A Clerk's Machine Ends Papermaking by Hand

Nicolas-Louis Robert, a clerk tired of managing quarreling workers at a French paper mill, patented a machine in January 1799 that formed paper as an unbroken sheet on a moving belt of wire cloth, rather than one page at a time dipped by hand from a vat. Robert lost control of his own patent in a financial dispute, and English financiers, the Fourdrinier brothers, funded its refinement into what's still called the Fourdrinier machine today.