1Hi, it's Doug.
2I'm surrounded today by paper.
3Paper is an amazing material.
4You can make almost anything out of paper.
5You can make a paper bird.
6You can make a paper airplane.
7You can make a paper hat.
8Someone named Malikai has a question about where paper comes from.
9Let's give him a call now.
10Hi, Doug.
11Hi, Malikai.
12I have a question for you.
13How do they turn wood into paper?
14That's a great question.
15You may or may not have heard this before: the idea that paper comes from wood.
16It's true.
17But that seems crazy. How would that even be possible?
18What do you think?
19How do you think wood gets turned into paper?
20I don't know what ideas you had.
21But when I first heard that paper comes from wood, I thought, well...
22maybe they cut a piece of wood really thin or something?
23So maybe paper is like a really thin slice of wood?
24But it's not.
25Think about it.
26Paper is so flexible that you can fold it.
27You can crumple it even.
28Wood isn't very flexible at all.
29You definitely can't fold it or crumple it.
30So how is it that paper comes from wood?
31Well, making paper does involve cutting up wood.
32It turns out if you chop up any kind of woody plant into small bits,
33like these wooden chips here,
34and you mash it up really well,
35then boil it in water,
36you'll make this soupy stuff that you see here called pulp.
37Now, it's not a soup that tastes any good. You wouldn't want to eat it.
38But if you pour it out over a flat surface and then wait a few days,
39it dries out and all sticks together to become this.
40Now you can recognize it.
41It's a sheet of paper.
42Whoa. So that's how paper is made.
43It kind of makes you wonder,
44who came up with this idea to chop up wood and boil it?
45How did they figure this out?
46Well, it turns out it was discovered so long ago that we don't know exactly who discovered it or how.
47But we do know that it was discovered in China
48in ancient times, thousands of years ago.
49The Chinese became the world's first makers of paper,
50and they started trading it with people all over the world.
51People love paper because it has all kinds of great uses.
52The uses of paper that you're probably most familiar with
53is using it to write on or draw on.
54But don't forget one of the most important uses of all.
55Without paper we wouldn't have these:
56books.
57The invention of paper made it possible for there to be books.
58So that's hugely important.
59But even that's not all.
60People experimented with different ways of making paper.
61And they discovered that they could make different kinds of paper
62depending on how thick or thin they spread the soupy pulp out to dry.
63If you spread it really thin,
64it will make a kind of paper that looks like this.
65It's so thin and flexible that you could use it to, you know, blow your nose.
66Sometimes we call it tissue paper.
67And you can probably think of other ways paper is used.
68We use paper to pay for things.
69Money is a type of paper.
70We use paper to play games, like these playing cards.
71We even use paper to do, you know, other things.
72So in summary, paper's made from wood by chopping wood up into bits,
73boiling it, and turning it into a soupy stuff called pulp.
74When the pulp gets spread thin and dries, it sticks together to form a sheet.
75That's all for this week's question.
76Thanks, Malikai, for asking it.