TYPESETTING AND PRINTING MACHINERY
“WHO WON the war?” The question immediately brings forth numerous
contenders who claim the honor, respectively, for the aviator, the
chemist, the engineer, the mechanic, the farmer, the shipbuilder, etc.
As a matter of fact, all these and many others as well were invaluable
contributors to the final success, and “there is glory enough for all.”
The question, “What branch of technology or what branch of machinery
has done most for civilization?” finds a similar division of opinion,
with partisans in favor of the steam engine, machine tools, electrical
machinery, iron manufacture, paper making, printing, etc. Again, it is
clearly evident that all have been most valuable contributors and none
may carry off all the honors. However, partisans of the printing press
are entitled to place that machine among the foremost because it has
certainly been most useful in preserving and disseminating all classes
of knowledge and in promoting the progress of civilization.
EARLY CHINESE PRINTING
It is hardly necessary for us to refer to Johann Gutenberg’s invention
in 1436 of separate type for each letter. Many centuries before that
the Chinese had made wood engravings of complete pages and printed
them on paper. Their method was to prepare an ink copy on a sheet of
paper and then transfer the copy by pressing the paper on the wood
before the ink was dry, after which they carved away all the surface
except those parts which were inked. This gave them a reverse plate
from which any number of copies could be printed. The invention of
individual type which could be used over and over again for setting new
copy was a marked improvement over the Chinese system.
DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING PRESSES
The primitive screw press saw little improvement except in minor
details down to the end of the eighteenth century. Then steam began
to take the place of hand power and the idea was conceived of using a
rotary cylinder in place of a flat press. The types were tapered so
that they could be fitted about a cylinder. The paper was fed between
the type cylinder and a soft impression cylinder faced with leather.
The ink was applied to the type by means of a roller which was fed by
an inking apparatus.
In 1814 two rotary presses were installed in the offices of the
London “Times,” making it possible to turn out that newspaper at
the marvelous rate of 11,000 impressions per hour. In this country,
Richard Marsh Hoe invented a machine in which four, six, eight, or
ten impression cylinders operated on a single form of type, thereby
increasing the output of the press correspondingly. The first machine,
a four-impression cylinder press, was used by the Philadelphia “Ledger”
in 1846, and it printed 8,000 papers per hour.
Next came the “perfecting” press that printed on both sides of the
paper, and then came the continuous web press, in which the paper was
fed from a roll as a continuous sheet and, after receiving the type
impression, was cut, folded, and delivered as a complete newspaper.
THE STEREOTYPE PLATE
Meanwhile stereotyping was introduced into newspaper printing. In
stereotyping an impression in plastic material is made of the type
face and then a casting is made from this impression which, of course,
exactly duplicates the type face. The type is thus relieved from
wear in the press and it is immediately released for use in setting
up other copy while the printing is done from the stereotype plate.
While the use of stereotyping in book printing dates back to the
eighteenth century, it was not thought practicable for newspaper
printing because of the length of time taken in making the plate, but
in 1861 papier-maché was introduced as a matrix material and a system
of rapidly drying the mold was developed so that a plate could be cast
in a comparatively short time; furthermore, impressions could be made
from a flat face of type and then the mold could be bent so as to make
curved stereotype plates for use on the cylinder presses. In newspaper
work it takes but five minutes to make a stereotype plate. Stereotype
metal does not stand the wear of printing very long and the plates
must be renewed from time to time. This fits in well with newspaper
requirements because clean cut work is not called for, and as the news
keeps coming in new editions must constantly be printed, which means
that new plates must be made from time to time. For the finer printing
of magazines and books, copper-faced electrotype plates are used in
place of the soft stereotype plates of newspaper printing.
