Michael: Alright Kevin, I'm going to say a word, and you give me your immediate, unfiltered reaction. The word is... 'paper'. Kevin: Boring. The stuff my printer is always out of. The reason I have a 'Junk Mail' pile that's achieved sentience. Why? Michael: That's the exact reaction I expected. And it's the reaction that author Nicholas A. Basbanes completely demolishes in his book, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History. Kevin: "The Everything"? That's a bold claim for something I use to jot down a grocery list and then immediately lose. Michael: It is! But Basbanes is the perfect person to make that claim. He's a renowned bibliophile, basically a professional book-lover, whose life's work is about the physicality of knowledge. And this book was so well-regarded it was a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. He argues that this 'boring' material is one of the most disruptive, world-changing technologies ever invented. Kevin: Okay, you have my attention. But how do you make a history of paper not sound like, well, a lecture on paper? Michael: Basbanes wastes no time blowing up that 'boring' idea. He starts by showing how paper is less about printing and more about... explosions. Both literal and metaphorical.

Michael: He kicks off with these incredible stories that show paper as this double-edged sword. On one side, it’s a tool for breathtaking creation. Take the Montgolfier brothers in 18th-century France. Kevin: I feel like I should know them, but I'm blanking. Michael: They were papermakers. Their family ran a mill, and they were obsessed with the idea of flight. They'd watch smoke rise from a fire and wonder, "How can we capture that? How can we ride the air?" They didn't have advanced materials or complex engines. They had what they knew best: paper. Kevin: Wait, don't tell me... Michael: Exactly. They constructed a massive balloon, an enormous sack, lined with multiple layers of paper from their own mill. They lit a fire underneath it, the hot air filled this paper bag, and it began to rise. In 1783, they launched the first manned hot-air balloon. Humanity's first step into the skies wasn't in a metal contraption; it was in a carefully crafted paper bag. Kevin: That's incredible! So the space race basically started in a paper mill? It’s wild to think that a material we see as so fragile and disposable was the key to one of humanity's greatest leaps. Michael: It’s the perfect example of paper’s creative power. Its properties—lightness, strength when layered, its ability to hold a shape—made the impossible possible. But that’s only one edge of the sword. Basbanes then flips the script and shows us paper’s destructive power. Kevin: Okay, how does paper destroy something? Besides giving me a nasty paper cut. Michael: By becoming a symbol. A carrier of an idea so potent it ignites a war. He takes us to India in 1857, under the control of the British East India Company. The British introduced a new weapon, the Enfield rifle. And with it, a new paper cartridge. Kevin: A paper cartridge? Like a little paper tube for gunpowder? Michael: Precisely. To load the rifle, a soldier, or a sepoy as the Indian soldiers were called, had to bite off the end of the paper cartridge to pour the powder into the barrel. A simple, efficient design. But a rumor began to spread like wildfire. Kevin: Uh oh. I have a bad feeling about this. Michael: The rumor was that the grease used to waterproof these paper cartridges was made from a mixture of beef and pork fat. For the Hindu sepoys, the cow is sacred. For the Muslim sepoys, the pig is unclean. To bite that cartridge was to commit a profound act of religious defilement. Kevin: Oh, wow. So every time they loaded their rifles, they were being forced to violate their deepest beliefs. Michael: Whether the rumor was true or not almost didn't matter. The British officers dismissed the concerns, and that dismissal was seen as the ultimate act of contempt. In May 1857, the sepoys in the town of Meerut refused to use the cartridges. They were punished, and in response, their comrades mutinied. They killed their officers and marched on Delhi. This single spark, this tiny, greased piece of paper, ignited the Sepoy Mutiny, a bloody, year-long rebellion that shook the British Empire to its core. Kevin: That is absolutely insane. A massive war, thousands of lives lost, the course of an empire altered... because of a piece of paper. It's a chilling reminder that technology is never just technology; it's always cultural. The object itself was neutral, but what it represented was explosive. Michael: Exactly. The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II, said it best: "The mighty English... have been overthrown in Hindustan by a single cartridge." It wasn't the gunpowder inside; it was the paper outside. That’s the duality Basbanes presents: paper can lift us to the heavens or drag us into the bloodiest of conflicts.

