventions made by Cain Lun (50 – 121 AD), who enabled faster and more reliable production of this highly valuable material. Spreading all across china, paper eventually arrived in Arab countries and during Crusades, in Europe. Jump in here to read more about it.

Timeline of Paper

From the moment the first papyrus paper was created in Ancient Egypt to the proliferation of modern paper machines in Europe, paper managed to have strong impact on our development and culture. If you ever wondered how paper traveled through our history, here is the perfect place to see it.

History of Papyrus

Papyrus is an ancient paper-like material that originated in Ancient Egypt and Syria, which alsmost single-handedly helped the rise of the first modern civilizations. Here you can read more about its rich history and the way it faded away from use when modern wood-based paper appeared.

History of Parchment

Parchment is a paper-like material created from the skins of animals. Today it is remembered as one of the primary mean of data collection from the moment Roman Empire started its rule to the arrival and proliferation of paper in 17th century AD. Read more about history of parchment here.

History of Vellum

Vellum is a high quality form of parchment, paper like material that was created from skins of animals for centuries in all around the world before arrival of Chinese paper. Here you can learn much more about it and how it was used in post-Roman history of Europe.

History of Paper Machines

History of paper machines started from the moment first Chinese paper recipes arrived to Europe in 11th century AD. From that point on more and more effort was placed on solving the riddle of easy and efficient paper production, with it finally being solved in early 19th century with famous Fourdrinier paper machines. Find out more about history of those machines here.

History of Paper Mills

History of Paper Mills is a long one, and it went through several changes together with the evolution of the paper machines and paper industry. Today, paper mills are totally different than the ones created just 100 years ago, and here you can find out why.

Writing Studio

Invention (aka brainstorming), what is “invention”.

In an effort to make our handouts more accessible, we have begun converting our PDF handouts to web pages. Download this page as a PDF: Invention Return to Writing Studio Handouts

Invention (also referred to as brainstorming) is the stage of the writing process during which writers discover the ideas upon which their essays will focus. During this stage, writers tend to overcome some of the anxiety they might have about writing a paper, and in many cases, actually become excited about it. Although invention usually occurs at the beginning of the writing process, exercises aimed at facilitating invention can be helpful at many stages of writing. Some of the best writers return to this stage a number of times while composing drafts of their essays.

Recommended Invention Techniques

Freewriting.

Read through your assignment and choose a topic, theme, or question that comes to mind. Write for 10-15 minutes in response to this idea – do not lift your pen from the paper or your hands from the keyboard.

When you are finished, read through your draft and underline or circle ideas that might lead you to a thesis for your paper. Consider asking a classmate or friend to read what you’ve written and ask questions about your ideas and topics.

After freewriting, read through what you have written and underline a phrase or sentence that you think is particularly effective or that expresses your ideas most clearly. Write this at the top of a new sheet of paper and use it to guide a new freewrite.

Repeat this process several times. The more you write and select, the more you will be able to refine your ideas.

Talk to Yourself

Some people often find themselves saying, “I know what I want to say. It’s just that I can’t figure out how to put it in writing.” If this is the case for you, try dictating your thoughts on a digital recording device. After several minutes, listen to what you’ve recorded and write down ideas you want to incorporate into your paper.

If you don’t have a recording device, ask a friend to write down some of the main points you make as you talk about your ideas.

List all the ideas you can think of that are connected to the topic or the subject you want to explore. Consider any idea or observation as valid and worthy of listing (go for quantity at this point). List quickly and then set your list aside for a few minutes. Come back and read your list and then do the listing exercise again.

Using Charts or Shapes

Use phrases or words that are central to your topic and try to arrange them spatially in a graph, grid, table, or chart. How do the different spatial representations help you see the relationships among your ideas? If you can’t imagine the shape of a chart at first, just put the words on a page and draw lines between or around them.

Break Down the Assignment

Sometimes prompts are so complicated that they can seem overwhelming. Students often ask: There’s so much to do, where should I start? Try to break the assignment down into its constituent parts:

• The general topic, like “The relationship between tropical fruits and colonial powers.”
• A specific subtopic or required question, like “How did the availability of multiple tropical fruits influence competition among colonial powers trading from the larger Caribbean islands during the 19th century?”
• A single term or phrase that seems to repeat in the material you’ve read or the ideas you’ve been considering. For example, if have you seen the words “increased competition” several times in the class materials you’ve been reading about tropical fruit exports, you could brainstorm variations on the phrase within the context of those readings or focus on variations of each component of the phrase (i.e., “increased” and “competition”).

Once you have identified the major parts of the topic, try to figure out what you are being asked to think about in the assignment. What questions are you expected to answer? Are there related questions that need to be addressed in order to answer the primary questions? If so, what are they?

Defining Terms

In your own words, write definitions for key terms or concepts given in the assignment. Find other definitions of those terms in your course readings, the dictionary, or through conversations and then compare the definitions to your own. Keep these definitions in mind as you begin to write your essay.

Summarizing Positions

Summarize the positions of relevant authors from your course readings or research. Do you agree or disagree with their ideas, methods, or approaches? How do your interests overlap with the positions of the authors in question? Try to be brief in your descriptions. Write a paragraph or up to a page describing a reading or a position.

Get together with a group of classmates and have each person write down her or his tentative topic or thesis at the top of a blank sheet of paper. Pass the sheets around from left to right so that each person can write down a thoughtful question or suggest related ideas to think about.

