PAPER AND PRINTING.
_Paper-making._--“The art preservative of all arts”--itself must have
means of preservation, and hence the art of paper-making precedes the
art of printing.
It was Pliny who wrote, at the beginning of the Christian era, that “All
the usages of civilised life depend in a remarkable degree upon the
employment of paper. At all events the remembrance of past events.”
Naturally to the Chinese, the Hindoo, and the Egyptian, we go with
inquiries as to origin, and find that as to both arts they were making
the most delicate paper from wood and vegetable fibres and printing with
great nicety, long before Europeans had even learned to use papyrus or
parchment, or had conceived the idea of type.
So far as we know the wasp alone preceded the ancient Orientals in the
making of paper. Its gray shingled house made in layers, worked up into
paper by a master hand from decayed wood, pulped, and glutinised,
waterproofed, with internal tiers of chambers, a fortress, a home, and
an airy habitation, is still beyond the power of human invention to
reproduce.
Papyrus--the paper of the Egyptians: Not only their paper, but its pith
one of their articles of food, and its outer portions material for
paper, boxes, baskets, boats, mats, medicines, cloths and other articles
of merchandise.
Once one of the fruits of the Nile, now no longer growing there. On its
fragile leaves were recorded and preserved the ancient literatures--the
records of dynasties--the songs of the Hebrew prophets--the early annals
of Greece and Rome--the vast, lost tomes of Alexandria. Those which were
fortunately preserved and transferred to more enduring forms now
constitute the greater part of all we have of the writings of those
departed ages.
In making paper from papyrus, the inner portion next to the pith was
separated into thin leaves; these were laid in two or more layers,
moistened and pressed together to form a leaf; two or more leaves united
at their edges if desired, or end to end, beaten smooth with a mallet,
polished with a piece of iron or shell, the ends, or sides, or both, of
the sheet sometimes neatly ornamented, and then rolled on a wooden
cylinder. The Romans and other ancient nations imported most of their
papyrus from Egypt, although raising it to considerable extent in their
own swamps.
In the seventh century, the Saracens conquered Egypt and carried back
therefrom, papyrus, and the knowledge of how to make paper from it to
Europe.
Parchment manufactured from the skins of young calves, kids, lambs,
sheep, and goats, was an early rival of papyrus, and was known and used
in Europe before papyrus was there introduced.
The softening of vegetable and woody fibre of various kinds, flax and
raw cotton and rags, and reducing it into pulp, drying, beating, and
rolling it into paper, seem to have been suggested to Europe by the
introduction of papyrus, for we learn of the first appearance of such
paper by the Arabians, Saracens, Spaniards and the French along through
the eighth, ninth, and tenth and eleventh centuries. Papyrus does not,
however, appear to have been superseded until the twelfth century.
Public documents are still extant written in the twelfth century on
paper made from flax and rags; and paper mills began to put in an
appearance in Germany in the fourteenth century, in which the fibre was
reduced to pulp by stampers. England began to make paper in the next
century. Pulping the fibre by softening it in water and beating the same
had then been practised for four centuries. Rollers in the mills for
rolling the pulp into sheets were introduced in the fifteenth century,
and paper makers began to distinguish their goods from those made by
others by water marks impressed in the pulp sheets. The jug and the pot
was one favourite water mark in that century, succeeded by a fool’s cap,
which name has since adhered to paper of a certain size, with or without
the cap. So far was the making of paper advanced in Europe that about
1640 wall paper began to be made as a substitute for tapestry; although
as to this fashion the Chinese were still ahead some indefinite number
of centuries.
Holland was far advanced in paper-making in the seventeenth century. The
revolution of 1688 having seriously interrupted the art in England, that
country imported paper from Holland during that period amounting to
£100,000. It was a native of Holland, Rittenhouse, who introduced
paper-making in America and erected a mill near Philadelphia in the
early years of the eighteenth century, and there made paper from linen
rags.
