NEWSPRINT 255
been made possible not only by building new mills, but also by increasing
the size, the speed, and the efficiency of the machines used to make this class
of paper* Newsprint manufacture has, in fact, been largely responsible for
leading the industry with ever wider and faster machines. This, of course,
is a logical development, since newsprint must always remain one of the cheapest
grades of paper made, and it is also required in quantities that far exceed any
other class of paper.
The majority of modern Fourdrinier newsprint machines in operation to-
day are designed for maximum paper widths ranging from about 200 to 250
inches, but a notable exception is the world's largest machine, which makes
paper 304 inches wide. This is an all-British machine operating in England.
The most common speeds of modern newsprint machines range from about
1050 to 1250 feet per minute, while the highest authentic speed is in the neigh-
bourhood of 1400 feet per minute. Machines of this kind naturally produce
a lot of paper. The output of the 304-inch machine, for example, when making
super-calendered paper of normal substance (55 grams per square metre),
reeled and ready for the customer, exceeds 200 tons per 24 hours.
The fibrous raw materials for newsprint are prepared exclusively from
wood, and it takes, very roughly, a cord of wood to produce a ton of finished
newsprint; a cord being a pile of logs, all lying parallel to each other, 4 feet
high, 4 feet wide, and 8 feet long- A cord of wood corresponds, very ap-
proximately, to eight trees having an average height of usable trunk of about
50 feet, and an average diameter of about 18 inches. Calculating from the
basis that a typical pre-war daily newspaper of about sixteen pages weighed
4 02., the amount of pulp required for a circulation of two million copies was
over 200 tons (air-dry) per day. This means that rather more than 800 trees
had to be cut down every day to satisfy the requirements of only one of the
leading newspapers published in this country.
Altogether, the average daily consumption of newsprint in the British Isles
during 1938 was 3400 tons, the consumption for the year having readied the
total of 1,241,000 tons. The corresponding annual consumption per head
of the population was about 60 Ib. It is interesting to compare these figures
with those for North America (Canada, U.S.A., and Newfoundland). The
total consumption for the same year, 1938, was 3,088,000 tons, which gives
a daily consumption of 8500 tons. Although these figures are two and a half
times greater than the figures for this country, the consumption per head in
North America was somewhat lower, being about 53 Ib. per year. During 1938
the British Isles and North America together accounted for 62 per cent of the
world production of 6,710,000 tons.
These enormous tonnages give some idea of the inroads being made into