on the surface of a horizontal revolving cylinder of about four and a
half feet in diameter. The form occupies a segment of only about one
fourth of the surface of the cylinder, and the remainder is used as
an ink-distributing surface. Around this main cylinder, and parallel
with it, are smaller impression-cylinders. The large cylinder being
put in motion, the form of types is carried successively to all
the impression-cylinders, at each of which a sheet is introduced,
and receives the impression of the type as the form passes. One
person supplies the sheets of paper to each cylinder. After being
printed they are carried out by tapes and laid upon heaps by means of
self-acting flyers. The ink is contained in a fountain placed beneath
the main cylinder, and is conveyed by means of distributing rollers
to the distributing surface on the main cylinder. The surface being
lower, or less in diameter than the form of types, passes by the
impression-cylinder without touching. For each impression there are two
inking rollers, which receive their supply of ink from the distributing
surface of the main cylinder; they rise and ink the form as it passes
under them, after which they again fall to the distributing surface.
Each page of the paper is locked up on a detached segment of the larger
cylinder, which constitutes its bed and chases, termed the “turtle.”
The column-rules run parallel with the shaft of the cylinder, and
consequently are straight, while head, advertising, and dash rules
are in the form of segments of a circle. The column-rules are in
the form of a wedge, with the thin part directed toward the axis of
the cylinder, so as to bind the type securely. These wedge-shaped
column-rules are held down to the bed by tongues projecting at
intervals along their length, which slide in rebated grooves cut
crosswise in the face of the bed. The spaces in the grooves between the
rules are accurately fitted with sliding blocks of metal, even with the
surface of the bed, the ends of which blocks are cut away underneath to
receive a projection on the sides of the tongues of the column-rules.
The form of type is locked up in the bed by means of screws at the foot
and sides, by which the type is held as securely as in the ordinary
manner upon a flat bed.
[Illustration: DOUBLE CYLINDER PRESS.]
This press was regarded as the highest degree of perfection, until
William A. Bullock, of Philadelphia, put out his web perfecting press.
This completely revolutionized the printing business so far as the
newspapers were concerned. It came into use in 1861,—just before the
breaking out of the war of the rebellion in the United States,—in time
to meet the enormous demands made upon the printing press at home and
abroad. It had been in operation but a short time when the newspaper
owners of Great Britain took hold of it, and for several years no
other press was used by the newspapers of large circulation.
How slow and toy-like it seems in comparison with the monsters of the
present day! And yet this machine met the demands of a period when it
was supposed the circulation of the daily press had reached an altitude
never to be surpassed. A newspaper like the New York “Herald,” which
had attained a daily circulation of about 75,000, was looked upon as
achieving the highest degree of success. In this last year of the
nineteenth century the “Journal” and “World” of New York send out at
least a million copies of their papers 365 days in the year.
William A. Bullock worked at his web printing press for six years
before he had it in shape to pronounce it applicable to the
requirements. It was not long after it was in successful operation
that one of his limbs caught in the machinery of one of his presses,
and death was the result. As the presses first were made, and indeed
for many years thereafter, the paper was cut in the press before being
printed, and it was a difficult matter properly to control these single
sheets until they were delivered, while the presses were without any
folding attachment. But these old style Bullock presses did succeed in
turning out 6000 eight-page papers an hour, printed on both sides.
In 1873 a great improvement was made in the Bullock presses, which
allowed of the papers being printed on the endless roll before the
paper was cut.
With the aid of other improvements subsequently made these presses
attained to a capacity of 16,000 eight-page papers an hour. But an
unexpected limit was found in the impossibility of delivering beyond
a certain rate from the fly. Then R. Hoe & Co. (about 1877) invented
a contrivance which obviated the difficulty. It consisted of an
accumulating cylinder, on which six or eight sheets were laid one above
the other and then delivered from the fly at one motion. This increased
the capacity of their perfecting press to 18,000 an hour. A folding
attachment was then added; next a pasting and cutting attachment.