The Dutch also had substituted cylinders armed with blades in place of
stampers and used their windmills to run them. The Germans and French
experimented with wood and straw.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century some manufacturers in
Europe had learned to make white paper from white rags, and as good in
quality, and some think better, than is made at the present day. The
essentials of paper making by hand from rags and raw vegetable fibres,
the soaking of fibres in water and boiling them in lyes, the beating,
rolling, smoothing, sizing and polishing of the paper, were then known
and practised. But the best paper was then a dear commodity. The art of
bleaching coloured stock was unknown, and white paper was made alone
from stock that came white into the mill. The processes were nearly all
hand operations. “Beating” was pounding in a mortar. The pulp was laid
by hand upon moulds made of parallel strands of coarse brass wire; and
the making of the pulp by grinding wood and treating it chemically to
soften it was experimental.
The nineteenth century produced a revolution. It introduced the use of
modern machinery, and modern chemical processes, by which all known
varieties and sizes of paper, of all colours, as well as paper vessels,
are made daily in immense quantities in all civilised countries, from
all sorts of fibrous materials.
Knight, in his _Mechanical Dictionary_, gives a list of nearly 400
different materials for paper making that had been used or suggested,
for the most part within the century and up to twenty years ago, and the
number has since increased.
The modern revolution commenced in 1799, when Louis Robert, an employee
of François Didot of Essones, France, invented and patented the first
machine for making paper in a long, wide, continuous web. The French
government in 1800 granted him a reward of 8,000 francs. The machine was
then exhibited in England and there tested with success. It was there
that Messrs. Fourdrinier, a wealthy stationery firm, purchased the
patents, expended £60,000 for improvements on the machine, and first
gave to the world its practical benefits. This expenditure bankrupted
them, as the machines were not at once remunerative, and parliament
refused to grant them pecuniary assistance. Gamble, Donkin, Koops, the
Fourdriniers, Dickenson, and Wilkes, were the first inventors to improve
the Robert machine, and to give it that form which in many essential
features remains to-day. They, together with later inventors, gave to
the world a new system of paper making.
By 1872 two hundred and ninety-nine Fourdrinier machines were running in
the United States alone. In the improved Fourdrinier machine or system,
rags, or wood, or straw are ground or otherwise reduced to pulp, and
then the pulp, when properly soaked and drained, is dumped into a
regulating box, passing under a copper gate to regulate the amount and
depth of feed, then carried along through strainers, screeners or
dressers, to free the mass from clots and reduce it to the proper
fineness, over an endless wire apron, spread evenly over this apron by a
shaking motion, subjected to the action of a suction box by which the
water is drawn off by air-suction pumps, carried between cloth-covered
rollers which press and cohere it, carried on to a moving long felt
blanket to further free it from moisture, and which continues to hold
the sheet of pulp in form; then with the blanket through press rolls
adjustable to a desired pressure and provided with means to remove
therefrom adhering pulp and to arrest the progress of the paper if
necessary; then through another set of compression rollers, when the
condensed and matted pulp, now paper, is carried on to a second blanket,
passed through a series of steam cylinders, where the web is partially
dried, and again compressed, thence through another series of rollers
and drying cylinders, which still further dry and stretch it, and now,
finally completed, the sheet is wound on a receiving cylinder. The
number of rollers and cylinders and the position and the length of the
process to fully dry, compact, stretch and finish the sheet, may be, and
are, varied greatly. If it is desired to impress on or into the paper
water marks, letters, words, or ornamental matter, the paper in its
moist stage, after it passes through the suction boxes, is passed under
a “dandy” or fancy scrolled roll provided on its surface with the
desired design. When it is desired to give it a smooth, glossy surface,
the paper, after its completion, is passed through animal sizing
material, and then between drying and smoothing rollers. Or this sizing
may be applied to the pulp at the outset of the operation. Colouring
material, when desired, is applied to the pulp, before pressing. By the
use of machines under this system, a vast amount of material, cast-off
rags, etc., before regarded as waste, was utilised for paper making.
The modern discoveries of the chemists of the century as to the nature
of fibres, best modes and materials for reducing them to pulp, and
bleaching processes, have brought the art of paper making from wood and
other fibrous materials to its present high and prosperous condition.
What are known as the soda-pulp and the sulphite processes are examples
of this. The latter and other acid processes were not successful until
cement-lined digesters were invented to withstand their corroding
action. But now it is only necessary to have a convenient forest of
almost any kind of wood to justify the establishment of a paper mill.
It was the scarcity of rags, especially of linen rags, that forced
inventors to find other paper-producing materials.