Kevin: That idea of paper carrying so much cultural weight makes me think about another area the book dives into... our own identities. I mean, what are we without our documents? In the digital age, we think about data trails, but the original data trail was on paper. Michael: It absolutely was. And this is where paper becomes intensely personal and high-stakes. Basbanes explores how paper documents literally construct who we are in the eyes of the world. And how they can be used to create entirely new identities. One of the most thrilling examples is from the Iran hostage crisis, the story that became the movie Argo. Kevin: The fake movie production to sneak diplomats out of the country! I loved that movie. Michael: The entire operation, led by CIA officer Tony Mendez, hinged on paper. They couldn't just say they were a Canadian film crew; they had to prove it. They created a whole fake Hollywood studio, "Studio Six Productions." They printed business cards with a real Los Angeles address and phone number. They created scripts for the fake sci-fi movie, Argo. They had storyboards, production notes, everything. Kevin: The "pocket litter," as they called it. The stuff that makes you look real. Michael: Exactly. The Canadian government provided real passports, but everything else—the entire legend—was built on a foundation of meticulously crafted paper. When the six American diplomats, posing as filmmakers, got to the airport in Tehran, the Revolutionary Guards interrogated them. They pulled out the script, the storyboards. The entire deception, the lives of these six people, rested on whether that stack of paper was convincing enough. Kevin: It's the ultimate catfishing! And it all relied on the paper looking and feeling right. It makes you think about all the digital forgery happening today, but there’s something so visceral about faking a physical object. You have to get the texture, the ink, the staples right. Michael: Mendez himself said it was the pocket litter, the business cards and whatnot, that sold it. The paper made the identity real. But paper doesn't just create false identities. It can also be the last, desperate proof of a real one. This is the other side of the coin, and it's a story that is both heartbreaking and profound. Kevin: Where are we going now? Michael: To September 11th, 2001. In the chaos of the World Trade Center attacks, paper was everywhere. Office documents, memos, reports—millions of pages rained down on Lower Manhattan. They were like confetti from a shattered world. For years, these fragments were collected, becoming artifacts in the 9/11 museum. Kevin: Just random pieces of paper? Michael: Random pieces that told a story. But one piece was different. It was a note, found on the street just before the South Tower collapsed. It was scrawled on a piece of paper and read: "84th floor west office 12 people trapped." Kevin: Chilling. A final message in a bottle, thrown into a storm of smoke and steel. Michael: For ten years, it was an anonymous plea. A symbol of all the people trapped that day. But the museum's forensic team and the medical examiner's office never gave up. They analyzed the handwriting, the paper, the context. And in 2011, a decade after the attacks, they identified the author: Randy Scott, an employee at Euro Brokers on the 84th floor. Kevin: Wow. After ten years. What did that mean for his family? Michael: It changed everything. His wife, Denise, said that for a decade, she had taken comfort in believing he died instantly in the plane's impact. It was a way to cope with the horror. But the note revealed a different story. Randy had survived the impact. He was alive, he was with others, and in his final moments, he wasn't panicking. He was trying to get help. He was trying to save the people with him. Kevin: That's... profound. A piece of paper completely reframed his death. It turned him from a victim into a hero in his family's eyes. Michael: It gave them a new legacy. As his wife said, he fought to the end. That single piece of paper wasn't just a document; it was his final act. It's not just data; it's tangible. You can't hold a deleted email in the same way. It has a physical presence, a weight. It’s a testament.

Kevin: So, after all these incredible stories—from hot-air balloons to the battlefields of India, from CIA black ops to the ashes of 9/11—what's the big takeaway? Is paper just a relic, or is there something more fundamental we're missing in our rush to go 'paperless'? Michael: I think Basbanes shows us that paper isn't just a medium; it's a mirror. It reflects our greatest ambitions, like flight, and our darkest, most intractable conflicts. It holds our official identities, the ones that let us cross borders, and our most private final words. Kevin: It has a kind of gravity to it. A physical weight that digital information just doesn't have. Michael: Exactly. The book is titled On Paper, but it could easily be called an elegy. An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead. Basbanes is, in a way, writing a lament for the slow decline of paper's dominance. But it's not a sad book. It's a celebration of its incredible, enduring power. In a digital world of fleeting pixels and ephemeral data, paper has a permanence. It can be burned, torn, or lost, but when it survives, it survives with a story that you can touch. Kevin: That's a powerful thought. It really makes you look at the simple things around you differently. It makes me wonder, what's the most important piece of paper in my own life? A letter from someone I've lost? A deed to a house? A drawing from my kid? Michael: That's the question the book leaves you with. We invite everyone listening to think about that too. What's your most important piece of paper? Find us on our socials and share your stories. We'd love to hear them. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.