Compare / Contrast Matrix

If your assignment asks you to compare or contrast two concepts, texts, subjects, etc., try to organize your thoughts in a compare/contrast matrix by focusing on the attributes you will consider in your draft. These attributes should establish the key points of comparison or contrast with which you will deal in your essay.

Last revised: 07/2008 | Adapted for web delivery: 05/2021

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Invention: Starting the Writing Process

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Tips for how to start a writing assignment.

Writing takes time

Find out when is the assignment due and devise a plan of action. This may seem obvious and irrelevant to the writing process, but it's not. Writing is a process, not merely a product. Even the best professional writers don't just sit down at a computer, write, and call it a day. The quality of your writing will reflect the time and forethought you put into the assignment. Plan ahead for the assignment by doing pre-writing: this will allow you to be more productive and organized when you sit down to write. Also, schedule several blocks of time to devote to your writing; then, you can walk away from it for a while and come back later to make changes and revisions with a fresh mind.

Use the rhetorical elements as a guide to think through your writing

Thinking about your assignment in terms of the rhetorical situation can help guide you in the beginning of the writing process. Topic, audience, genre, style, opportunity, research, the writer, and purpose are just a few elements that make up the rhetorical situation.

Topic and audience are often very intertwined and work to inform each other. Start with a broad view of your topic such as skateboarding, pollution, or the novel Jane Eyre and then try to focus or refine your topic into a concise thesis statement by thinking about your audience. Here are some questions you can ask yourself about audience:

• Who is the audience for your writing?
• Do you think your audience is interested in the topic? Why or why not?
• Why should your audience be interested in this topic?
• What does your audience already know about this topic?
• What does your audience need to know about this topic?
• What experiences has your audience had that would influence them on this topic?
• What do you hope the audience will gain from your text?

For example, imagine that your broad topic is dorm food. Who is your audience? You could be writing to current students, prospective students, parents of students, university administrators, or nutrition experts among others. Each of these groups would have different experiences with and interests in the topic of dorm food. While students might be more concerned with the taste of the food or the hours food is available, parents might be more concerned with the price.

You can also think about opportunity as a way to refine or focus your topic by asking yourself what current events make your topic relevant at this moment. For example, you could connect the nutritional value of dorm food to the current debate about the obesity epidemic or you could connect the price value of dorm food to the rising cost of a college education overall.

Keep in mind the purpose of the writing assignment.

Writing can have many different purposes. Here are just a few examples:

• Summarizing: Presenting the main points or essence of another text in a condensed form
• Arguing/Persuading: Expressing a viewpoint on an issue or topic in an effort to convince others that your viewpoint is correct
• Narrating: Telling a story or giving an account of events
• Evaluating: Examining something in order to determine its value or worth based on a set of criteria.
• Analyzing: Breaking a topic down into its component parts in order to examine the relationships between the parts.
• Responding: Writing that is in a direct dialogue with another text.
• Examining/Investigating: Systematically questioning a topic to discover or uncover facts that are not widely known or accepted, in a way that strives to be as neutral and objective as possible.
• Observing: Helping the reader see and understand a person, place, object, image or event that you have directly watched or experienced through detailed sensory descriptions.

You could be observing your dorm cafeteria to see what types of food students are actually eating, you could be evaluating the quality of the food based on freshness and quantity, or you could be narrating a story about how you gained fifteen pounds your first year at college.

You may need to use several of these writing strategies within your paper. For example, you could summarize federal nutrition guidelines, evaluate whether the food being served at the dorm fits those guidelines, and then argue that changes should be made in the menus to better fit those guidelines.

Pre-writing strategies

Once you have thesis statement just start writing! Don't feel constrained by format issues. Don't worry about spelling, grammar, or writing in complete sentences. Brainstorm and write down everything you can think of that might relate to the thesis and then reread and evaluate the ideas you generated. It's easier to cut out bad ideas than to only think of good ones. Once you have a handful of useful ways to approach the thesis you can use a basic outline structure to begin to think about organization. Remember to be flexible; this is just a way to get you writing. If better ideas occur to you as you're writing, don't be afraid to refine your original ideas.

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Essays on Inventions

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November 1, 2013

What Are the 10 Greatest Inventions of Our Time?

Before you consider, here are a few opinions from Scientific American readers in 1913 on what makes a great invention

By Daniel C. Schlenoff

A competition sponsored in 1913 by Scientific American asked for essays on the 10 greatest inventions. The rules: “our time” meant the previous quarter century, 1888 to 1913; the invention had to be patentable and was considered to date from its “commercial introduction.”

Perception is at the heart of this question. Inventions are most salient when we can see the historical changes they cause. In 2013 we might not appreciate the work of Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison on a daily basis, as we are accustomed to electricity in all its forms, but we are very impressed by the societal changes caused by the Internet and the World Wide Web (both of which run on alternating-current electricity, by the way). A century from now they might be curious as to what all the fuss was about. The answers from 1913 thus provide a snapshot of the perceptions of the time.

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The airplane: The Wright Flyer for military purposes, being demonstrated at Fort Myer, Va., in 1908. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

Following are excerpts from the first- and second-prize essays, along with a statistical tally of all the entries that were sent in.

The first-prize essay was written by William I. Wyman, who worked in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., and was thus well informed on the progress of inventions. His list was:

1. The electric furnace (1889) It was “the only means for commercially producing Carborundum (the hardest of all manufactured substances).” The electric furnace also converted aluminum “from a merely precious to very useful metal” (by reducing it’s price 98 percent), and was “radically transforming the steel industry.”

2. The steam turbine, invented by Charles Parsons in 1884 and commercially introduced over the next 10 years. A huge improvement in powering ships, the more far-reaching use of this invention was to drive generators that produced electricity.

