Wood, Water, and Brains: Modern Paper Making and Merchandising as Revealed by the Rise of Kimberly-Clark Corporation

I

POWER, wood, and water are the essentials of modern paper making, and the greatest of these is water. The sheet on which these words are printed was once almost fluid, a fragile web of fibrous particles in solution, and the central problem in its manufacture was that of adding and then subtracting water.

It is water-born electric power which turns the giant machines of the mills, reducing an unending procession of tree trunks to their component fibres and then realigning them in thin sheets ready for the printer. The paper manufacturer uses more water than wood, more wood than man-hours of toil. All through the process, man supervises and controls mighty natural forces in the modern aspects of this ancient art, which was once almost entirely a handicraft.

Given water in sufficient quantity and purity, wood supply is the next factor in deciding location. The ideal site is on a rushing stream of pure water capable of being harnessed for electrical production and flowing through virgin forest rich in soft woods, preferably spruce and balsam. These are northern trees, and the farther north they grow the more dense is their wood content. So we find the paper industry of North America, or at least that great part of it which provides materials for newspapers, books, magazines, and circulars, concentrated in the more northerly states and reaching over into Canada. On the American side, some original advantages have been lost through rapid cutting of adjacent forests, and pulpwood is now carried considerable distances to the mill by rail, raft, or ship.

Once the lumberjack has felled a tree, it is sawn into standard lengths for transport — sixteen-footers, eightfooters, four-footers. For all-river work the approved length is sixteen feet; the hundred-foot monarch of yesterday floats downstream in pieces, which form part of a rolling mosaic of logs filling the stream from bank to bank. Here the rivermen — adventurers of the woods — shepherd the logs on their way, preventing jams, keeping the procession moving as they leap from one rolling cylinder to another. A log may float fifty to a hundred miles on some of those sinuous northern rivers before it arrives inside the boom-controlled area above the mill, from which daily supplies are drawn. After the spring run, when the winter’s cut comes out on white water from melting snows, the river above the mill may be full of wood mile after mile. Powerful cranes and conveyors stock huge mountains of white or gray logs which often tower higher than the mills themselves as merely reserve supplies, to be drawn upon when water-borne or rail-borne supplies fall short.

The daily supply of logs floats to a jack hoist carrying the logs up through power saws which reduce sixteen-footers to four-footers. Next they lose their bark jackets, to emerge wet, shining, and clean, while the bark goes on its way to feed the furnaces, generating the necessary steam which later on disintegrates the wood and dries the paper. From this point the log’s progress will depend upon whether it is selected for sulphite treatment or for grinding. In the latter case the wood is forced by hydraulic pressure against giant millstones until it looks and feels almost like flour. This pulp is then put through sieves and settling basins until all foreign matter and rank fibres have been eliminated, the purpose being to reduce it to an absolutely dependable filler material.

Logs selected for the sulphite process are reduced to small chips and cooked with sulphurous acid in a huge retort or digester. The result of this chemical action is, by bulk, approximately half cellulose, the wood fibres having become soft and pliable. The remainder is waste material containing lignin, still a relatively unknown quantity in organic chemistry. There are also in the residue appreciable quantities of resins and sugars. Both fortune and reputation as a public benefactor await the individual or group that can recover byproduct value from these sources.

What happens next to these two materials — sulphite pulp and groundwood— will depend upon the product desired. The pulp may be bleached, pressed, and shipped to distant mills for use in paper or kindred product, or it may be macerated, mixed with the groundwood and other materials, and made into paper on the spot.

So far all these operations, proceeding at high speed and on different levels as logs are carried through the various stages automatically and as their derivatives in solution flow through channels and settling basins, have been merely preparing the raw materials for paper making. The latter process is a truly tremendous expression of science and power. Paper-making machines are hundreds of feet in length, and complex in detail, but the key idea is simplicity itself—to saturate solids with all the water they will hold and then get rid of surplus water as expeditiously as possible. The mix, perhaps only one per cent solid and far too thin to support itself, is flowed out upon an endless screen of fine brass wire which allows part of the water to escape by gravity. Traveling rapidly, the sheet is passed along from its wire support to a felt blanket. Meantime it is being subjected to intense pressure and cleared of water by various devices. It then passes over and between steam-filled cylinders and finally through highly polished chilled iron rolls which impart the necessary smoothness of surface to the sheet. Still warm to the hand but dry by ordinary standards, it rolls off the machine to become a gigantic spool of white, clean paper. When a roll has reached correct dimensions, agile hands break the web and start another roll so swiftly that the great machine itself is not halted.

