PRINTING.
EARLY PRINTING PRESSES--NICHOLSON’S ROTARY PRESS--THE COLUMBIAN AND
WASHINGTON PRESSES--KÖNIG ROTARY STEAM PRESS--THE HOE TYPE REVOLVING
MACHINE--COLOR PRINTING--STEREOTYPING--PAPER MAKING--WOOD PULP--THE
LINOTYPE--PLATE PRINTING--LITHOGRAPHY.
The art preservative of all arts it has been rightfully called. Before
its birth generation after generation of the human family lived and
died, and each was but little wiser, and but little better than its
predecessor. Tradition was the misty, vague, and sometimes wholly false
dependence of the living, and the experiences of mankind were, in the
words of an eminent writer, but like the stern lights of a vessel, which
only illumined the pathway over which each had passed. But printing
gives to the present the cumulative wisdom of the past, and marks a
great era of growth in civilization. It conserves and preserves man’s
thoughts and makes them immortal, so that each generation comes into
existence with a richer legacy of ideas, and is guaranteed a higher
plane of existence, and a more exalted destiny.
Printing from letters engraved on blocks of wood is an ancient art,
having had its origin in China many centuries before the Christian era.
The Chinese method, which is still followed, was to write their
characters with a brush on a sheet of paper, and while still wet, the
piece of paper was laid face downward on a smooth piece of board to
transfer the ink lines, and then all except the ink lines on the board
was cut away. Thus they have one type plate for each book page. Printing
with movable type, _i. e._, with a separate type for each letter, which
may be repeatedly set up into forms of varying composition, is
practically the beginning of the modern art of printing. This invention
is usually ascribed to Johann Gutenberg, of Mentz, about 1436.
[Illustration: FIG. 122.--BENJAMIN FRANKLIN’S PRESS, 1725.]
In the earliest printing presses the form was locked up in a tray, and
placed upon a platform, and the platen was then brought down upon it by
turning a screw in a cross bar above. The first printing press of this
type was made by Blaew, of Amsterdam, in 1620, which had a spring to
cause the screw to fly back after the impression was taken. The press
upon which Benjamin Franklin worked in London in 1725 is of this
pattern, and is to be seen in the National Museum at Washington. It is
almost entirely of wood, and is shown in Fig. 122. About the beginning
of the Nineteenth Century Lord Stanhope invented a press entirely of
cast iron, in which the oscillating handle operated a toggle to force
down the platen in taking the impression. The bed traveled on guide
ways, and the tympan and frisket were hinged to fold back and lay in
elevated position.
[Illustration: FIG. 123.--THE WASHINGTON PRESS.]
The “Columbian” press was the first important American improvement. It
was invented by George Clymer, of Philadelphia, and is shown in his
British Pat. No. 4,174 of 1817. A compound lever was employed for
applying the power. The “Washington” press was patented in the United
States by Samuel Rust, April 17, 1829. In this press (see Fig. 123) the
platen is forced downwardly by a compound lever applied to a toggle
joint and is raised by springs on each side. The bed is run in and out
by turning a crank on a shaft which has a pulley and belt passing around
it.
As so far described the presses were worked by hand power. An important
step in the advancement of this art was made by the introduction of
_power presses_ worked by steam. These arranged the type on the surface
of a cylinder. Probably the earliest form of rotary cylinder press is
that invented by Nicholson, British Pat. No. 1,748 of 1790. Its main
features are described as follows: “The types, being rubbed or scraped
narrower toward the foot, were to be fixed radially upon a cylinder.
This cylinder with its type was to revolve in gear with another cylinder
covered with soft leather (the impression cylinder), and the type
received its ink from another cylinder, to which the inking apparatus
was applied. The paper was impressed by passing between the type and the
impression cylinder.”
The first practical success, however, in rotary steam presses was
achieved by König, a German, who in 1814 set up for the _London Times_
two machines, by which that newspaper was printed at the rate of 1,100
impressions per hour. He obtained British Pat. No. 3,321 of 1810, No.
3,496 of 1811, No. 3,725 of 1813, and No. 3,868 of 1814. König’s machine
was in 1827 succeeded by that of Applegath and Cowper, which was simpler
and more rapid.