3. The gasoline-powered automobile. Many inventors worked toward the goal of a “self-propelled” vehicle in the 19th century. Wyman gave the honor specifically to Gottleib Daimler for his 1889 engine, arguing: “a century's insistent but unsuccessful endeavor to provide a practical self-propelled car proves that the success of any type that once answered requirements would be immediate. Such success did come with the advent of the Daimler motor, and not before.”

4. The moving picture. Entertainment always will be important to people. “The moving picture has transformed the amusements of the multitude.” The technical pioneer he cited was Thomas Edison.

5. The airplane. For “the Realization of an age-long dream” he gave the laurels of success to the Wright brothers, but apart from its military use reserved judgment on the utility of the invention: “It presents the least commercial utility of all the inventions considered.”

6. Wireless Telegraphy. Systems for transmitting information between people have been around for centuries, perhaps millennia. Telegraph signals got a speed boost in the U.S. from Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail. Wireless telegraphy as invented by Guglielmo Marconi, later evolving into radio, set information free from wires.

7. The cyanide process. Sounds toxic, yes? It appears on this list for only one reason: It is used to extract gold from ore. “Gold is the life blood of trade,” and in 1913 it was considered to be the foundation for international commerce and national currencies.

8. The Nikola Tesla induction motor. “This epoch-making invention is mainly responsible for the present large and increasing use of electricity in the industries.” Before people had electricity in their homes, the alternating current–producing motor constructed by Tesla supplied 90 percent of the electricity used by manufacturing.

9. The Linotype machine. The Linotype machine enabled publishers—largely newspapers—to compose text and print it much faster and cheaper. It was an advance as large as the invention of the printing press itself was over the painstaking handwritten scrolls before it. Pretty soon we won’t be using paper for writing and reading, so the history of printing will be forgotten anyway.

10. The electric welding process of Elihu Thomson. In the era of mass production, the electric welding process enabled faster production and construction of better, more intricate machines for that manufacturing process.

The electric welder invented by Elihu Thomson enabled the cheaper production of intricate welded machinery. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

The turbine invented by Charles Parsons powered ships. Assembled in numbers, they provided an efficient means of driving electrical generators and producing that most useful commodity. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

The second-prize essay, by George M. Dowe, also of Washington, D.C., who may have been a patent attorney, was more philosophical. He divided his inventions into those aiding three broad sectors: production, transportation and communication.

1. Electrical fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. As natural fertilizer sources were depleted during the 19th century, artificial fertilizers enabled the further expansion of agriculture.

2. Preservation of sugar-producing plants. George W. McMullen of Chicago is credited with the discovery of a method for drying sugar cane and sugar beets for transport. Sugar production became more efficient and its supply increased by leaps and bounds, like a kid on a “sugar buzz.” Maybe this is one invention we could have done without. But I digress.

3. High-speed steel alloys. By adding tungsten to steel, “tools so made were able to cut at such a speed that they became almost red hot without losing either their temper or their cutting edge” The increase in the efficiency of cutting machines was “nothing short of revolutionary.”

4. Tungsten-filament lamp. Another success of chemistry. After tungsten replaced carbon in its filament, the lightbulb was considered “perfected.” As of 2013 they are being phased out worldwide in favor of compact fluorescent bulbs, which are four times as efficient.

5. The airplane. Not yet in wide use as transportation in 1913, but “To [Samuel] Langley and to the Wright brothers must be awarded the chief honors in the attainment of mechanical flight.” In 2013 the annoying aspects of commercial airline flying make transportation by horse and buggy seem a viable alternative.

6. The steam turbine. As with Mr. Wyman, the turbine deserved credit not only “in the utilization of steam as a prime mover” but in its use in the “generation of electricity.”

7. Internal combustion engine. As a means of transportation, Dowe gives the greatest credit to “Daimler, Ford and Duryea.” Gottleib Daimler is a well-known pioneer in motor vehicles. Henry Ford began production of the Model T in 1908 and it was quite popular by 1913. Charles Duryea made one of the earliest commercially successful petrol-driven vehicles, starting in 1896.

8. The pneumatic tire. Cars for personal transportation were an improvement on railways. “What the track has done for the locomotive, the pneumatic tire has done for the vehicle not confined to tracks.” Credit is given to John Dunlop and William C. Bartlet, who each had a milestone on the road (pun intended) to successful automobile and bicycle tires.

9. Wireless communication. Marconi was given the credit for making wireless “commercially practical.” Dowe also makes a comment that could apply equally to the rise of the World Wide Web, stating that wireless was “devised to meet the needs of commerce primarily, but incidentally they have contributed to social intercourse.”

10. Composing machines. The giant rotary press was quite capable of churning out masses of printed material. The bottleneck in the chain of production was composing the printing plates. The Linotype and the Monotype dispensed with that bottleneck.

The essays sent in were compiled to come up with a master list of inventions that were considered to be the top 10. Wireless telegraphy was on almost everyone’s list. The “aeroplane” came in second, although it was considered important because of its potential, not because there were so many airplanes in the sky. Here are the rest of the results:

There were also mentions for Luther Burbank's agricultural work (23); Louis Pasteur and vaccination work (20); acetylene gas from carbide (17); mercury-vapor lamp (7); preservation of sugar-producing plants (7); combined motion picture and talking machine (10); Edison's storage battery (6); automatic player piano (4); Pulmotor (a respirator machine) (4); telephone (4).