Thus, in 1879 they were able to turn out a press which produced 30,000
perfect eight-page papers an hour—printed, cut, pasted, and folded.
The next great achievement was put in operation in a New York
pressroom in 1885. That was the double supplement press, which in
reality combines two presses in one. It was the first press to insert
supplement sheets automatically, and it was the first press to print
from two rolls of paper, one roll being placed at right angles to the
main roll. As the name of the press implies, from the secondary roll
the supplements are printed at the same time that the main part of the
paper is being printed from the other roll. And by means of what to the
ordinary man seems a miraculous contrivance, but which to the initiated
in the mysteries of mechanics is no doubt very simple, the supplement
is automatically inset and pasted into the main paper before reaching
the fly, and dropped out folded ready for the newsdealer.
From this press has been evolved the superb printing machine which, in
recent years, has astonished the world. On it can be printed eight-,
ten-, or twelve-page papers at a running speed of 24,000 an hour, or
400 a minute, and whether eight, ten, or twelve pages are printed they
all come out with the supplements inset and the paper pasted and
folded. From this press was developed the next triumph, the quadruple
press. Marvelous machines these quadruple presses are, and it seemed
impossible that any press could be built for many years to come that
would beat them.
The printing business stood amazed, awe-stricken at the sight of so
many papers being turned out each hour. And before the amazement had
subsided there came forth the machine which is destined to go down in
history as one of the great achievements in mechanics of the nineteenth
century,—the sextuple press, manufactured by Hoe & Co., which has
brought forth as many wonderful improvements as any mechanical concern
in the world.
Although it is impossible to explain in language comprehensible to the
man who is not an engineer how this monarch among printing presses does
its work at a rate of speed which is well-nigh incredible and outstrips
the flight of imagination itself, yet it is possible to convey an idea
of what the extent of the work is.
[Illustration: FIRST PERFECTING PRESS.]
This machine will print, fold, paste, and deliver 90,000 of a four-page
paper or six-page newspaper in one hour. It will require some figuring
to convey an adequate idea of how fast that is, for, as a matter of
fact, it is faster than a man can think, and that is why I say that the
speed of the machine outstrips the flight of imagination.
Ninety thousand copies an hour is equivalent to fifteen hundred copies
a minute, and fifteen hundred copies a minute means twenty-five copies
per second!
Now take out your watch, and while the second hand is passing from one
second to another try to grasp the idea that in all that brief interval
of time twenty-five six-page newspapers have been printed. You can’t do
it. It is faster than you can think.
And yet in that second those twenty-five papers are not only printed,
but the inside sheets are automatically pasted in, and the twenty-five
papers are all cut and folded ready for delivery to the newsdealers.
Is there anything more marvelous than that recorded in the “Arabian
Nights”? Who said that there are no miracles in this nineteenth
century? Why, if old Gutenberg,—peace to his soul,—or Faust, or
Caxton, or even our own Benjamin Franklin had seen anything of the
sort, they would have sworn that it was either a miracle or the work
of the supernatural, with the chances in favor of the latter.
Each page of the average newspaper has six columns, and in each column
there is on an average 1800 words. Six multiplied by six and the
product of that by twenty-five, and that again by 1800, you will find
makes 1,620,000, which is just about the number of words that this
press prints in a second when it is turning out six-page papers at the
rate of twenty-five a second. That is something that will stagger any
man’s imagination if he tries to realize what it is.
This press will print, cut, paste, fold, count, and deliver 72,000
copies of an eight-page newspaper in one hour, which is equivalent to
1200 a minute and 20 a second.
It will print, cut, paste, count, and deliver complete 48,000 copies of
a ten- or twelve-page newspaper in one hour, which is equivalent to 800
a minute and a fraction over 13 a second.
It will print, cut, paste, fold, count, and deliver complete 36,000
copies of a sixteen-page newspaper an hour, which is at the rate of 600
a minute, or 10 a second.
It will print, cut, paste, fold, count, and deliver complete 24,000
copies of a fourteen-, twenty-, or twenty-four-page newspaper an hour,
which is at the rate of 400 a minute, or very nearly seven a second.