Except for this sharp action, the paper makers in charge of a giant Fourdrinier ² machine of latest model are inspectors rather than doers. From the moment the mix, thin as slush, begins its race through the machine, until it emerges as paper ready for shipment or warehousing, the work is all mechanical. But this kindly monster of a machine takes a deal of watching by sharp eyes and delicate adjustment by skilled fingers. In spite of mechanical and scientific aids, paper making is still an art, depending for its success upon infinite attention to detail at every stage of its manufacture.

As paper changes from liquid to solid before the eyes of the observer, the mind runs back to the beginnings of this vital business. The Chinese began it, say the books; in so doing they laid the foundation for the modern world, which has been built on the records of the past and the diffusion of ideas through the written and printed word. Lacking paper, history would be almost a blank; geography still a fable; poetry a harper’s song by the fireside; trade a matter of simple barter, and the productive arts still under rule of thumb. Each generation, instructed only by word of mouth by elders schooled through crude experience, would have had to repeat in its own time the errors of its forefathers,and all human knowledge would have been at the mercy of precarious memory. Likewise, if these great paper machines should be stilled forever, our civilization could hardly rally from the shock. Imagine, if you can, the bleakness, incoherence, and futility of a world without books, newspapers, magazines, print of all descriptions. The survivors of such a catastrophe would soon be on their way back to savagery if the thought web which binds society together and preserves the accumulating wisdom of mankind were to be broken asunder.

In the July Atlantic Mr. Stanley Casson gives an archæologist’s view of the inevitable disintegration of our great cities into rubbish heaps in which his fellow craftsmen, of some unnamed breed, will delve for telltale evidences of our vanished social life. But our best works — imperishable ideas clearly and beautifully expressed in books — have received world-wide circulation in such numbers that nothing less than a world cataclysm could destroy them or the means of reprinting them. Thanks to the art of printing and its sister arts, civilization is better insured against disaster than it once was; local misfortunes might force upon it a change of base and scene, but hardly more while paper continues to be printed.

II

Paper making naturally followed lumbering operations toward the Northwest in the busy, progressive years after the War between the States. That conflict, intensifying the demand for news, resulted in great increases in newspaper circulation in the older centres of population, and every new town in the rapidly settled West required its local newspapers and printing plant. A growing market for paper developed in the Mississippi Valley, and a swiftly expanding railway system permitted shipping to distant areas from the edge of the big woods where materials and water power were abundant. Farsighted lumbermen saw the economic advantage of paper making, first as a means of using water power and timber not suitable for building purposes, second as a way to continue their activities after the virgin forests had yielded their choicest trees. Thus central Wisconsin became naturally a paper-making area, especially in the Fox River Valley, blessed beyond other regions with abundant water of proper quality, large supplies of raw material, and access to markets both by rail and by the Great Lakes waterways. For more than sixty years the Fox River Valley has been making paper. To-day it makes more kinds of paper than any other section of equal size in the country. Paper is the life interest, of this beautiful valley, and that interest has brought into being there the Institute of Paper Chemistry at Appleton, Miscousin, supported by the paper industry of the nation to conduct fundamental research.