The motion picture: The hard-working Thomas Edison helped make this entertainment form technically viable. Image: Scientific American - November 1, 1913

The full contents of all the prize-winning essays is available with a subscription to the Scientific American archives .

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Essay on Scientific Discoveries

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• Feb 7, 2024

Writing and speaking skills are the most important skills in the world. It shows how well a student will convey his or her ideas, experiences and thoughts. Essays are one of the most popular forms of writing to ascertain an applicant’s general knowledge, experiences, writing style and language skills. It is used in many entrance exams like SAT, IELTS, TOEFL and in college applications as well. From a very early age, school curriculums have been encouraging students to write essays and give speeches. Sometimes the topics provided to students can be complicated. So, today we have come up to help the students with an essay on Scientific Discoveries.

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Five Qualities of A Good Essay

Before we provide you with an essay on scientific discoveries. Let’s learn about essay writing. Writing an essay is a difficult thing. The writing should be rich in content plus should not bore its readers. Here are the five qualities a perfect essay should have:-

• Focus: All of your writing should come under one single topic. No matter how vast your essay is, it should always revolve around the topic of the essay. Avoid unnecessary details.
• Development: Every paragraph of your essay should centre the topic of your essay. Try to use examples, details and descriptions.
• Free composition: Always follow a basic structure. Before finalising your essay, jot down the points you would like to mention and then make a series. Do not surprise the reader with complicated words, try to keep it as simple as possible. 
• Correctness: Make sure your essay is free from any grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, mismatched sentences, etc. Always use standard English and complete sentences.
• Introduction and Conclusion: The introduction and the conclusion of the writing are the most important parts of the essay. The first impression is always the last, and so is the introduction of your writing. After reading the first two or three lines, if the reader gets bored, he may not read your whole essay. So make sure your essay contains a crispy beginning. Alternatively, make the conclusion so strong and effective that the reader never forgets your essay. Don’t feel afraid to use quotes, catchy lines, slogans and all. They are the cherry on the cake for your essay.

Also Read: Importance of Technology in Education

Also Read: Essay on Athletics in 100, 200 and 300 Words

Sample Essay on Scientific Discoveries

Here is an example of an essay on scientific discoveries to help them out in their school assignments.

Everything around us is a great discovery. Be it a necessity, comfort, or luxury, they all came from different scientific discoveries that took place over some time. Starting from a small pin to a big ship, everything is just a mere invention to make the lives of humans easier. Scientistic discoveries take place in every arena of thought so before we talk about these inventions. Let’s examine what is science. What is science? Science is a system for acquiring knowledge. We use observations, and experimentation to come to a conclusion and explain any natural phenomenon. In simple language, science is the systematic field of study or knowledge gained from experimentations, observations and some accepted facts. And so scientific discoveries have done miracles in human lives.  Scientific discoveries and inventions have made our lives easier and more comfortable than we could have ever imagined. Scientific equipment accomplishes lengthy tasks in just minutes. Be it in the health sector, education, transportation, and more. All the inventions are just the gifts of science. Nowadays we are in a situation where without science, we cannot imagine our survival. In the absence of Science, no country, and no single person would have made progress. Scientific discoveries and inventions are machines that accomplish any task of humans either fully or partially. According to the business dictionary, the word ‘invention’ is “a new scientific or technical idea and the means of its embodiment or accomplishment. To be patentable, an invention must be novel, have utility, and be non-obvious. To be called an invention, an idea only needs to be proven as workable. But to be called an innovation, it must also be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. That’s why only a few inventions lead to innovations because not all of them are economically feasible.” Wikipedia further says, “An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition or process. It may be an improvement upon a machine or product or a new process for creating an object or a result. An invention that achieves a unique function or result may be a radical breakthrough. Such works are novel and not obvious to others skilled in the same field.” These definitions made us clear about how important scientific discovery is for us. Due to science, we can get all kinds of things we desire for. Electricity is a miracle that gives us light even in the dark. It further helps us to run industries conserve the environment and control pollution .  A cricket match is going on in America and we can watch it. Why? Inventions! Nowadays medical science is doing its best all over the world. Let us not forget computers, which is the greatest invention of mankind.  However, it is rightly said that every coin has two sides. Scientific discoveries and inventions have given us a lot and at the same time created a lot of disadvantages too. Nowadays people have become so dependent on technology that even walking has become difficult. Inventions made people so lazy, especially the young generation. All they could think about now is sitting at their home, with their computers and tablets on.

Gone are the days when people used to go out, play and have actual fun in life. Also, scientific inventions have made people jobless. Employers are substituting their employees with heavy machines. And this is the sad reality everywhere. Along with a luxurious life, technology has made our lives more complicated. People nowadays catch the disease early due to no exercise and sitting in front of their computer the whole day.  The biggest and most disastrous inventions are weapons, guns and bombs. What’s worse than taking the life of people? It has ruined unity, peace and harmony all over the world.  Scientific discoveries and inventions have contributed so much that my essay would never be enough to explain it. Ultimately, I would like to say that do not take up the monstrous side. Try the blessing of discoveries and make your life better in every aspect.