It would be impossible and uninteresting in a work of this character to
enumerate the mechanical details constituting the improvements of the
century in paper-making machinery of all kinds. Thousands of patents
have been granted for such inventions. With one modern Fourdrinier
machine, and a few beating engines, a small paper mill will now turn out
daily as much paper as could be made by twelve mills a hundred years
ago.
In moulding pulp into articles of manufacture, satisfactory machines
have been invented, not only for the mere forming them into shape, but
for water-proofing and indurating the same. From the making of a
ponderous paper car wheel to a lady’s delicate work basket, success has
been attained.
_Paper bag machines_, machines for making _paper boxes_, applying and
staying corners of such boxes, for making _cell cases_ used in packing
eggs and fruit, and for wrapping fruit; machines for affixing various
forms of labels and addresses, are among the wonders of modern
inventions relating to paper. It is wonderful how art and ingenuity
united about thirty years ago to produce attractive _wall papers_.
Previous to that time they were dull and conventional in appearance. Now
beautiful designs are rolled out from machines.
_Printing._--We have already seen how paper making and printing grew up
together an indefinite number of centuries ago in the Far East. Both
block printing and movable types were the production of the Chinese,
with which on their little pages of many-coloured paper they printed
myriads of volumes of their strange literature in stranger characters
during centuries when Europeans were painfully inscribing their thoughts
with the stylus and crude pens upon papyrus and the dried skins of
animals.
But the European and his descendants delight to honour most the early
inventors of their own countries. Italy refers with pride to the
printing from blocks practised by the Venetians, and at Ravenna, from
1280 to 1300; from type at Subiaco in the Roman territory in 1465, and
to the first Roman book printed in 1470; the Dutch to Laurens Coster,
whom they allege invented movable type in 1423. Some of the Dutch have
doubted this, and pin their faith on Jacob Bellaert, as the first
printer, and Gerard Leeu, his workman, who made the types at Haarlem, in
1483. The Germans rely with confidence on John Guttenberg, who at
Strasburg, as early as 1436, had wooden blocks, and wooden movable
types, and who, two or three years after, printed several works; on the
partnership of Faust and Guttenberg in 1450 at Mentz, and their Bible in
Latin printed in 1456 on vellum with types imitating manuscript in form,
and illustrated by hand; and, finally, on Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim,
who then made matrices in which were cast the letters singly, and who
thereby so pleased his master, Faust, that the latter gave him his
daughter, Christina, in marriage.
From Germany the art spread to Paris and thence to England. About 1474
Caxton was printing his black-letter books in England. Spain followed,
and it is stated that in 1500 there were two hundred printing offices in
Europe. The religious and political turmoils in Germany in the sixteenth
century gave an immense impetus to printing there. The printing press
was the handmaid of the Reformation. In America the first printing press
was set up in Mexico in 1536, and in Lima, Brazil, in 1586. In 1639,
nineteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on the bleak rock at
Plymouth, they set up a printing press at Cambridge, Mass.
The art of printing soon resolved itself into two classes: first,
_composition_, the arranging of the type in the proper order into words
and pages; and second, _press work_; the taking of impressions from the
types, or from casts of types in plates--being a _facsimile_ of a type
bed. This was _stereotyping_--the invention of William Ged, of
Edinburgh, in 1731.
Types soon came to be made everywhere of uniform height; that of England
and America being 92-100 of an inch, and became universally classified
by names according to their sizes, as pica, small pica, long primer,
minion, nonpareil, etc.
After movable types came the invention of _Presses_. The earliest were
composed of a wooden frame on which were placed the simple screw and a
lever to force a plate down upon a sheet of paper placed on the bed of
type which had been set in the press, with a spring to automatically
raise the screw and plate after the delivery of the impression. This was
invented by Blaew of Amsterdam in 1620. Such, also, was the Ramage
press, and on such a one Benjamin Franklin worked at his trade as a
printer, both in America and in London. His London press, on which he
worked in 1725, was carried to the United States, and is now on
exhibition in Washington. This was substantially the state of the art at
the beginning of the century.