Many improvements upon the methods for handling the paper were
subsequently devised, and double cylinder presses were made which were
able to print 4,000 sheets an hour. In 1845 the firm of R. Hoe & Co.,
which had already been for years engaged in the manufacture of printing
presses, brought out the Hoe Type Revolving Machine. The first one of
these was placed in the office of the _Philadelphia Ledger_ in 1846, and
had four impression cylinders, printing 8,000 papers per hour. The
constantly increasing circulation of newspapers, however, continued to
make insatiable demands for more rapid work, and to meet this demand the
Hoe company in 1871 brought out their continuous web press, in which the
paper was furnished to the machine in the form of a roll, and after
being printed was separated into sheets. This principle of action gave
promise of unlimited speed, and required important reorganization in all
parts of the machine. To meet these conditions of increased speed more
rapid drying ink had to be produced to prevent blurring, paper of
uniform quality and strength had to be made, means had to be devised for
printing the opposite side of the web, and severing devices for cutting
the web into sheets were needed, but perhaps the most important feature
was the device called a gathering and delivering cylinder, whereby the
papers could be gathered and disposed of as fast as they could be
printed, and much faster than human hands could work. This was the
invention of Stephen D. Tucker, and it is the mechanism upon which the
speed of the modern press depends, for it would obviously be useless to
print papers faster than they could be taken from the machine in proper
condition. Many patents were taken by Messrs. Hoe & Tucker covering
various improvements, prominent among which were No. 18,640, Nov. 17,
1857; No. 25,199, Aug. 23, 1859 (re-issue No. 4,429); No. 84,627, Dec.
1, 1868 (re-issue No. 4,400); No. 113,769, April 18, 1871; No. 124,460,
March 12, 1872; No. 131,217, Sept. 10, 1872. The first rapid printing
press of the Hoe Company was set up in the office of the _New York
Tribune_ in 1871, and its maximum output was 18,000 an hour. This marked
the great era of rapid newspaper printing, and following it many further
improvements, such as devices for folding and counting the papers
automatically, have been added, until to-day the great Hoe Octuple
Press, shown in Fig. 124, is the wonder of the Nineteenth Century. It
prints 96,000 papers of four, six, or eight pages in an hour, or at the
rate of 1,600 a minute, and these papers are not only printed, but in
the same operation and by the same machine are cut, pasted, folded, and
counted automatically. Fifty miles of paper of the width of an ordinary
newspaper pass through it each hour from its several rolls. The machine
weighs over 60 tons, and is composed of about 16,000 parts, and yet its
touch is so deft, and its members so delicately and accurately adjusted
that it does not tear the tender sheet as it flies through the
machine--so fast that one-fifth of a second only is required to print a
page.
[Illustration: FIG. 124.--HOE OCTUPLE PRESS. PRINTS, CUTS, PASTES, FOLDS
AND COUNTS NEWSPAPERS AT RATE OF 1,600 A MINUTE.]
The latest development in the printing press has been in color printing,
which has recently been introduced in the illustration of some of the
largest daily newspapers. Such a press contains from 50,000 to 60,000
parts, and its cost is from $35,000 to $45,000.
Collateral with the development of the printing press are three
important branches of the art--stereotyping, paper making, and type
setting.
_Stereotyping_ was the invention of William Ged, of Edinburgh, in 1731,
and was introduced into the United States by David Bruce, of New York,
in 1813. The stereotype is simply a moulded duplicate of the type face
as set up, the duplicate being cast in the form of a single block of
metal, by first taking an impression in plastic material from the faces
of the type, after being set up, to form the mould, and then casting, in
an easily fusible metal, an exact duplicate of this type face in this
mould. This art prevents the wear on the movable type involved in
printing, and also avoids the locking up into permanent forms of a large
body of valuable type, since a form may be set up, stereotyped, and the
type then distributed and set up into another form. Stereotyping,
although used in book printing, was not thought practical for newspaper
work until about 1861, because of the length of time required for the
formation and drying of the mould and the casting of the plate; but
about this time great expedition in the formation of the plate was
attained by the employment of a steam bed to dry the mould, and a novel
form of papier maché matrix, or mould, which could be conveniently
disposed around the cylinders of type. The dampened and plastic papier
maché sheets are beaten into the face of the type form by means of
brushes, are then removed, dried, and used as moulds to cast the
stereotype plate from. A stereotype plate can now be made in about seven
minutes.
[Illustration: FIG. 125.--PAPER PULP BEATING ENGINE.]