Also Read: Essay on Information Technology in 400 Words

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Home — Essay Samples — Science — Electricity — The Invention of Light Bulb

The Invention and The Importance of Light Bulb

• Categories: Electricity Light Thomas Edison

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Words: 606 |

Published: Dec 5, 2018

Words: 606 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Works Cited

• Buranelli, V. (2003). Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death. New York University Press.
• Energy Basics. (2022). U.S. Department of Energy.
• Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy. (2019). Oxford University Press.
• History of the Light Bulb. (2022). Edison Tech Center.
• Holmes, J. (2014). The Invention of the Light Bulb. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/the-invention-of-the-light-bulb-9829735.html
• Incandescent Light. (2022). In Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/incandescent-light
• Kean, S. (2011). The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements. Back Bay Books.
• Krupp, E. C. (2019). Light Bulb. In Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 11th ed., vol. 11 (pp. 655-657). McGraw-Hill Education.
• Pagán, E. (2021). Thomas Edison. National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2021/03-04/thomas-edison-how-an-inventor-became-a-cultural-icon/
• Lighting the Way: A History of the Light Bulb. (2010). Smithsonian Magazine.

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The Invention of Internet Essay

Introduction and thesis statement, events that led to the advancement of the internet, effects of advancement of the internet, evolution if the advancement the internet.

Internet is a communication tool that has enabled the entire world to become like a village. This is because with internet people from all corners of the world can reach each other in less than a minute. Internet was invented, and it required people to have computers to get its access.

With internet, people who work or study abroad can talk to their family members almost anytime. This is due to low cost of making telephone calls through the internet (Abbate, 2000). In fact, internet has saved a lot of resources for both individuals and governments.

This is due to the ease of sending and receiving information from their accomplices or business partners from all over the world. For instance, governments used to spend a lot of money in air tickets as their officials went around the world looking for potential business or development partners. Invention of the internet has made work easy because ministry officials can make deals over internet enabled calls. In addition, today one is able to make video calls with the aid of various internet applications.

This means that the internet is an essential communication tool that has transformed the whole world in terms of accessibility (Aspray, 2008). Development in the internet is continuously advancing as several mobile gadgets have been developed to enable more people to access internet. This ranges from the use of laptops which are portable computers to hand devices such as mobile phones.

Several events led to the advancement of the internet in the world today. All these events revolve around the fact that everyone wanted easy and cheap modes of communication. As the world developed and people started migrating from their homes to other countries and continents in the world, they needed to communicate with people back at home.

Therefore, this led to the advancement in the internet to enable them to communicate effectively with people back at their homes. In addition, the development of the digital world played a crucial role in development and advancement, in internet.

This means that due to the creation of digital images and other effects that could be translated electronically; it was vital to advance internet. This was vital because people required sending and receiving photos and other data through the internet. Many countries in the world came up with strategies of ensuring that computer applications studies are compulsory in their public and private institutions (Hewson, 2002).

The level of computer literacy in the world played a leading role in the advancement of internet as teachers and students wanted to get the information online. In fact, it is easier to get information from internet compared to going through books in the library. This is due to the simple nature of data searching through the search engines in the internet. Internet was advanced to enable professionals to consult on their work from wherever they are in the world without necessarily travelling to hold physical meetings.

Internet has enabled the world to become small in the sense that regardless the distance between people, they can close business transactions effectively. This is because business partners may meet and transact their business in the virtual world through the internet.

For instance, social networks, which are supported by the internet, have created a global scenario where people can mingle and make friends. In fact, strangers are meeting through internet, and if they have common activities they may extend them to their benefits. In addition, people abroad have been able to communicate with their family members and friends without incurring a lot of costs.

Internet has enabled people to shop from anywhere in the world by visiting desired websites. This has happened especially in the motor vehicle business where a consumer accesses motor dealers through the search machines. The customer is able to see various motor vehicles available in the dealers’ yards.

All information regarding vehicles is made available on the internet and upon making the desired choice, negotiations start (Misa, 2011). This maybe in the form of electronic mails, internet enabled phone calls or live chats. When they agree on terms of purchase and shipping the vehicle to customer’s location, payment is done through internet payment systems.

Then the vehicle is shipped to the customer who throughout the process keeps in touch with the dealers through internet. Internet has enhanced learning in universities and other learning institutions by providing easy means of accessing information. In fact, there is a variety of information available in the internet hence allowing students to have access to a lot of knowledge.

Everything that has advantages may be accompanied by several disadvantages. Internet has many advantages, but it also has a dark side of its advancement. There has been cases of internet crimes where people have lost their property and lives to internet friends. This happens where one discloses their information to strangers who purport to be looking for business accomplices (Weber, 2004).

After they get all the necessary information, they get access to bank accounts draining all the money to their accounts. Many people in the world have committed suicide after losing their long saved fortunes to internet conmen. Internet has negatively impacted social lives where young people have been exposed to pornographic materials. These materials have corrupted minds of youths hence causing them to engage in irresponsible sexual behaviors.

As a result, it has led to spread of sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AID among young people. Internet has contributed to increased rate of piracy hence affecting artists (Morozov, 2011). This happens because upon the release of their music and other electronic works of art people send them to the internet making it easy for others to download. This affects their profitability as majority of people who get access to the works of art pay almost nothing.

In addition, people have lost their lives by meeting bandits from the internet. This is where people start up relationships on the internet and upon meeting they may disagree on some things. This might lead to physical confrontation or even to loss of lives in some cases. Therefore, internet users should be careful whenever planning to meet or transact any business with strangers.

Internet has transformed lives of many people in the world today as they can access any information with only a click of a mouse. This means that information sources have been made readily available in the world today. Transacting business with people abroad has become easy with the development of electronic payment systems which are aided by the internet.

People can send pictures and other information through the internet to their loved ones and friends. On the other hand, internet should be used wisely to reduce the rates of social crimes. People have lost their lives and property though internet deals, therefore, caution must be taken to prevent such actions.