Then Earl Stanhope in England invented a press entirely of iron, and the
power consisted of the combination of a toggle joint and lever. The
first American improvement was invented by George Clymer, of
Philadelphia, in 1817, the power being an improved lever consisting of
three simple levers of the second order. This was superseded by the
“Washington” press invented by Samuel Rust in 1829. It has as essential
parts the toggle joint and lever, and in the frame work, as in the
Stanhope, type bed, rails on which the bed was moved in and out, means
to move the bed, the platen, the tympan on which the sheet is placed,
the frisket, a perforated sheet of paper, to preserve the printed sheet,
an inking roller and frame. In this was subsequently introduced an
automatic device for inking the roller, as it was moved back from over
the bed of type on to an inking table. This, substantially, has been the
hand press ever since.
With one of these hand-presses and the aid of two men about two hundred
and fifty sheets an hour could be printed on one side. The increase in
the circulation of newspapers before the opening of the 19th century
demanded greater rapidity of production and turned the attention of
inventors to the construction of power or machine presses. Like the
paper-making machine, the power press was conceived in the last decade
of the eighteenth century, and like that art was also not developed
until the nineteenth century. William Nicholson of England is believed
to have been the first inventor of a machine printing press. He obtained
an English patent for it in 1720. The type were to be placed on the face
of one cylinder, which was designed to be in gear, revolved with, and
press upon another cylinder covered with soft leather, the type cylinder
to be inked by a third cylinder to which the inking apparatus, was
applied, and the paper to be printed by being passed between the type
and the impression cylinder. These ideas were incorporated into the best
printing machines that have since been made. But the first successful
machine printing press was the invention of two Saxons, König and Bauer,
in 1813, who introduced their ideas from Germany, constructed the
machine in London, and on which on the 28th of November, 1814, an issue
of the _London Times_ was printed. The _Times_ announced to its readers
that day that they were for the first time perusing a paper printed upon
a machine driven by steam power. What a union of mighty forces was
heralded in this simple announcement! The union of the steam engine, the
printing press, and a great and powerful journal! An Archimedean lever
had been found at last with which to move the world.
The production of printed sheets per hour over the hand-press was at
once quadrupled, and very shortly 1800 sheets per hour were printed.
This machine was of that class known as cylinder presses. In this
machine ordinary type was used, and the type-form was flat and passed
beneath a large impression cylinder on which the paper was held by
tapes. The type-form was reciprocated beneath an inking apparatus and
the paper cylinder alternately. The inking apparatus consisted of a
series of rollers, to the first of which the ink was ejected from a
trough and distributed to the others. In 1815 Cowper patented in England
electrotype plates to be affixed to a cylinder. Applegath and Cowper
improved the König machine in the matter of the ink distributing
rollers, and in the adaptation of four printing cylinders to the
reciprocating type bed, whereby, with some other minor changes, 5000
impressions on one side were produced per hour. Again Applegath greatly
changed the arrangement of cylinders and multiplied their number, and
the number of the other parts, so that in 1848 the sheets printed on one
side were first 8000 and then 12,000 an hour.
In the United States, Daniel Treadwell of Boston invented the first
power printing machine in 1822. Two of these machines were at that time
set up in New York city. It was a flat bed press and was long used in
Washington in printing for the government. David Bruce of New York, in
1838, invented the first successful type-casting machine, which, when
shortly afterward it was perfected, became the model for type-casting
machines for Europe and America. Previous to that time type were
generally made by casting them in hand-moulds--the metal being poured in
with a spoon.
Robert Hoe, an English inventor, went to New York in 1803, and turned
his attention to the making of printing presses. His son, Richard March
Hoe, inherited his father’s inventive genius. While in England in
1837-1840, obtaining a patent on and introducing a circular saw, he
became interested in the printing presses of the London Times. Returning
home, he invented and perfected a rotary machine which received the name
of the “Lightning Press.” It first had four and then ten cylinders
arranged in a circle. As finally completed, it printed from a continuous
roll of paper several miles in length, and on both sides at the same
time, cutting off and folding ready for delivery, 15,000 to 20,000
newspapers an hour, the paper being drawn through the press at the rate
of 1,000 feet in a minute. Before it was in this final, completed shape,
it was adopted by the _London Times_. John Walter of London in the
meantime invented a machine of a similar class. He also used a sheet of
paper miles long. It was first damped, passed through blotting rolls,
and then to the printing cylinders. It gave out 11,000 perfected sheets,
or 22,000 impressions an hour, and as each sheet was printed, it was cut
by a knife on the cylinder, and the sheets piled on the paper boards. It
was adopted by the London _Times_ and the New York _Times_.
