circa 1827 In 1787, Joshua, his brother Thomas, and their uncle,
Miers Fisher, began making paper at a mill in the
Brandywine Village along the
Brandywine Creek in Delaware. The mill was originally built by their maternal grandfather,
Joshua Fisher in 1765. The first batches of paper were created in June 1787. The entrepreneurs had help from
Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1788, lent Miers Fisher some French books on papermaking. In time the mills prospered, specialising in banknote paper. The Gilpins supplied many States' banks as well as the
United States Treasury. The company was initially named Gilpin & Fisher but also operated under the names Joshua Gilpin and Company, Thomas Gilpin and Company and Gilpin and Company. It was known locally as the Brandywine Paper Mill. He spent the next six years touring the continent including the factories and mills of the
Industrial Revolution. His travels took him throughout Great Britain and Ireland as well as the Low Countries, France and Switzerland. Gilpin wanted to learn all he could about modern methods of paper-making, and visited many other industries as well. He kept a diary of his travels with voluminous notes about the people he met, the industrial processes he inspected and his impressions of the towns and countryside. During his time in England he gathered information about the application of
chlorine to the bleaching of paper-stuff and applied that knowledge to his mill in Delaware. At that time paper was made from ground-up linen rags, which after fermenting and disintegrating needed to be bleached to make white paper. He witnessed the process first October 1795 in William Simpson's
Polton Bank mill at
Lasswade in Scotland, and later, in March 1796, in James Smith's mill at
Maidstone, Kent. The process had been discovered by the French chemist
Berthollet and introduced into Scotland by 1791 and England the following year. Gilpin and his family returned to America on October 15, 1801. In 1811, Gilpin and his family returned to England, where they became trapped by the
War of 1812 and had to remain until it was over. They lived in Yealand Conyers, and Gilpin was able to gather more information about new paper manufacturing methods, this time the cylinder-mould paper-making machine, developed by
John Dickinson. The Gilpins returned to America in 1815. Dickinson severely criticized the Gilpin's for luring his employee away in order to steal his invention. The Gilpin machine first produced paper in February 1817 and was used in the printing the edition of ''Poulson's Daily Advertiser'' published in that month. They also produced and sold the paper making machine to other manufacturers. The introduction of the paper making machine by the Gilpins revolutionized the manufacture of paper throughout the world. The Gilpins strove to keep their machine a secret, but rivals were eventually able to copy the technology. For a time the Gilpin mill prospered as a result of the new methods, but an economic depression in 1819, coupled with Joshua's expenditure on a new house,
Kentmere, (named after their Westmorland origins), as well as the cost of improvements to the mill caused a decline in fortune. The Gilpins also established the Brandywine Woolen Mill in 1812, but it flooded in 1822 and was sold in 1825. The paper mill was damaged by a fire and flood in the 1820s. The Gilpin brothers tried to sell the concern without success until 1837, when a group of Philadelphia businessmen purchased it. The last paper made by the Gilpins was in June 1837, 50 years after the enterprise began. The Gilpin family were promoters of the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Joshua was elected in 1803 as a member of the board of directors to the newly formed canal company and was involved in making a new survey. Gilpin was elected as a member of the
American Philosophical Society in 1804. Gilpin died on August 22, 1841, at his Kentmere residence in Wilmington, Delaware and was buried at
Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. ==Writings==