Abbate, J. (2000). Inventing the Internet . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Aspray, W. C. (2008). Internet and American Business . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hewson, C. Y. (2002). Internet Research Methods: A Practical Guide for the Social and Behavioral Sciences. London, GBR: SAGE Publicatins Inc. (US).

Misa, T. J. (2011). Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present . London: JHU Press.

Morozov, E. (2011). The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Weber, R. (2004). Computers Then and Now . Michigan: Compass Point Books.

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The Steamboat’s Invention from Concept to Reality

This essay about the invention of the steamboat traces its development from early concepts in the 17th century to its successful commercialization by Robert Fulton in 1807. Highlighting key figures like John Fitch and James Rumsey, who laid the groundwork for steam-powered navigation, the essay emphasizes Fulton’s pivotal role in creating the first commercially viable steamboat, the North River Steamboat. It discusses the steamboat’s profound impact on 19th-century transportation, commerce, and societal expansion, transforming rivers into vital arteries of trade and connectivity. The narrative celebrates the steamboat era as a significant chapter in human progress, illustrating the relentless human drive to overcome natural barriers and foster connections. Through the lens of the steamboat’s history, the essay reflects on the enduring power of innovation to change the world, underscoring the steamboat’s legacy as a symbol of progress and possibility.

How it works

The tale of the steamboat isn’t just a story of a machine; it’s a riveting saga of human ingenuity, trial and error, and the relentless pursuit to shrink the world’s vast waterways into navigable streams. The invention of the steamboat in the late 18th and early 19th centuries marks one of those pivotal moments in history that set the stage for the industrial revolution and transformed the way we traverse water.

The journey to the first functional steamboat was no smooth sailing.

While the idea of steam-powered navigation had been bubbling since the 17th century, it was John Fitch and James Rumsey in America who independently made significant headways in the 1780s. Fitch’s steamboat made successful, albeit financially unsustainable, trips on the Delaware River, proving that steam could indeed power a vessel.

However, it was Robert Fulton who, in 1807, launched the North River Steamboat (often mistakenly called the Clermont) on the Hudson River, earning the title for creating the first commercially successful steamboat. Fulton’s design wasn’t dramatically different from his predecessors’, but his timing, business acumen, and engineering improvements steered his venture to success. The North River Steamboat’s maiden voyage from New York City to Albany was a watershed moment, significantly reducing travel time and laying the groundwork for the steamboat era, which would dominate the 19th-century waterways.

The ripple effect of Fulton’s success was immediate and transformative. Rivers became the highways of the early 19th century, with steamboats ferrying passengers, goods, and ideas across the United States. Cities that were once remote outposts became bustling ports overnight, and the steamboat became a symbol of progress and possibility.

Yet, the steamboat’s story is more than a chronicle of technological achievement; it’s a testament to the human spirit’s unyielding drive to conquer natural barriers and connect distant shores. The steamboat era not only revolutionized transportation and commerce but also redefined society’s relationship with its waterways, turning them from barriers into conduits of expansion and exchange.

In essence, the invention of the steamboat encapsulates a key chapter in the narrative of human progress. It reminds us of the power of innovation to transform the world, a lesson as relevant today as it was two centuries ago. As we navigate the currents of the 21st century, the steamboat’s legacy continues to inspire, a beacon of ingenuity lighting the way forward.

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Announcing the NeurIPS 2023 Paper Awards 

Communications Chairs 2023 2023 Conference awards , neurips2023

By Amir Globerson, Kate Saenko, Moritz Hardt, Sergey Levine and Comms Chair, Sahra Ghalebikesabi 

We are honored to announce the award-winning papers for NeurIPS 2023! This year’s prestigious awards consist of the Test of Time Award plus two Outstanding Paper Awards in each of these three categories: 

• Two Outstanding Main Track Papers 
• Two Outstanding Main Track Runner-Ups 
• Two Outstanding Datasets and Benchmark Track Papers  

This year’s organizers received a record number of paper submissions. Of the 13,300 submitted papers that were reviewed by 968 Area Chairs, 98 senior area chairs, and 396 Ethics reviewers 3,540  were accepted after 502 papers were flagged for ethics reviews . 

We thank the awards committee for the main track: Yoav Artzi, Chelsea Finn, Ludwig Schmidt, Ricardo Silva, Isabel Valera, and Mengdi Wang. For the Datasets and Benchmarks track, we thank Sergio Escalera, Isabelle Guyon, Neil Lawrence, Dina Machuve, Olga Russakovsky, Hugo Jair Escalante, Deepti Ghadiyaram, and Serena Yeung. Conflicts of interest were taken into account in the decision process.

Congratulations to all the authors! See Posters Sessions Tue-Thur in Great Hall & B1-B2 (level 1).

Outstanding Main Track Papers

Privacy Auditing with One (1) Training Run Authors: Thomas Steinke · Milad Nasr · Matthew Jagielski

Poster session 2: Tue 12 Dec 5:15 p.m. — 7:15 p.m. CST, #1523

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 3:40 p.m. — 4:40 p.m. CST, Room R06-R09 (level 2)

Abstract: We propose a scheme for auditing differentially private machine learning systems with a single training run. This exploits the parallelism of being able to add or remove multiple training examples independently. We analyze this using the connection between differential privacy and statistical generalization, which avoids the cost of group privacy. Our auditing scheme requires minimal assumptions about the algorithm and can be applied in the black-box or white-box setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by applying it to DP-SGD, where we can achieve meaningful empirical privacy lower bounds by training only one model. In contrast, standard methods would require training hundreds of models.

Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage? Authors: Rylan Schaeffer · Brando Miranda · Sanmi Koyejo

Poster session 6: Thu 14 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #1108

Oral: Thu 14 Dec 3:20 p.m. — 3:35 p.m. CST, Hall C2 (level 1) 

Abstract: Recent work claims that large language models display emergent abilities, abilities not present in smaller-scale models that are present in larger-scale models. What makes emergent abilities intriguing is two-fold: their sharpness, transitioning seemingly instantaneously from not present to present, and their unpredictability , appearing at seemingly unforeseeable model scales. Here, we present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, emergent abilities appear due to the researcher’s choice of metric rather than due to fundamental changes in model behavior with scale. Specifically, nonlinear or discontinuous metrics produce apparent emergent abilities, whereas linear or continuous metrics produce smooth, continuous, predictable changes in model performance. We present our alternative explanation in a simple mathematical model, then test it in three complementary ways: we (1) make, test and confirm three predictions on the effect of metric choice using the InstructGPT/GPT-3 family on tasks with claimed emergent abilities, (2) make, test and confirm two predictions about metric choices in a meta-analysis of emergent abilities on BIG-Bench; and (3) show how to choose metrics to produce never-before-seen seemingly emergent abilities in multiple vision tasks across diverse deep networks. Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

Outstanding Main Track Runner-Ups

Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models Authors : Niklas Muennighoff · Alexander Rush · Boaz Barak · Teven Le Scao · Nouamane Tazi · Aleksandra Piktus · Sampo Pyysalo · Thomas Wolf · Colin Raffel

Poster session 2: Tue 12 Dec 5:15 p.m. — 7:15 p.m. CST, #813

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 3:40 p.m. — 4:40 p.m. CST, Hall C2 (level 1)  

Abstract : The current trend of scaling language models involves increasing both parameter count and training dataset size. Extrapolating this trend suggests that training dataset size may soon be limited by the amount of text data available on the internet. Motivated by this limit, we investigate scaling language models in data-constrained regimes. Specifically, we run a large set of experiments varying the extent of data repetition and compute budget, ranging up to 900 billion training tokens and 9 billion parameter models. We find that with constrained data for a fixed compute budget, training with up to 4 epochs of repeated data yields negligible changes to loss compared to having unique data. However, with more repetition, the value of adding compute eventually decays to zero. We propose and empirically validate a scaling law for compute optimality that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated tokens and excess parameters. Finally, we experiment with approaches mitigating data scarcity, including augmenting the training dataset with code data or removing commonly used filters. Models and datasets from our 400 training runs are freely available at https://github.com/huggingface/datablations .

Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model Authors: Rafael Rafailov · Archit Sharma · Eric Mitchell · Christopher D Manning · Stefano Ermon · Chelsea Finn

Poster session 6: Thu 14 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #625

Oral: Thu 14 Dec 3:50 p.m. — 4:05 p.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (level 2)  

Abstract: While large-scale unsupervised language models (LMs) learn broad world knowledge and some reasoning skills, achieving precise control of their behavior is difficult due to the completely unsupervised nature of their training. Existing methods for gaining such steerability collect human labels of the relative quality of model generations and fine-tune the unsupervised LM to align with these preferences, often with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). However, RLHF is a complex and often unstable procedure, first fitting a reward model that reflects the human preferences, and then fine-tuning the large unsupervised LM using reinforcement learning to maximize this estimated reward without drifting too far from the original model. In this paper, we leverage a mapping between reward functions and optimal policies to show that this constrained reward maximization problem can be optimized exactly with a single stage of policy training, essentially solving a classification problem on the human preference data. The resulting algorithm, which we call Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), is stable, performant, and computationally lightweight, eliminating the need for fitting a reward model, sampling from the LM during fine-tuning, or performing significant hyperparameter tuning. Our experiments show that DPO can fine-tune LMs to align with human preferences as well as or better than existing methods. Notably, fine-tuning with DPO exceeds RLHF’s ability to control sentiment of generations and improves response quality in summarization and single-turn dialogue while being substantially simpler to implement and train.

Outstanding Datasets and Benchmarks Papers

In the dataset category : 

ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation

Authors:  Sungduk Yu · Walter Hannah · Liran Peng · Jerry Lin · Mohamed Aziz Bhouri · Ritwik Gupta · Björn Lütjens · Justus C. Will · Gunnar Behrens · Julius Busecke · Nora Loose · Charles Stern · Tom Beucler · Bryce Harrop · Benjamin Hillman · Andrea Jenney · Savannah L. Ferretti · Nana Liu · Animashree Anandkumar · Noah Brenowitz · Veronika Eyring · Nicholas Geneva · Pierre Gentine · Stephan Mandt · Jaideep Pathak · Akshay Subramaniam · Carl Vondrick · Rose Yu · Laure Zanna · Tian Zheng · Ryan Abernathey · Fiaz Ahmed · David Bader · Pierre Baldi · Elizabeth Barnes · Christopher Bretherton · Peter Caldwell · Wayne Chuang · Yilun Han · YU HUANG · Fernando Iglesias-Suarez · Sanket Jantre · Karthik Kashinath · Marat Khairoutdinov · Thorsten Kurth · Nicholas Lutsko · Po-Lun Ma · Griffin Mooers · J. David Neelin · David Randall · Sara Shamekh · Mark Taylor · Nathan Urban · Janni Yuval · Guang Zhang · Mike Pritchard

Poster session 4: Wed 13 Dec 5:00 p.m. — 7:00 p.m. CST, #105 

Oral: Wed 13 Dec 3:45 p.m. — 4:00 p.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (level 2)

Abstract: Modern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore’s Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator’s macro-scale physical state. The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society.   

