Half of the Newspaper

How far does half of a newspaper go and what can you use it for? Today most is simply recycled and turned into, well, other newspapers. That's rather uninteresting but what people used to do with them is a whole other story.  
Famously, fish and chips were usually wrapped in newspapers and some still are today. Is this for that nostalgic feel or, as I once heard, a way of adding to the flavor? No, that second one is complete nonsense. It was for simple reasons, Newspapers were the cheapest thing that a local seller could get their hands on that was also a clean sheet.
In the golden days of football as your granddad may refer to it. You know, when players were hardly regulated, hacking was prominent and very easy to get away with due to the lack of eyes on the pitch and a lack of shin-pads made it even worse. Yeah, that era. Rather than face sustaining a serious injury players would stuff a newspaper into the back of the socks to try and cushion the blow.
But possibly the strangest use of half a newspaper came from the toilet industry. Not toilet paper, but in fact something else. Toilet flushes had to be at an exact standard, a standard of being able to flush down half a newspaper. Today of course there are less wasteful methods of testing this but back in the day, I forget which one exactly, toilets were tested by flushing newspapers.