At Neenah, Wisconsin, where the Fox River, with the tremendous reservoir of Lake Winnebago behind it, begins its slide toward Green Bay and Lake Michigan, four farseeing pioneers, J. A. Kimberly, C. B. Clark, F. C, Shattuck, and Havilah Babcock, began to make paper in 1872. The founders were men of means accustomed to financing their own enterprises; they made no public offer of shares, and for nearly fifty years after its founding Kimberly-Clark remained a private, family enterprise. During all this period the company grew through the ploughing back of earnings, remaining entirely in the hands of the descendants of the founders and a few active managers who had acquired stock interests. Stockholders numbered only 52 prior to the public offering of l928, when the company increased its capital to $30,000,000.‘

During these years of small group ownership, Kimberly-Clark established itself on a solid base as regards both policies and properties. It enlarged its holdings in the Fox River Valley, where it now operates the lakeview and Badger-Globe at Neenah, Wisconsin, Atlas at Appleton, Wisconsin, and the mill at near-by Kimberly, built in 1889 and rebuilt in 1903. Mills were erected at Niagara, Wisconsin, in 1899 (remodeled in 1916), and at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1920, the capacity of the latter being doubled in 1921. The chief products of these mills are as follows: —

1. Book Papers (Niagara and Kimberly, Wis., and Niagara Falls, N. Y.)
Kleerfeet Processed; for all printing
Hyfect purposes
Primoplate Non-processed; for all
Hyloplate printing purposes
Rotoplate, particularly suited to the rotogravure printing process

2. Wall Papers (Atlas, Appleton, Wis.)

3. Specialties (Lakeview, Neenah, Wis.) Cover stocks — Tribal, Economy, and Recondite Covers
School papers — Kimray
Box cover papers
Ticket stock, and so forth

4. Crepe Wadding Products (Badger-Globe, Neenah, and Niagara Falls)
Sanitary pads
Facial tissues
Handkerchiefs
Hospital wadding } Manufactured for International Cellucotton Products Company and sold by it under the trade-marked names Kotex, Kleenex, Kerfs, and Cellucotton (not cotton) absorbent wadding
Kimpak, a protective material
Kimsul, an insulating material against sound and temperature
Sanek neck strips
Kimflex shoe counters, inner soles, and other specialties

The capacity of Kimberly-Clark’s six American mills is 1,000.000 pounds of paper a day, exclusive of newsprint and crepe wadding products.

Extensive timber tracts were added, notably 200,000 acres of virgin forest in the Gogebic Lake district of Northern Michigan and Minnesota.

Under the leadership of Mr. F. J. Sensenbrenner, who joined KimberlyClark in 1889 and became the President in 1926, the company developed policies which were far ahead of their time and have influenced the entire papermaking industry. Recently Mr. Sensenbrenner’s leadership was recognized by his election to the Presidency of the American Pulp and Paper Association.

In research in the always mysterious and still complex chemistry of paper, Kimberly-Clark has long been a leader, developing new processes and products. This was the first company to introduce reasonably priced rotogravure paper of light weight and high opacity to American printers; it leads in crepe wadding research and adaptations, and its work has been outstanding in improving groundwood papers by bleaching the wood pulp and by equipping Fourdrinier machines with special processing devices.

When Kimberly-Clark announced that in its new Kleerfect and Hyfect groundwood book papers printing qualities would be lifted to new heights at no increased cost, the printers of the country were skeptical, especially as to their performance in half-tone and color printing. The company not only proved the point in these respects, but by the new process developed sheets both sides of which possessed equally good printing surfaces, thereby overcoming in large degree an age-old printing difficulty due to the fact that the underside of the sheet revealed the telltale marks of the wire screen over which it had passed in the first stages of manufacture. The results are papers especially adapted to fast press runs in large editions.

In sales and advertising policies Kimberly-Clark recognized early the new trends in business. No KimberlyClark sheet is considered sold until it has been printed; once gained, customers are held as steady buyers for long periods.

In advertising, the company has taken its story to the public with marked success. By demonstrating with its own advertisements the superior appeal of rotogravure paper, it broke the ice for both printers and publishers when that field was new. Later, in introducing Kleerfect and Hyfect, a determined campaign begun six months before deliveries were possible made so deep an impression on the printing trade that these new papers were successful from the start, though introduced in the black year of 1933. These and other innovations, backed by consistent advertising, resulted in steady operations at a substantial per cent of capacity through the recent trying years. Kimberly-Clark is a shining example of the power of new products and steady advertising in overcoming generally adverse conditions.