This is lightning work with a vengeance, and yet it is possible that
there may be some who read this who will live to call it slow. That
will probably be when they have found out all about how to put a
harness on electricity. No one can predict when inventive genius will
reach its limits in the printing press. Before this press was built,
the fastest presses in the world were Hoe’s quadruple presses, which
will turn out 48,000 four-, six-, or eight-page papers an hour, 24,000
ten-, twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-page papers an hour, and 12,000
twenty- or twenty-four page papers an hour, all cut, pasted, and folded.
The sextuple press has a well-nigh insatiable appetite for white paper.
To satisfy it it is fed from three rolls at the same time, one roll
being attached at either end of the press, and the third suspended near
the centre. It is the only press which has ever been able to accomplish
that feat. Each roll is sixty-three inches wide. When doing its best
this press will consume 25-7/8 miles of 63-inch wide white paper in
one hour, and eject it at the two deliveries, each copy containing an
epitome of the news of the world for the preceding twenty-four hours,
and each copy cut, pasted, and folded ready for delivery. It is a sight
worth seeing to see it done, and in its way it is just as impressive as
Niagara.
A man turns a lever, shafts and cylinders begin to revolve, the
whirring noise sets into a steady roar, you see three streams of white
paper pouring into the machine from the three huge rolls, and you pass
around to the other side and—it is literally snowing newspapers at
each end of the two delivery outlets. So fast does one paper follow
the other that you catch only a momentary glitter from the deft steel
fingers which seize the papers and cast them out.
The machine weighs about fifty-eight tons. It is massive and strong,
with the strength of a thousand giants. And yet, though its arms are of
steel and its motions are all as rapid as lightning, its touch is as
tender as that of a woman when she caresses her babe. How else does the
machine avoid tearing the paper? Paper tears very readily, as you often
ascertain accidentally when turning over the pages. Truly wonderful it
is, and mysterious to anybody but an expert, how this huge machine can
make newspapers at the rate of twenty-five a second without rending the
paper all to shreds.
It has six plate cylinders, each cylinder carrying eight stereotype
plates, and six impression-cylinders. These cylinders, when the press
is working at full speed, make two hundred revolutions a minute.
The period of contact between the paper and the plate cylinders is
therefore inconceivably brief, and how in that fractional space of time
a perfect impression is made even to the reproduction of the finest,
is one of those things which, to the man who is not “up” in mechanics,
must forever remain a mystery.
[Illustration: FOUR ROLLER TWO-REVOLUTION PRESS.]
A double folder forms part of the machine. A single folder would not
be equal to the task imposed on it. As it is, this double folder has
to exercise such celerity to keep up with the streams of printed paper
which descend upon it that its operations are too quick for the eye to
follow.
The press has two delivery outlets. At each the papers are
automatically counted in piles of fifty. No matter how rapidly the
papers come out, there is never a mistake in the count. It is as sure
as fate. By an ingenious contrivance—if I should try to describe it
more definitely most people would be none the wiser—each fiftieth
paper is shoved out an inch beyond the others which have been dropped
on to the receiving tapes, thus serving as a sort of tally mark.
Truly it is a marvelous machine—this sextuple press. Nowhere you will
find a more perfect adaptation of means to ends, nowhere in any branch
of industry a piece of mechanism which offers a finer example of what
human skill and ingenuity is capable of. And it is free from that
reproach which is sometimes brought against the greatest triumphs of
inventive genius in other departments of human activity,—that they
make mere automatons out of human beings.
There was recently manufactured by the Hoe Company for a New York paper
an addition to this wonderful piece of machinery designated an octuple
press. Running at full speed it will print, paste, cut, fold, and count
96,000 eight-page papers an hour. It is nearly 14 feet high, and 25
feet long. Ten men are required to operate it. The cylinders revolve
200 times in every 60 seconds.