_Paper Making_ is an important adjunct of the printing art, and its
formation cheaply into long rolls of uniform strength is an essential
condition of success in the rapid web-perfecting printing press. A
Frenchman named Louis Robert about 1799 was the first to make a
continuous web of paper, and in 1800 he received from the French
Government a reward of 8,000 francs for his discovery. His invention was
subsequently taken up and carried to a success by the great English
paper makers, the Fourdrinier Brothers, whose name has been given to the
machine. In the Fourdrinier process rags are ground to a pulp by a
revolving beater (Fig. 125) working in a tank of water. The pulp, duly
beaten, refined, screened, and diluted with water, is then piped into
the “flow-box” of the Fourdrinier machine. The “flow-box,” shown on
right of Fig. 126, is a deep rectangular chamber extending across the
full width of the machine, from which the pulp flows out in a thin
stream onto an endless belt of 70-mesh wire cloth which runs over end
rollers. To prevent the stream of pulp from flowing laterally over the
edges of the belt, two endless rubber guides or bands, two inches square
in cross section, travel with the belt over the first twenty feet of its
length, and run over two pulleys above the wire cloth. The upper half of
the wire cloth belt is supported by and runs over a series of closely
juxtaposed rollers. As the pulp passes from the “flow-box” the particles
of fibre float in it just as an innumerable multitude of particles of
cotton fibre would float in a stream of water. To unite and interlace
the fibres the wire cloth belt is given a lateral oscillating or shaking
movement, which serves to interlock the fibres. Meanwhile the water
strains through the wire cloth, leaving a thin layer of moist interlaced
fibre spread in a white sheet over the surface of the belt. The
separation of the water is further assisted by suction boxes which
extend across close beneath the upper run of the belt and are connected
to suction pumps.
[Illustration: FIG. 126.--FOURDRINIER PAPER MACHINE.]
The wire cloth with its layer of moist pulp now passes below a roll
which compresses the fibre, and then leaving the machine seen in Fig.
126 it passes below a second and larger roll covered with felt, which
presses out more of the water. The fibre next passes to the “first
press,” where it is caught up on an endless belt and passed between two
rollers where more water is pressed out of the sheet. Then it passes
through a “second press,” and finally the sheet commences a long journey
up and down over a series of steam-heated drying rolls, by which the
sheet is dried.
_Wood-Pulp._--When a purchaser of one of the New York dailies reads the
morning’s voluminous edition, he little realizes that he holds in his
hands the remains of a billet of wood as large as a good-sized club, yet
such is the case. Originally made from the fibres of the papyrus plant,
and later from rags beaten into a pulp, paper for the printing of books
and newspapers is now made almost entirely of wood. In the formation of
paper pulp from wood two processes are employed, one known as the soda
process, and the other the sulphite process. In both cases the wood is
cut into fine chips, and then digested in great drums with chemicals to
extract the resinous matter and leave the pure fibrous cellulose, which
resembles raw cotton in texture. This industry was developed by Watt and
Burgess in 1853 (U. S. Pat. No. 11,343, July 18, 1854), who invented the
soda process; by Voelter (U. S. Pat. No. 21,161, Aug. 10, 1858), who
devised means for comminuting or shredding the wood; and by Tilghman (U.
S. Pat. No. 70,485, Nov. 5, 1867), who invented the sulphite process.
The logs, usually of spruce or poplar, are first split, as seen at the
bottom of Fig. 127, then placed in the chipper, where a revolving disc
with knives cuts them into small chips, which are fed to an elevator and
raised to a screening device, seen at the top, to remove saw-dust, dirt
and knots. In the sulphite process the chips are then delivered into the
digesters shown in Fig. 128, which are supplied with sulphurous acid
generated in a plant shown in Fig. 129. In the digesters the gummy and
resinous matters are dissolved by the heat and chemicals, and the woolly
fibre left behind is bleached, washed, and dried, and afterwards made
into paper upon the Fourdrinier machine.
[Illustration: FIG. 127.--CHIPPING LOGS FOR PAPER PULP.]
[Illustration: FIG. 128.--DIGESTER FOR WOOD PULP.]
[Illustration: FIG. 129.--SULPHUROUS ACID PLANT FOR MAKING WOOD PULP.]
