1The origin of facial tissue may be Japanese.
2A 17th-century historical account describes Japanese blowing their noses in small soft papers
3then throwing them on the ground.
4Modern day tissues were first marketed in the early 1920s as a disposable cloth for wiping off cold cream.
5While some sneezers still prefer traditional cloth handkerchiefs,
6the disposable paper tissue is the implement of choice with the sniffling and lens-cleaning masses.
7This brand is made entirely of recycled paper,
8specifically, used computer printer paper,
9because its short, flexible fibers produce soft tissue.
10The half-ton bales go into a giant machine called a pulper.
11It breaks up the paper into fibers and mixes them with water.
12The result is called pulp.
13Next, it injects the pulp with air.
14This causes the ink to detach from the fibers and cling to the air bubbles
15which rise to the top and drain off.
16The machine then feeds the now ink-free pulp through several rollers.
17Like an old-fashioned wringer washing machine,
18the rollers squeeze out the dirty water.
19A screw conveyor then breaks up the pulp and moves it to the next station
20which rinses it with clean water.
21Now the pulp is ready to become tissue.
22That transformation begins in the paper machine.
23It injects the pulp evenly across the screen conveyor belt,
24then the pulp passes through rollers that press out the water.
25The extracted water drains down through the screen.
26The pulp then passes through a hot air dryer
27and exits the machine as a thin 10-foot wide sheet of paper.
28Each jumble roll coming off the machine contains about 37 miles of paper.
29The converting machine is the giant contraption that now transforms this paper into tissues.
30The first station unwinds two rolls of paper,
31applying modest tension to remove waves and wrinkles.
32The next station mates the two papers, producing a two-ply sheet.
33The following station holds the sheet steady with suction,
34as a knife slices across it every 8 and 1/2 inches.
35You can see the cuts in slow motion.
36At the next station, these two ply sheets meet up with two ply sheets coming from the opposite direction.
37Here's what that looks like in slow motion,
38and at full speed.
39The sheets enter a mechanism that folds them in half, in an interlocking fashion.
40In slow motion, you can see how they interlock,
41each sheet folded in half,
42one side inserted into the fold of the next sheet.
43This happens at a speed of 16 folds per second.
44This produces a huge stack of folded tissue 5 feet wide.
45The next station separates the big stack into small ones,
46in preparation for the final cutting.
47Each smaller stack contains the precise number of tissues the tissue box will contain,
48from 80 to 250 sheets,
49depending on the format they're packaging.
50The smaller stacks now travel to the next station
51where an automated circular saw cuts every 8 inches,
52producing the final tissue size.
53The interlocking folds ensure that when you pull out one tissue,
54it draws the next out of the box ready to use.
55To produce three ply tissues,
56the converting machine processes six rolls into two sheets of three plies each
57then folds them in the same interlocking fashion.
58The finished tissues travel by conveyor belt to the automated packaging line.
59A robot with multiple suction-cupped arms grabs flattened boxes one at a time,
60opens them,
61and lines them up on another conveyor belt running alongside the tissue belt.
62An automated arm compresses the tissues and slides them into the box.
63The next station glues the flaps closed.
64The top of the box has a removable tab with clear plastic film underneath.
65A tight slide in the film makes grabbing a single tissue a non-issue.