A German press at Augsburg, and the Campbell presses of the United
States, have also become celebrated as web perfecting presses, in which
the web is printed, the sheets cut, associated, folded, and delivered at
high speed. One of the latest quadruple stereotype perfecting presses
made by Hoe & Co. of New York has a running capacity of 48,000 papers
per hour. On another, a New York paper has turned off nearly six hundred
thousand copies in a single day, requiring for their printing
ninety-four tons of paper. Among other celebrated inventors of printing
presses in the United States were Isaac Adams, Taylor, Gordon, Potter,
Hawkins, Bullock, Cottrell, Campbell, Babcock, and Firm.
_Mail-marking Machines_, in which provision is made for holding the
printing mechanism out of operative position in case a letter is not in
position to be stamped; address-printing machines, including machines
for printing addresses by means of a stencil; machines for automatically
setting and distributing the type, including those in which the
individual types are caused to enter the proper receptacle by means of
nicks in the type, which engage corresponding projections on a
stationary guard plate, and automatic type justifying machines. All such
have been invented, developed, and perfected in the last half century.
Another invention which has added wonderfully to push the century along,
is the _Typewriter_. It has long been said that “The pen is mightier
than the sword,” but from present indications, it is proper to add that
the typewriter is mightier than the pen.
A machine in which movable types are caused to yield impressions on
paper to form letters by means of key levers operated by hand, has been
one of slow growth from its conception to its present practical and
successful form.
Some one suggested the idea in England in a patent in 1714. The idea
rested until 1840, when a French inventor revived it in a patent. At the
same time patents began to come out in England and the United States;
and about forty patents in each of these two countries were granted from
that time until 1875. Since that date about 1400 patents more have been
issued in the United States, and a large number in other countries. It
was, however, only that year and before 1880, that the first popular
commercially successful machines were made and introduced.
The leading generic idea of all subsequent successful devices of this
kind was clearly set forth in the patent of S. W. Francis of the United
States in 1857. This feature is the arranging of a row of hammers in a
circle so that when put in motion they will all strike the same place,
which is the centre of that circle. The arrangement of a row of pivoted
hammers or type levers, each operated by a separate key lever to strike
an inked ribbon in front of a sheet of paper, means to automatically
move the carriage carrying the paper roll from right to left as the
letters are successfully printed, leaving a space between each letter
and word, and sounding a signal when the end of a line is reached, so
that the carriage may be returned to its former position--all these and
some other minor but necessary operations may seem simple enough when
stated, but their accomplishment required the careful study of many
inventors for years.
One of the most modern of typewriters has a single electro-magnet to
actuate all the type bars of a set, and to throw each type from its
normal position to the printing centre. By an extremely light touch
given to each key lever the circuit is closed and causes the lever to
strike without the necessity of pressing the key down its whole extent
and releasing it before the next key strikes. By this device, the
operator is relieved of fatigue, as his fingers may glide quickly from
one key to another, the printing is made uniform, and far greater speed
attained by reason of the quick and delicate action. Mr. Thaddeus Cahill
of Washington appears to be the first to have invented the most
successful of this type of machines.
_Book-binding Machinery_ is another new production of the century. It
may be that the old hand methods would give to a book a stronger binding
than is found on most books to-day, but the modern public demands and
has obtained machinery that will take the loose sheets and bind them
ready for delivery, at the rate of ten or fifteen thousand volumes a
day.
The “quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore,” the Latin folios in
oak or ivory boards with brass clasps, or bound in velvet, or in crimson
satin, ornamented with finest needlework or precious stones, or the more
humble beech boards, and calf and sheep skins with metal edges and iron
clasps, in all of which the sheets were stoutly sewed together and
glued, when glue was known, to the covers, are now but relics of the
past. Machinery came to the front quite rapidly after 1825, at which
time cloth had been introduced as cheaper than leather, and as cheap and
a more enduring binder than paper. The processes in book-binding are
enumerated as follows; and for each process a machine has been invented
within the last sixty years to do the work:
Folding the sheets;
Gathering the consecutive sheets;
Rolling the backs of folded sheets;
Saw cutting the backs for the combs;
Sewing;
Rounding the back of the sewed sheets.