It was stated by the _Paper Trade Journal_ in 1897 that the increase in
paper making in the United States during the 15 years preceding amounted
to 352 per cent., due chiefly to the growth of the wood pulp industry.
The Androscoggin Pulp Mill, established in Maine in 1870, was one of the
pioneers in this field. In that State the industry had grown in 1897 to
over $13,000,000 and gave employment to more than 5,000 men, but the
State of Maine is excelled by both New York and Wisconsin in this
industry, for in the same year New York mills had a daily capacity of
1,800,000 pounds; Wisconsin, 670,000; Maine, 665,000, and other States a
less capacity. There are over 1,000 paper mills in the United States,
and their combined daily capacity amounts to over 13,000 tons. In 1898
the United States exported over five million dollars’ worth of paper,
and over fifty million pounds of wood pulp. Of the total amount of paper
produced in the world Mulhall estimated it in 1890 to be 2,620,000,000
tons annually. This amount is greatly increased at the present time, and
by far the larger part of it is manufactured from wood.
In 1891 the _Philadelphia Record_ in an experimental test as to speed,
cut trees from the forest, converted them into paper, and then into
printed newspapers, all within the space of 22 hours. At a later period
in Germany, where the wood pulp art began, even this expeditious work
has been excelled. The trees were felled in the morning at 7:35,
converted into paper, and presented at 10 A. M. in the form of printed
newspapers, with a record of the news of the forenoon. The great naval
edition of the _Scientific American_ of April 30, 1898, consumed a
hundred tons of wood pulp paper, and was therefore built upon a material
foundation of 125 cords of wood, which cleared off over six acres of
well-set spruce timber land. It is mainly wood pulp that has enabled
books and newspapers to be made so cheaply, for they are now furnished
at a less price than the cost of the paper made in the old way from
rags.
[Illustration: FIG. 130.--LINOTYPE MACHINE.]
[Illustration: FIG. 131.--LINOTYPE MATRIX.]
[Illustration: FIG. 132.--SPACING OF ASSEMBLED LINE OF MATRICES.]
_The Linotype._--The most revolutionary and perhaps the most important
development in the printing art of this century has been the linotype
machine. The laborious, painstaking, and expensive feature of printing
has always been the setting and redistribution of the types, since each
little piece had to be separately selected and placed in the composing
stick, and the line afterwards “justified,” which means an apportionment
of the space between the words so as to make each line of type about the
same length in the column. The same separate handling of each piece was
again involved in restoring the type to the case. Machines for thus
setting and distributing the type had been devised, but the operation
was so involved, and required so nearly the discretion of the thinking
mind, that all automatic machinery proved too complicated and
impracticable. In 1886, however, a machine was placed in the office of
the _New York Tribune_ whose performances astonished and alarmed the
old-time compositor. It rendered it unnecessary to handle the type, or
even to have any separate type at all. It was the Mergenthaler Linotype
machine, which automatically formed its own type by casting a whole line
of it at a time. The first machine was invented in 1884, and patented in
1885, but it was subsequently reorganized and greatly improved in Pats.
No. 425,140, April 8, 1890; Nos. 436,531 and 436,532, Sept. 16, 1890,
and No. 438,354, Oct. 14, 1890. It is shown in the accompanying
illustration (Fig. 130). By manipulating the keyboard, which resembles
that of a typewriter, each lettered key is made to bring down from an
inclined elevated magazine a little brass plate of the shape shown in
Fig. 131, and which plate is called a matrix, because it bears on its
edge at _x_ a mould of the type letter. There is a matrix plate for
every letter and character used. These little matrices are spaced by
wedges, as seen in Fig. 132, and are assembled, as in Fig. 133, along
the side of a mould wheel having a slot in it which forms a channel
between the aligned type-moulds or matrices on one side and the
discharge mouth of a melting pot, in which molten type metal is
maintained in a fluid state by a subjacent gas-burner. In the melting
pot there is a cylinder and plunger, and when the plunger descends, it
forces the molten metal up through the discharge spout into the slot of
the mould wheel, and against the letter mould _x_ of each one of the
composed or aligned matrices. The wheel is then turned with the
matrices, and the metal in its slot is afterwards discharged in the form
of a linotype slug, seen in Fig. 134, which is a metal plate bearing on
its edge a completely moulded line of type ready for setting up in the
form for printing. The jagged notches in the tops of the matrices (Fig.
