The yellow- and black-striped paper wasp builds its hulking honeycomb nest by gathering wood fiber and slathering it with saliva, creating a thin, paper-like material it constructs into hives.
In 6th-century China, these fragile shelters, hanging from the sprawling branches of native mulberry trees, were a common sight for Cai Lun, a eunuch, inventor, and politician widely credited with inventing the paper-making process.
Legend has it that the paper wasp inspired Lun to scrape bark from mulberry trees and mash it into pulp with water to create dried sheets of paper. Chinese emperors guarded these papermaking secrets jealously for centuries, but the process soon spread to the Islamic world, where it was refined.
Modern papermaking began in 19th-century France with the invention of the Fourdrinier machine, a device that allowed papermakers to produce sheets continuously, rather than one at a time. Today’s papermaking machines are similar to the Fourdrinier device, using a wire mesh to wring water from pulp...
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