This monster is divided into two working parts. The printing is done
on the half of the machine to the right. The paper passes over the
cylinders there, where it is printed from the stereotype plates, and
then runs through the other half of the machine on the left, where it
is cut, inserted, pasted, delivered, and counted from four outlets
folding in half-page size.
This press shows four distinct double printing machines, each fed by
its own roll of paper. The paper from each roll passes against two sets
of stereotype plate cylinders—one for each side of the printed sheet.
The machine is so perfectly adjusted that by simply turning a screw and
moving a gear a few inches each of the four sets of cylinders can be
thrown out of operation; that is to say one quarter, one half, three
quarters, or the whole press can be operated at will.
The folder is harmonized for each adjustment of the printing cylinder.
The folding of the papers has been brought to the highest state of
perfection. The sheets are folded, cut, and delivered by a rotary
motion at a speed that could never have been attained with the
reciprocating arms, such as were used prior to the Hoe inventions.
When a sixteen-page paper is being printed it comes in four-ply
thickness, and then doubles and shoots eight thicknesses under the
knife.
When a twenty-four-page paper is being printed it passes over the
longitudinal folder in six-ply thickness and passes under the knife in
twelve thicknesses. All this is attained without the use of guiding
tapes. In fact, the speed could not be attained with them.
As the papers are folded and delivered from the four outlets, with a
speed too great for the eye to follow, the machine itself counts them
in total and in bundles, as is done on the sextuple press. This monster
octuple machine has a perfected system of ink distribution with which
no other presses are equipped. Under the system results are obtained
by decreasing the size and increasing the number of ink-rollers around
each cylinder of plates.
The arrangement of the type cylinders is such as to make the press
one that can be handled with great ease and rapidity. Along the right
hand of the machine, between the two rows of cylinders, is an open
passageway. It is large enough for men to pass through either from the
ground or from the gallery near the latitudinal centre of the press.
From this open passageway the pressmen are able to watch every movement
of the machine’s interior working, and from it they are able to make
quick changes on the plate cylinders. The change in position of only
two ink-rollers is necessary to change a plate on any cylinder. This is
a matter of great importance to a paper which prints many editions, for
it is necessary to change plates so often and to economize every minute
of time in order to catch the fast mails which carry the paper to all
quarters of the earth.
On the octuple presses each roll of paper is guarded against breakage.
There is a device in the shape of a short endless belt of rubber which
passes over two pulleys and rests on top of the roll of paper. The
paper is then pulled from the roll as gently as the thread is pulled
from the spool of a sewing machine. The belt pushes the roll along
at a speed equal to and sometimes a little greater than that of the
stereotype cylinders. Hence, all tension is removed from the paper.
From the stereotyper’s department, where they have been made in a
few minutes, come the plates of curved, bright metal. Passed to the
pressmen, they are locked on the cylinders as fast as they can be
handled. The rolls of paper have been placed in their proper positions.
This accomplished, the men step back from the machine, the brakeman
pulls the lever, and the giant press begins its work. Slowly its
cylinders revolve at first, but as headway is gained the rumble that
accompanied the start increases into a shrill shriek as the limit of
speed is reached.
[Illustration: LITHOGRAPHIC PRESS.]
The paper rushes from its continuous rolls, is printed, folded, cut,
and thrown out from the four outlets at a speed that would be over
twice greater than that of any express train if it were confined to one
roll. Every paper is just like every other one, perfect in every detail.
When this has gone on for an hour, two hours, or however long it may
take to run off the editions, the monster press can be stopped in an
instant. With the simple touching of a lever all its movement will
cease before the cylinders can revolve five times, and they had been
revolving two hundred times a minute before.
The two wonders just described are confined to newspaper work. This
same American firm has produced presses upon which are printed the fine
specimens of magazines where the work takes a striking resemblance to
lithograph printing. They have a speed of 8000 an hour. From them come
booklets of 16, 20, or 24 pages. From the presses of 4000 an hour come
books of 32, 40, and 48 pages. In construction they are complicated and
grand.
Then come the presses upon which are printed different colors.