131) are for co-operation with a distributer bar (not easily explained)
for restoring the matrices to their appropriate magazines after being
used. There are altogether about 1,500 of the little brass matrices. The
machine is about five feet square, weighs 1,750 pounds, and costs $3,000
each. Notwithstanding this expense these Linotype machines have to-day
made their way into nearly all the daily newspaper offices of the
civilized world, even to Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. In the
composing rooms of the daily newspapers and the larger book printing
offices we find great rows of these Linotype machines, each doing the
work of from four to five men. There are now in use in America something
over 5,000 Linotype machines; and in other countries about 2,000, making
7,000 in all. Each machine may be adjusted in five minutes to produce
any size or style of type, and it gives new, clean faces for each day’s
issue, with none of the ordinary troubles of distributing type. The
cheapness of composition, due to the machine, has led to an enormous
increase in the size of papers, in the frequency of the editions, and
has correspondingly increased the demand for labor in all the attendant
lines, such as paper-making, press-making, the attendants on presses,
stereotyping, etc. In the Boston Library, which keeps its catalogues
printed up to within 24 hours of date, the Linotypes print in 23
languages.
[Illustration: FIG. 133.--CASTING THE LINE.]
[Illustration: FIG. 134.--A LINOTYPE.]
When the Linotype machine was first patented it was not regarded by
printers generally as a practical machine, but only one of the many
complicated, theoretical, but impracticable organizations which the
Patent Office has to deal with. Its history, however, has been unique.
It is practically the product of the brain of a single man, Ottmar
Mergenthaler, a most ingenious and indefatigable inventor living in
Baltimore. It was exploited under the powerful patronage of a syndicate
of newspaper men, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in
perfecting it before any practical results were obtained. To-day it
stands a triumph of human ingenuity, ranking in importance with the
rotary web-perfecting press, and is probably the most ingenious piece of
practical mechanism in existence.
Of the three forms of printing attention has been given thus far only to
the leading branch of the art, which is _type printing_, or “_letter
press_,” as it is called, in which the characters are raised in relief
and receive ink on their raised surfaces only. A second branch of the
art is _plate printing_, in which the lines and characters are engraved
in intaglio in a plate, and which, being covered with ink, and the
surface of the plate wiped clean, leaves the ink in the undercuts, which
is taken up by the paper when pressure is applied through a roller.
Plate printing is a very old art, the plate printing press having been
ascribed to Tomasso Finiguerra, of Florence, in 1460. The reciprocating
table bearing the engraved plate, and the superposed pressure roller
turned by hand through its long radial arms, is an ancient and familiar
form of press which has been in use for many years. This method of
printing finds application in fine line engraving in works of art, card
invitations, and bank note engraving. Very ingenious automatic machines
have been invented and were in use a few years ago by the United States
Government for printing its bank notes, but have since been displaced by
the old hand machines. To the credit of the machine, it should be said,
that it was from no fault in the machine that this retrograde step was
taken, but rather the disfavor of the labor organizations.
_Lithography_ is another and quite important branch of the printing art,
in which the lines and characters are drawn upon stone with a kind of
oily ink to which printers’ ink will adhere, while it is repelled from
the other moistened surfaces of the stone. Lithography was invented in
1798 by Alois Senefelder, of Munich. It finds its greatest application
in artistic and fanciful work in inks of various colors, and its
development into chromo-lithography in the Nineteenth Century has grown
into a fine art. Our beautifully colored chromos, prints, labels, maps,
etc., are made by this process. A more recent and quite important
development of this art is photo-lithography, which will be more fully
considered under photography.
Many collateral branches of the printing art are interesting in their
development, such as calico printing, the printing of wall papers, of
oil cloth, printing for the blind, book binding, type founding, and
folding and addressing machines, but lack of space forbids more than a
casual mention.
Printing is perhaps the greatest of all the arts of civilization, and
the libraries and newspapers of the Nineteenth Century attest its value.
If Benjamin Franklin could wake from his long sleep and enter the
composing rooms of our great dailies, and witness the imposing array of
linotype machines, more resembling a machine shop than a printing
office, and then visit the press room and see the avalanche of finished
papers flying at the rate of 1,600 a minute, neatly folded, and counted
for delivery, he would doubtless be overwhelmed with emotions of wonder
and incredulity, for broad-minded man as he was, he could have no
conception of such progress.