King Eduard III

Jonathan asked a few days ago for an audience.

He accepted, mainly because he was interested in what they had achieved, and what he wanted from him.

He hoped that he would not be greedy, but you could never no.

Soon enough, Jonathan was in his study, and began speaking, after all the formalities had been done: “We managed to create our first paper. It is of an acceptable, but improvable quality.”

He sat his bag, which the king had noticed earlier, but thought he was using it to transport documents to underscore his points, down and took out a sheet of mostly white material. Then, Jonathan lied it on the table. It had some wilts in it, but it was mostly flat.

Then he continued speaking: “This is one of the 7 sheets of paper we produced to this day. I admit openly that it is the flattest one, but the colour and feel of the others is basically the same. On one of the other sheets of paper, we have written down the cost to produce the paper, and how much it would cost if one would scale the production up. But much more interesting than that is what we have written on the other side of the same sheet of paper.”

He took another sheet of the material, which the king now realized was paper, out of his bag. This sheet of paper had been written on in the beautiful and very readable script of Julius Atramento.

“As you can read here, the cost of production, even taking mass production into account is not exactly cheap. It is cheaper than vellum, but still not usable for our task. But let’s look at every prize point individually. The material cost can be changed with some experimentation and if one would set up specific demand for it. In fact, most of the cost of the material was not the acquisition itself but instead finding out who would have significant amounts of the material. Streamlining the process, for example through laws, could decrease this cost significantly. But it is not the biggest point on our list. The biggest point is labour cost. We have three sub-points there. The first one is the preparation of the bought material, which, if I forgot to mention it, is old white cloth. It is not important if it is totally white, but to get a white colour it should be mostly white. Searching for brown cloth might be cheaper, but the quality of the paper would suffer, but for certain tasks, this would be a trade-off one could easily accept. Now, back to the cost of labour in that instance. We can streamline the process, and develop better tools to reduce the time needed per cloth, but I do not think we could get more than 10 to 20 per cent of cost reduction out of it. While the upfront of a new manufacture plant would be higher if we do this, I still think it would end up being worth it. But the next step is where it gets interesting. It is preparing the feedstock out of which the paper is made in the end. Here we could use watermills to speed up the process and reduce or even eliminate the labour needed. But there is a catch.”

The king stopped Jonathan from continuing: “You are really bad at explaining this. So get to the point. Why are you here?”

Jonathan thought for a while and then answered: “I have created the paper. And while I can optimize the process, this would not be an optimal use of my time, especially considering that everything I know about paper, I have used. I want to hand that process of optimization of to someone else. I have some ideas that might be worth following, but not much knowledge of how the process actually would work.”

“So, you want to build this printing press now?”

“Exactly. One of the persons who get that mission should know how to design and build a water mill because it is certainly possible to optimize that second labour part with a water mill.”

“I must think about it. Meet me again tomorrow.” With that, the audience ended.