MODERN NEWSPAPER PRESSES
A modern large newspaper press is a bewildering sight to behold; there
is such a vast number of rolls and cylinders, and the web of paper
moves so rapidly. But, after all, the machine is multiplex rather than
complex. It consists of a large number of printing cylinders, all
operating in a single frame. Take, for instance, a double-octuple,
color-combination press. It consists really of two separate presses,
each operating on four webs of paper that feed from opposite ends
toward the middle. There are two type cylinders for each web, one for
each side of the paper. Each cylinder is long enough to take four
stereotype plates side by side, and since each plate extends but half
way around the cylinder we have eight pages printed on each side of
the web. This makes sixteen pages per web or sixty-four for each half
of the machine, giving a total of 128 page impressions at each turn of
the cylinders. It is seldom that a 64-page paper is required, hence
the webs are slit in two by a revolving knife blade and each section
of the press has two folding mechanisms so that two sets of 16-page
papers are printed, folded, and delivered by each section. Arrangements
are provided whereby the product may consist of 32-page papers. The
papers are delivered by a traveling conveyor and every fiftieth paper
is pushed out ahead of the others so as to provide a simple method of
keeping count of the product.
PRINTING 240,000 PAGES PER HOUR
The cylinders turn at the rate of 300 revolutions per minute which
means that the paper runs through the machine at nearly 14 miles per
hour. Summing up all the webs we have a total consumption of 108 miles
of paper per hour. The paper is 6 feet wide and the weight of paper in
an hour’s run is about 18 tons and the hourly production is 150,000
sixteen-page papers. When color is used, the press will deliver 50,000
24-page papers per hour with the two outside pages printed in three
colors and black. The course of the color printed web must necessarily
be different from that of the plain black printed web. It must pass
through a number of printings; and to prevent the moist ink from
transferring to the impression rolls and from them back to a succeeding
page, thus soiling or blurring the impression, an extra roll of thin
paper is passed between the printed web and the impression cylinders.
This acts in a measure as a blotter. The offset paper is taken up on a
roll and used over and over again. It is used not only for color work,
but also when fine half tone engravings are to be printed so that a
cleaner impression may be obtained.
The inking system of printing press is very elaborate. It is highly
essential that the ink be spread upon the type surface in just
sufficient quantity to be picked up by the paper and that the ink be
uniformly distributed over the whole surface. There is an ink reservoir
and a set of inking rollers for each cylinder. The reservoir consists
of a trough running the whole length of the cylinder. At each turn
a revolving roller dips into the ink and transfers a thin film of
ink to a series of small rollers. These are grouped about a large
roller to which they deliver the ink. The small rollers have an axial
reciprocating motion whereby the ink is uniformly spread over the large
roller. The latter transfers its thin coating of ink to a pair of
rollers known as “form rollers” and these in turn deliver the ink to
the printing cylinder.
A SEA CAPTAIN’S CONTRIBUTION
The folding mechanism of a printing press is interesting. The paper is
first fed over a wedge-shaped form which folds the paper lengthwise
and then it is given a cross-wise fold. Curiously enough the folding
mechanism for printing presses was first invented by a Yankee sea
captain, named Cromwell, who could not read a drawing but developed his
invention by whittling out wooden models. He also contributed other
valuable improvements for the printing press worked out in the same
primitive way.
The rotary press was evolved especially for the printing of daily
papers and for a long time magazines continued to be printed on
flat-bed presses. But as the circulation of magazines grew into
the hundreds of thousands it became necessary to build high speed
presses to turn out these large editions. Accordingly rotary machines
were constructed similar in design to newspaper presses, but with
refinements to enable them to produce the better class of work required
of magazine printing. Although there are many magazines still printed
on flat bed presses, particularly those which publish small editions of
less than a hundred thousand, all the big national weekly journals and
monthly magazines are printed on rotary presses and some of them even
use web presses.
GATHERING AND BINDING MAGAZINES
When a newspaper leaves the press it is folded, cut, and ready for the
news stand. Not so with the book and magazine press. There are too many
pages to be handled by a single press, and, furthermore, the pages must
be bound together. Some large magazines contain regularly more than 500
pages and occasionally they will run over a thousand pages. Obviously
no single press could handle so many pages and it takes the product of
many presses to make up a single copy. Each press prints what is known
as a form or signature and these signatures from the different presses
are then gathered, wire-stitched, and bound into individual copies.
