011 The First Paper Mill
Hey Paper Wasp, you make paper by chewing wood, and you were doing it long before we thought of it.
What else is already solved, that we are still proud of inventing?
What problem are you trying to solve that someone has already solved?
Under the edge of a roof hangs a grey nest, light as paper, full of neat six-sided cells.
It is paper. Real paper. Made by a wasp.
What really happens
Paper wasps scrape tiny bits of wood from old fences and dead branches, chew them with their saliva into pulp, and spread it thin to dry. That is how paper is made.
Around three hundred years ago, the French scientist Réaumur watched wasps doing this and suggested people could make paper from wood too. Wood-pulp paper, the kind in your notebooks, came later. The wasps had been doing it all along.
How we know: Réaumur's 1719 observation is a well-known moment in the history of paper.
The turn
We love to invent. But many of our best ideas were already working somewhere else, in a field, in a forest, or in a team down the corridor.
Wisdom often begins with noticing what already works.
Three takeaways
- Many problems have already been solved somewhere.
- Watching carefully can be as valuable as inventing.
- Humility is a shortcut: look around before you start from zero.
Before we invented paper, a wasp was already writing on wood.
…finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.