Context: Paper armor originated in China as early as the 6th century, first improvised from books and later deliberately manufactured from folded or layered paper. It was widely used by regular armies, militias, bandits, and rebels due to its low cost and ease of production. Despite being lightweight, layered paper was sometimes combined with silk or soaked in water. It offered meaningful protection against blades and even some early firearms. Its effectiveness declined with the advent of modern breech-loading rifles, but it persisted into the 19th century in some regions.
What is a phone book?
I’m 40, I was just teasing and now I feel bad!
I can’t tell if this is a joke, but just in case, I’ll answer anyway.
It may vary by nation. I’ll speak about in the UK, but I’d expect something similar existed in other countries
Until very recently, most people and businesses had “landlines”, which were phones and phone numbers connected to buildings.
You used to receive 2 phone books each year, delivered to you for free, to every house and business address in a city/town.
One phone book would contain an index of every business in the city/town/area - grouped together alphabetically by the type of business - so you could look up e.g. plumber/electrician and there’d be a list of all plumbers and electricians in the city, and their phone numbers. Same for ordering a taxi, or a pizza.
The other phone book would be an index of people’s surnames and initials, addresses and phone numbers from the local city/town/region (unless they opted out of being included). So if you needed to contact someone, you could look them up in the phone book, e.g. trying to contact a bloke called “Dave Smith” who you think lived on “Fake Street”, you’d search through until you found “Smith, D, 12 Fake Street”, and it’d show his number.
It also meant you could just look through the phone book and find someone with a silly name, and then ring them up and say silly things i.e. phone up someone called “Zatman” and sing the Batman theme tune at them (I’m so sorry, Mr & Mrs Zatman, if you’re still alive).
It worked pretty well until someone invented “cold calling” marketing, and scummy businesses used to use the phone book to ring people up at random and try to sell things to them - after that, most people went “opt out” of the directory.
Because this was a large amount of information, both directories were a bit bigger than A4 sized pages and about 5cm (2 inch) thick.