Edge cutting;
Binding, securing the books to the sides, covering with muslin,
leather or paper. Tooling and lettering.
Edge gilting.
One of the best modern illustrations of human thought and complicated
manual operations contained in automatic machinery is the _Linotype_.
It is a great step from the humble invention of Schoeffer five hundred
and fifty years ago of cast movable type to that of another German,
Mergenthaler, in 1890-92.
The Linotype (a line of type) was pronounced by the _London Engineering_
“as the most remarkable machine of this century.” It was the outcome of
twelve years of continuous experiment and invention, and the expenditure
of more than a million dollars. A brief description of this invention is
given in the report of the United States commissioner of patents for
1895 as follows: “In the present Mergenthaler construction there is a
magazine containing a series of tubes for the letter or character
moulds, each of which moulds is provided with a single character. There
are a number of duplicates of each character, and the moulds containing
the same character are all arranged in one tube. The machine is provided
with a series of finger keys, which, when pressed like the keys of a
typewriter, cause the letter moulds to assemble in a line in their
proper order for print. A line mould and a melting pot are then brought
into proper relation to the assembled line of letter moulds and a cast
is taken, called the linotype, which represents the entire line, a
column wide, of the matter to be printed. The letter moulds are then
automatically returned to their proper magazine tube. The Mergenthaler
machine is largely in use in the principal newspaper offices, with the
result that a single operator does at least the work of four average
compositors.”
Mr Rogers obtained a United States patent, September 23, 1890, for a
machine for casting lines of type, the principal feature of which is
that the letter moulds are strung on wires secured on a hinged frame.
“When the frame is in one position, the letter moulds are released by
the keys, slide down the wires by gravity and are assembled in line at
the casting point. After the cast is taken, the lower ends of the guide
wires are elevated, which causes the letter moulds to slide back on the
wires to their original position, when the operation is repeated for the
next line.” Operated by a single person, the Mergenthaler produces and
assembles linotypes ready for the press or stereotyping table at the
rate of from 3,600 to 7,000 ems (type characters) per hour. It permits
the face or style of type to be changed at will and it permits the
operator to read and correct his matter as he proceeds.
To the aid of the ordinary printing press came _electrotyping_,
stenographic colour printing, engraving, and smaller job and card
presses, all entirely new creations within the century, and of infinite
variety, each in itself forming a new class in typographic art, and a
valuable addition to the marvellous transformation.
The introduction of the linotype and other modern machines into printing
offices has without doubt many times reduced and displaced manual
labour, and caused at those times at least temporary suffering among
employees. But statistics do not show that as a whole there are fewer
printers in the land. On the contrary, the force seems to increase, just
as the number of printing establishments increase, with the
multiplication of new inventions. As in other arts, the distress caused
by the displacement of hand-labour by machinery is local and temporary.
The whole art rests for its development on the demand for reading
matter, and the demand never seems to let up. It increases as fast as
the means of the consumers increase for procuring it. One hundred years
ago a decent private library, consisting of a hundred or so volumes, one
or two weekly newspapers, and an occasional periodical, was the badge
and possession alone of the wealthy few. Now nearly every reading
citizen of every village has piled up in some corner of his house a
better supply than that, of bound or unbound literature, and of a far
superior quality. Besides the tons of reading matter of all kinds turned
out daily by the city presses, every village wants its own paper and its
town library, and every one of its business men has recourse to the
typewriter and the printer for his letters, his cards, and his
advertisements.
To supply the present demand for printed matter with the implements of a
hundred years ago, it would be necessary to draw upon and exhaust the
supply of labourers in nearly every other occupation. Printing would
become the one universal profession.
The roar of the guns at Waterloo and the click of the first power
printing press in London were nearly simultaneous. The military Colossus
then tumbled, and the Press began to lead mankind. Wars still continue,
and will, until men are civilised; but the vanguard of civilisation are
the printers, and not the warriors. The marvellous glory of the
nineteenth century has proceeded from the intelligence of the people,
awakened, stimulated, and guided by the press. But the press itself, and
its servitors and messengers, speeding on the wings of electricity, are
the children of the inventors.
These inventions have made the book and the newspaper the poor man’s
University. They are mirrors which throw into his humble home
reflections of the scenes of busy life everywhere. By them knowledge is
spread, thought aroused, and universal education established.