In 1841 Oliver Morris Butler moved west into Illinois, locating at St. Charles, a town about thirty miles from Chicago and situated upon the Fox River. Here he immediately built a wrapping-paper mill; later, and upon the opposite bank of the same stream, he erected a print-paper plant, the first of its kind west of Pittsburg. It is also recorded in the Atlas Biographical Dictionary that Simeon and Asa Butler, members of another branch of the Butler family, made the first letter-paper, the product of an American mill, that was used in the Senate of the United States. ♦The great Fourdrinier machine♦ The desire for improvement in material conditions, for better implements and better methods, has marked every stage of man’s advance. The same spirit that led primitive man to seek a better and more convenient medium of expression than the cumbersome bowlder or the carved obelisk, manifested itself again, centuries later, in the untiring zeal with which manufacturers sought to improve a product that may be considered the final successor of the bowlder and the obelisk. The beginning of the century saw many improvements in the methods of paper-making. In 1804 Messrs. Henry and Seely Fourdrinier, enterprising and public-spirited stationers doing business in England, brought to a good degree of perfection the great machine which bears their name, and which is described at some length in a subsequent chapter dealing with the methods of modern paper manufacture. The machine had been invented, though not perfected, a year or two previously, by a Mr. Roberts in France; in 1805, Mr. Donkin, the engineer of the Fourdrinier Brothers, who had built the machine, further improved it by altering the position of the cylinders so as to dispense with an upper web. By this change the process was so simplified that the work of six vats could be done in twelve hours. These improvements were made in a paper-mill at Two Waters, England; but the machine that can now do in a day the work that formerly required three months was not immediately introduced into this country. ♦Many new mills♦ The increase of paper-mills in the United States had been so rapid that in 1810 the number in the country was stated to be 185. In 1811, Zenas Crane, who had built the first mill at Dalton, since known as the Berkshire Mills, erected a new mill at the lower falls of the Housatonic. These pioneers gave a great impetus to the manufacture, and paper-mills sprang up as if by magic along all the swift-flowing mountain streams of New England.