In its relations with printers, Kimberly-Clark recognizes the paper maker’s responsibility for performance as well as for product. Its papers are, of course, subject to rigid inspection, as are those of all leading mills. However, so varied are the conditions under which printing is done, and so rapid have been the developments in printing presses and inks, that the company maintains a close liaison with its printer customers through skilled field men ready to advise on technical printing problems. In this way it attempts to fill in what is by common consent the weak spot in the mechanics of publishing — the lack of complete and continuous coöperation between the best brains of the printing industry and the best brains of the paper-making industry.

III

In 1926, Kimberly-Clark joined with the New York Times in erecting at Kapuskasing, Ontario, a magnificent newsprint plant for its subsidiary, Spruce Falls Power & Paper Company.

Kapuskasing is situated on the Canadian National Railways, on the great arc which that railroad makes near the fiftieth parallel of latitude in its transcontinental progress toward the Pacific along the northerly line of settlement in the Dominion. The visitor to this industrial frontier has passed the northerly limits of established mining around Cochrane and Timmins, and is within a hundred air miles or so of James Bay, the southern extension of Hudson’s Bay.

Coming by air from Port Arthur on Lake Superior, as I did, one flies over a beautiful wilderness of lake, forest, and muskeg for three hundred miles, a country almost untenanted by man except for an occasional mining settlement and prospectors seeking new gold strikes on this last of the rail-encircled frontiers. This is the greatest continuous virgin forest of soft woods on the continent, and Canada most intelligently is protecting it from fire by airplane patrols, watchtowers, and quick response to blazes. Burnedover patches are a common feature of the landscape, but they are mostly small in extent and traversed by fire lanes, each ribbed area proving that efficient fire fighters have there met the enemy and triumphed.

In the northeastern corner of this area the Kapuskasing River flows north toward Hudson’s Bay. No one, save perhaps an Indian trapper or a white prospector, knows as yet precisely where this great tributary of the Mattagami rises, for parts of this wilderness are still unmapped. Here, in the Algoma and Cochrane districts, the Spruce Falls Company has under lease from the government nearly five thousand square miles of forest land. At Smoky Falls, fifty miles distant from the plant, stands a hydroelectric plant with a capacity of 75,000horsepower, produced at the lowest cost available to industry anywhere. Completely modern because constructed in 1929,— and few indeed have been the paper mills built since, — the Spruce Falls plant can produce 175,000tons of newsprint annually. Its location and equipment permit phenomenally low costs without cutting the corners on quality. Here electricity is so cheap that it can be used economically to make steam and cook wood. Here timber of superlative paper-making qualities makes possible an enviable percentage of yield and a sheet of outstanding merit.

No doubt Kapuskasing operations suffer from low newsprint prices and high freight rates, but their effects are not apparent in the town, a bright spot on the map of that far-northern country.

It is a company town, but, unlike so many company towns, it really reflects the Kimberly-Clark idea of what a town ought to be. After so much wilderness, and a bird’s-eye view of some neighboring settlements which grew like Topsy, one rejoices that some central authority with sense enough to hire a town planner and capital enough to build with dignity and stability could establish this sightly little city on the flat prairie. From the air, Kapuskasing looks like a dolls’ town of pretty houses arranged around a parked semicircle which gives upon the serpentine river that separates the town from the mills. Three large structures — the first we saw in three hundred miles of wilderness travel — stand out as sentinels of urban civilization in the vast plain stretching away to the Arctic. They are the Community House, the Inn for the accommodation of unmarried employees and travelers, who find there comforts long deferred in most of the North Country, and the Sensenbrenncr Hospital, equipped by Mr. F. J. Sensenbrenner, an outpost of modern medical science serving a wide area. Nearly everyone in Kapuskasing belongs to the Community Club, which, in a town of four thousand population, passes thirty thousand persons through its doors every year, offering them a wide range of educational and recreational activities, including bowling alleys and basketball courts, gymnasium, ’talkies’ (as they say in Canada), lectures, library service, musicals, home dramatics, debates, bridge, and, of course, tea, for this is part of the realm of His Majesty, George V. Perhaps the prize exhibit of the Kapuskasing Community Hall, and one indicating the good-fellowship prevailing in the town, is a lodge room which both Masons and Knights of Columbus, in all amity, use for their meetings on different evenings.

