To a sheet of paper, a paper path is like a Tough Mudder—a multistage obstacle course that must be run in hostile conditions.

To a sheet of paper, a paper path is like a Tough Mudder—a multistage obstacle course that must be run in hostile conditions. With a hint of swagger, Warner walked me through the paper path of a hulking, truck-size iGen printing press (around a million dollars and a hundred and fifty pages per minute). “We start by sucking a sheet off the stack with vacuum feeders,” she said. “Then it travels along thirty feet of path at one thousand three hundred and fifty millimetres per second, changing speed and direction at accelerations reaching 3g.” In xerographic printers, she continued—she had to shout above the press’s vacuum pumps, which sound like a copier’s, but louder—“the sheets are charged with sixty-five hundred volts. In ink-jets, they’re soaked in liquid. Then we have to keep the image from shaking or wiping off.” Warner pointed to the back of the paper path, where the fuser was situated: a set of black rubber rollers heated to three hundred and eighty-five degrees. “It’s like wringing a shirt through an old washing machine,” she said, miming the motion with her hands. Later, she gave me a flowchart of the printing process; it featured a cartoon of a paper sheet, its mouth agape in terror.

Further reading:

• Why Paper Jams Persist