There are machines which will do this work of gathering and binding at
the rate of sixty 1,000-page magazines or catalogues every minute. The
machines are adjustable for pages of different dimensions. The forms
may consist of four, eight, sixteen, or thirty-two pages. A separate
compartment is provided for each signature. A large machine will handle
thirty-six 32-page signatures. The compartments are kept supplied by
an operator, there being usually six compartments for each operator to
attend to. The bottom signature in each compartment is brought into
position by a suction device which seizes the signature and draws
it out, depositing it in a steel trough. Here a belt conveyor moves
the signature along at the right speed to carry it before the next
compartment just as a signature is being withdrawn therefrom. Thus the
magazine or book is progressively built up and the signatures reach
the end of their course properly assembled. A very delicate adjustment
is provided to insure the proper adjustment of signatures. The grippers
are adjusted to receive signatures of a certain thickness. If the
operator should make a mistake and put a signature of a wrong size
in the compartment the whole machine would come to a standstill. The
adjustment is so delicate that even a variation of a single thickness
of paper is enough to operate the stop mechanism. Each assembly of
signatures as it reaches the end of the trough is squared up and then
bound with wire stitching. From this point it moves on to receive its
cover. A thin coating of hot glue is applied to the rear edge of the
signatures. The cover is automatically applied and firmly pressed into
place. The finished book is then carried on out of the machine and
deposited neatly on a pile of previously bound books. To operate such a
machine there are required one chief operator and an assistant and six
girls to feed the signatures to the compartments.
SETTING TYPE BY MACHINE
The publication of a modern daily newspaper with its many special
editions would be well nigh impossible if we still had to depend
upon hand setting of type. Tens of thousands of type characters are
required to make up a single newspaper page, and although skilled hand
compositors work with extreme rapidity it would take a large corps of
men to set type for even a small newspaper in the short time available.
Speed is of prime importance in newspaper work and the task of handling
thousands of little pieces of type metal and arranging them correctly
into words and sentences was long recognized as a serious handicap,
but the problem of doing this work by machine was by no means simple
one and baffled inventors for years. One of the principal difficulties
lay in the size and shape of the type and another was that of
justifying the lines, that is, providing just the right width of spaces
between words to fill out the lines completely so that they would all
be of equal length, giving a straight instead of a ragged margin to the
column. After that came the problem of redistributing the type.
The first really successful composing machine was the invention of
Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1888. Mergenthaler overcame the difficulties
that had balked other inventors by attacking the problem from a
radically new angle. Instead of setting precast type, his machine cast
its own type from a set of matrices. By operating a keyboard, the
matrices were assembled in a line which was justified automatically
after the line was composed and then the whole line of type was cast in
a single slug. Hence his machine earned the name “linotype.” Then the
matrices were returned automatically distributed to the proper channels
of the matrix magazine ready to be used over again for succeeding slugs.
THE LINOTYPE MATRIX AND SPACE BAR
[Illustration: FIG. 72--A LINOTYPE MATRIX]
A picture of a linotype matrix is shown in Figure 72. It is a plate of
brass formed with ears _A_ at the four corners. The type mold is shown
at _B_ and of course the thickness of the matrix varies with the width
of the type letter it is designed to cast. In the top of the matrix
there is a V-shaped slot _C_ formed with teeth which are designed to
engage grooves in a V-shaped bar over the matrix magazine. The teeth on
the matrices are variously cut away and serve as keys to the different
channels of the magazine. There is a different combination of teeth
for each letter of the alphabet and all matrices of the same letter
have the same combination of teeth. The teeth on the distributing
bar are also cut away according to various combinations. After the
line has been cast the matrices are all raised by their ears and fed
one by one upon the distributing bar. Each matrix moves along until
it arrives over the channel it is designed to enter when it comes to
a gap in the teeth of the bar that are supporting it and drops into
the magazine. Although there are but seven teeth on each side of the
V-shaped bar, there are more than enough combinations possible to
provide a characteristic one for every key of the keyboard. A matrix
always has at least one pair of teeth in engagement with the bar until
it reaches the gap that lets it fall into its own special channel of
the magazine. The number of matrices of each character varies with the
normal frequency of use of that letter. For instance, the letter _e_
is very commonly used, and there must be many more _e_ matrices than
_z_ matrices, but in any case the number need not be very large because
the process of casting a line and redistributing the type does not take
very long and the matrices are soon back in the magazine ready to be
used over again. The casting and distributing operations are entirely
automatic and while they are in process the compositor is setting a new
line.