Because Kapuskasing was built from the ground up at one time, its attention to social problems is notable, but the Kimberly-Clark interest in community welfare is also expressed in housing and community club projects of similar nature at Niagara and Kimberly, Wisconsin.

IV

While Kimberly-Clark made its reputation on printing papers, within recent years it has become a leader in developing absorbent paper products — technically known as crepe wadding — for sanitary, insulating, and other purposes. Known to the public as Kotex and Kleenex, these are among the well-known products developed in Kimberly-Clark laboratories and made exclusively in Kimberly-Clark mills for the International Cellucotton Products Company, an entirely distinct corporation which advertises and distributes these products. The manufacture of crepe wadding from sulphite pulp is largely a matter of fluffing the wood fibre until it becomes highly absorbent, and to accomplish this Kimberly-Clark engineers have originated unique plant layouts. The highest degree of automatization and sanitary control marks the assembling and packaging of these and similar products.

V

Paper making is fundamentally a power-machine industry, employing relatively few persons in comparison to volume of output, but the continuous processes described require close attention and high skill at all points. Labor relations are consequently of the utmost importance. On February 18, 1920, when employee representation was a novelty in American industry, a council of employees was established to bargain collectively with the management.

This plan, revised as of June 17, 1933, contains more ‘teeth’ from the labor standpoint, in the opinion of the employees who helped to draft it, than any other similar compact in American industry. The plan provides for local settlement of local disputes and for reference of general questions at regular intervals to a General Council composed of twenty-one representatives of employees from all the company’s scattered plants, meeting with an equal representation from management.

The General Council, in addition to handling all basic questions of wages, hours, and working conditions, has legislated a system of standard instructions which govern the action of supervisors and employees in every important aspect of their relationship. Proceedings of the General Council are distributed to employees, who are thus made acquainted with the actions taken, and apprised of the conduct of their representatives in joint conference with management. The employees have equal voice not only in determining wages and hours, but also in many other matters commonly reserved to management. For instance, the councils are now working out together with the management a complete job analysis and classification under which wage rates will be set in accordance with the relative importance of each job. Just as Kimberly-Clark acted on collective bargaining long before government acted in that field, so the management of the Corporation announced to employees, on the downfall of the NRA, that no changes will be made in any relationship except through joint action in General Council. ’Our agreements with employees under the Council plan,’ said President Sensen brenner, ‘are as binding on us as they would be under the law.‘

There seems to exist in KimberlyClark a desire on the part of both management and representatives of employees to be worthy of the other’s respect. They realize that law alone cannot compel right relations within industry. That must be achieved from the inside out, rather than from the outside in. They have evidently built on the theory that both parties to a collective-bargaining enterprise must contribute their share of good will, patience, and respect for personality. In spite of many controversial issues which must necessarily exist under the prevailing wage and profit system, employees and management of KimberlyClark seem to have got hold of those basic elements of common interest which are so frequently lost sight of in modern industrial life.

In the cities where it is a leading industrial factor, Kimberly-Clark has built clubhouses, swimming pools, and hospitals, and in some cases provides housing; but the operation of these properties is inside the sphere of labor relations, and employees join in establishing the rates and rules under which these facilities are used. It would be difficult to find a more cohesive and intelligent labor force, the coöperative spirit having been built up by years of fair dealing, steady employment, and the long-established practice of joint conferences between management and men.

VI

In Kimberly-Clark the observer will note certain characteristics which are the natural result of its long existence as a family or small group enterprise. There is a deep concern for quality output and customer satisfaction; also a fraternal note in its relations with employees, most of whom live in relatively small cities where KimberlyClark itself furnishes practically all the jobs.

In the reach of its research, engineering, industrial relations, advertising, and sales promotion activities, Kimberly-Clark Corporation is as alert and progressive as any business unit in the country, regardless of size or reputation. It has moved confidently forward in the seven years since it became listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and the prospects are bright for its continued leadership in the many important branches of paper making in which it specializes.

Copyright 1935, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.