In the benchmark category :

DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models

Authors: Boxin Wang · Weixin Chen · Hengzhi Pei · Chulin Xie · Mintong Kang · Chenhui Zhang · Chejian Xu · Zidi Xiong · Ritik Dutta · Rylan Schaeffer · Sang Truong · Simran Arora · Mantas Mazeika · Dan Hendrycks · Zinan Lin · Yu Cheng · Sanmi Koyejo · Dawn Song · Bo Li

Poster session 1: Tue 12 Dec 10:45 a.m. — 12:45 p.m. CST, #1618  

Oral: Tue 12 Dec 10:30 a.m. — 10:45 a.m. CST, Ballroom A-C (Level 2)

Abstract: Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models have exhibited exciting progress in capabilities, capturing the interest of practitioners and the public alike. Yet, while the literature on the trustworthiness of GPT models remains limited, practitioners have proposed employing capable GPT models for sensitive applications to healthcare and finance – where mistakes can be costly. To this end, this work proposes a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation for large language models with a focus on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, considering diverse perspectives – including toxicity, stereotype bias, adversarial robustness, out-of-distribution robustness, robustness on adversarial demonstrations, privacy, machine ethics, and fairness. Based on our evaluations, we discover previously unpublished vulnerabilities to trustworthiness threats. For instance, we find that GPT models can be easily misled to generate toxic and biased outputs and leak private information in both training data and conversation history. We also find that although GPT-4 is usually more trustworthy than GPT-3.5 on standard benchmarks, GPT-4 is more vulnerable given jailbreaking system or user prompts, potentially due to the reason that GPT-4 follows the (misleading) instructions more precisely. Our work illustrates a comprehensive trustworthiness evaluation of GPT models and sheds light on the trustworthiness gaps. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://decodingtrust.github.io/.

Test of Time

This year, following the usual practice, we chose a NeurIPS paper from 10 years ago to receive the Test of Time Award, and “ Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and their Compositionality ” by Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, and Jeffrey Dean, won. 

Published at NeurIPS 2013 and cited over 40,000 times, the work introduced the seminal word embedding technique word2vec. Demonstrating the power of learning from large amounts of unstructured text, the work catalyzed progress that marked the beginning of a new era in natural language processing.

Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean will be giving a talk about this work and related research on Tuesday, 12 Dec at 3:05 – 3:25 pm CST in Hall F.  

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2023 Conference

Announcing NeurIPS 2023 Invited Talks

Reflections on the neurips 2023 ethics review process, neurips newsletter – november 2023.

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Amanda Hoover

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.

A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

ChatGPT’s launch was met with knee-jerk fears that the English class essay would die . The chatbot can synthesize information and distill it near-instantly—but that doesn’t mean it always gets it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate , creating its own facts and citing academic references that don’t actually exist. Generative AI chatbots have also been caught spitting out biased text on gender and race . Despite those flaws, students have used chatbots for research, organizing ideas, and as a ghostwriter . Traces of chatbots have even been found in peer-reviewed, published academic writing .

Teachers understandably want to hold students accountable for using generative AI without permission or disclosure. But that requires a reliable way to prove AI was used in a given assignment. Instructors have tried at times to find their own solutions to detecting AI in writing, using messy, untested methods to enforce rules , and distressing students. Further complicating the issue, some teachers are even using generative AI in their grading processes.

Detecting the use of gen AI is tricky. It’s not as easy as flagging plagiarism, because generated text is still original text. Plus, there’s nuance to how students use gen AI; some may ask chatbots to write their papers for them in large chunks or in full, while others may use the tools as an aid or a brainstorm partner.

Students also aren't tempted by only ChatGPT and similar large language models. So-called word spinners are another type of AI software that rewrites text, and may make it less obvious to a teacher that work was plagiarized or generated by AI. Turnitin’s AI detector has also been updated to detect word spinners, says Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer. It can also flag work that was rewritten by services like spell checker Grammarly, which now has its own generative AI tool . As familiar software increasingly adds generative AI components, what students can and can’t use becomes more muddled.

Detection tools themselves have a risk of bias. English language learners may be more likely to set them off; a 2023 study found a 61.3 percent false positive rate when evaluating Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams with seven different AI detectors. The study did not examine Turnitin’s version. The company says it has trained its detector on writing from English language learners as well as native English speakers. A study published in October found that Turnitin was among the most accurate of 16 AI language detectors in a test that had the tool examine undergraduate papers and AI-generated papers.

Lauren Goode

Karen Williams

William Turton

Schools that use Turnitin had access to the AI detection software for a free pilot period, which ended at the start of this year. Chechitelli says a majority of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection. But the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now. Montclair State University in New Jersey announced in November that it would pause use of Turnitin’s AI detector. Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University did the same last summer.

“This is hard. I understand why people want a tool,” says Emily Isaacs, executive director of the Office of Faculty Excellence at Montclair State. But Isaacs says the university is concerned about potentially biased results from AI detectors, as well as the fact that the tools can’t provide confirmation the way they can with plagiarism. Plus, Montclair State doesn’t want to put a blanket ban on AI, which will have some place in academia. With time and more trust in the tools, the policies could change. “It’s not a forever decision, it’s a now decision,” Isaacs says.

Chechitelli says the Turnitin tool shouldn’t be the only consideration in passing or failing a student. Instead, it’s a chance for teachers to start conversations with students that touch on all of the nuance in using generative AI. “People don’t really know where that line should be,” she says.

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