Who Came up With the Crazy Idea?

Isaiah Deck was an adventurer at heart, who, in 1847, was in Egypt looking for Cleopatra's lost emerald mines, when he kept stumbling across piles of bones and linen wrappings of huge mummy caches (both animal and human). Knowing at the time there was a huge rag shortage in the United States for making paper, he could not resist looking at all of the fine linen wrappings and thinking that here was a gold mine, instead.

Accordingly he made some calculations and published his findings in the Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New-York, for the year 1854. The idea was novel, but it did not take long to catch on. In his Chronology of the Origin and Progress of Paper and Paper-Making (Albany: J. Munsell, 1876), Joel Munsell recorded the following item for 1855:

“Egyptian rags did not make an appearance in this country until the present year, when a cargo of 1215 bales arrived, and were purchased by J. Priestly & Co. at 4 and 3 3/8 cents a pound on six and eight months time. The bill amounted to $25,000."

It is not know where those rags went, but it was the beginning of a massive importation and manufacturing business which flourished primarily in New England, but reached as far west as Appleton, Wisconsin.