These are made in England and the United States, and are used with
satisfactory results on prominent publications in both countries. A
recent issue of the “British and Colonial Printer” directs attention
to this advance in mechanism through the medium of the Hoe art rotary
form feeder. It says:—
“This machine carries the mind back naturally to pre-rotary days, when
the Hoe multi-feeder held the field as the newspaper machine, to the
days of the heavy, and as we consider in these advanced days, clumsy
turtle. When the creative genius of Colonel Hoe evolved the rotary
press, the multi-feeder was almost at once relegated to the lumber
room of obsolete mechanics. It is hardly conceivable that it entered
the mind of any practical man at this time that the principle of
multi-fed flat sheet printing would ever be adapted to the production
of high art illustrated literature, at a speed equal, or nearly so,
to the former Hoe news machine. It has, at all events in our country,
long been a settled opinion that such work could only be successfully
accomplished upon a flat-bed machine, that the mere curvature of a
plate must destroy the beauty of a fine process block for example, and
that any attempt to travel at a greater speed than 1200 to 1500 an hour
must be at the sacrifice of depth and sufficiency of rolling. Whether
this is really so readers will now be able to form their own opinion
from the pages of the ‘Strand Magazine.’ Those pages abound in very
varied methods of engraving, woodcut and process, line and nature, and
reproductions alike from photos and from wash and crayon drawings.
Every page has undergone the process of electrotyping, cast straight
and curved subsequently, and therefore the conditions of printing at
the high speed of 4000 (or to be strictly accurate, four sheets of 16
pages each put through at the rate of 950 each, or 3800 per hour) are
as severe as could be desired.
“The British printer has yet to acquire a full mastery of its
capabilities, and the engineer has equally before him in some degree a
period of development. Some of the portraiture, human and animal, is
equal to anything seen. The make-ready (upon hard packing) exhibits
the highest quality, and the distribution of color perfection.
The plate-cylinder is made as large as the desired speed renders
practicable, in order that the curvature of the plates may be reduced
to a minimum. The provision for securing adequate distribution and
in-rolling is upon a liberal scale, but not one whit more so than
is requisite, extent of surface and speed of running considered.
There are 16 inkers and 38 distributors, with 16 iron distribution
cylinders. The sheets are fed in two at either side of the machine,
those from the right hand feeders being delivered upon the table at
the extreme left, the other upon the inner delivery board. The plates
are rigidly secured by special clutches. To facilitate the imposition
of the plates, or any attention required by the cylinder, the short
rear portion of the machine back of the cylinder is detachable and
can be run out upon an extended base, and then closed up and put into
gear again. This renders it perfectly accessible at the most essential
point. The sheets are of course printed on one side only. We have not
yet attained to the perfecting stage in art work in combination with
high speed; the introduction of the Hoe art rotary press, however,
marks a distinct epoch in this class of printing in Great Britain.
Color printing-presses are in use in the newspaper and magazine offices
in this country, and from them are produced the artistic as well as the
lurid styles of art.”
What the possibilities of the printing press are, looking at the degree
of excellence at present attained, it is difficult to predict. It
would seem as if the height of perfection now had been reached. The
probability is that the printer at the end of the first quarter of the
twentieth century may look with something akin to contempt upon the
machines which now are regarded with so much pride.
Such a thing is possible in this age of invention.
[Illustration: NUMBERING CARD PRESS.]
II. THE SETTING OF TYPE.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the little metal
pieces of type were picked up one at a time and placed in the composing
“stick” by hand, there was attached to the work an importance which
elevated it almost to the ranks of the trained professions. In England,
as late as 1817, compositors arrogated to themselves the dignity of
carrying swords. At the close of the nineteenth century, the art is
seen to be passing into the sphere of mechanics,—the methods in vogue
making it entirely a mechanical operation. Before many years of the
twentieth century have passed, there will have been attained a degree
of advancement which will dispense with the hand of man in guiding
the movements of the machine. The inventive skill which brought the
printing press to such a high point of excellence and speed has been
turned toward the work of type-composing, and the forward march is
likely to be as rapid.