The method of spacing which was a later development of the linotype
is also very ingenious. The compositor does not have to bother with
the width of spaces required to fill out a line. He merely touches the
space key at the end of each word and and a space bar drops into place.
Each space bar is formed of a pair of wedges and after the line has
been assembled the space bars are automatically expanded to fill out
the line completely by mechanism which holds down one wedge member (A,
Figure 73) and slides up the other (B).
INDIVIDUAL TYPE CASTING AND COMPOSING
[Illustration: FIG. 73.--A LINOTYPE SPACE BAR]
The difficulties of casting the linotype slug proved a serious handicap
in the earlier days of the linotype. The product of the machine could
not compare in quality with precast hand-set individual type, although
it served very well for newspapers; but the machine is now so far
perfected that it is widely used for magazine and book composition.
However before this stage of perfection was reached the demand for a
machine that could do a higher grade of work led to the invention of
another machine known as the “monotype.” The monotype consists actually
of two machines, one of which is operated by a compositor and the other
operated entirely automatically by the product of the first machine.
The compositor operates a keyboard and thereby cuts perforations in a
long strip of paper. These perforations are arranged in characteristic
groups one for each key. The perforated paper is then run through
the second machine and in accordance with the various perforations
the separate types are cast and assembled into justified lines. Air
flowing through the perforations operates a pneumatic mechanism which
brings the proper molds into position and casts the separate types. The
method of justifying the lines is very interesting. As in the linotype
the operator merely touches a space key at the end of each word, but
at the end of the line the mechanism automatically estimates the
spaces to be filled and divides this by the number of spaces so that
a characteristic group of perforations is punched when the compositor
shifts to the next line. In the casting machine the paper ribbon runs
through backward and the space group of perforations is encountered
before the line is cast. This automatically adjusts the mechanism to
cast spaces of the requisite size to fill out the line exactly.
WRITING BY MACHINE
In one sense we have taken up the various machines employed in printing
in reverse order. Of course the first machine used is the typewriter,
after which comes the composing machine, and finally the press.
It was in 1866 that two inventors, C. Latham Sholes and Samuel W.
Soule, undertook to make a machine for printing numbers in serial order
upon the pages of a blankbook. Carlos Glidden, another inventor, who
was engaged in developing a spading machine designed to take the place
of a plow, saw their work and suggested that they make their machine
write letters and words as well as numbers. The three combined and
proceeded to evolve the new machine. By the end of the summer of 1867
they had produced a typewriting machine that could be operated fairly
rapidly and that produced fair work. It was one of the letters written
by this machine that brought James Densmore into the enterprise.
He furnished the money needed to improve the crude typewriter and
make it a commercial machine. Many models were built but nothing was
produced that seemed good enough for commercial production. This
development work was too slow and discouraging for Soule and Glidden
and they dropped out, but Sholes inspired by Densmore persevered until
at last in 1873 he had produced a machine which he could offer for
manufacture. The typewriter was then taken to the Remington factory at
Ilion, N. Y., and the next year it was placed on the market and began
its public career.
Such is the story of the early development of the typewriter. It has
become so widely used and is so indispensable a part of the business
office that it arouses the utmost astonishment to learn that there
still are a few old-fashioned houses so conservative and so far behind
that they continue to write their business letters with the pen. So
common a machine, it is hardly necessary for us to describe in detail
except to mention two steps in the development of the machine, namely
the arrangement of the type bars whereby the typewriting is visible
to the typist, and secondly the effort to overcome noise by limiting
the stroke of the type bar and making it impinge upon the paper with a
pressure stroke rather than a hammer blow.
A recent development is the “stenotype,” a small machine which prints
shorthand characters, thus expediting the taking of rapid dictation.