An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 70 ppsx

In this intaglio process, the ink was received by lines incised into the metal and a sheet of paper in contact with the plate was forced through an engraving press, rather like a mangle.

as Pliny’s Historia naturalis, first printed in 1469 and the earliest scientific

work of all to be printed, astronomy was the subject most treated, as it was the area of science more advanced than any other Early in the next century technological books began to appear—on mining, the assay of metals, glassmaking, distilling In mid-century appeared books that were to initiate profound changes in the way man thought of his place in the

universe—above all Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium printed in

Nuremberg in 1543 The book was joined by the periodical, as scientific work gathered pace from the mid-seventeenth century, in order to report progress more quickly and conveniently The earliest of these periodicals

that is still current is the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which

began to appear in 1665

The book was not of course a new medium: the printer took it over from the scribe But he did invent a new medium—the printed sheet, to advertise or give information The earliest surviving piece of printing, and also the earliest piece to come from Caxton’s press, is of this kind It was an indulgence, an announcement that a pardon was available to those who undertook certain good works There flowered a whole variety of ephemeral printing that was to

be the lot of the jobbing printer

During the sixteenth century the printers began to satisfy a growing demand for up-to-date information and entertainment in a more suitable form than the book From hand-written news reports circulated by hand was born the news-book and then the news-sheet At first spasmodic—the earliest English example provided an account of the Battle of Flodden in 1513—they became

regular and emerged as the first true newspapers with the publication of Aviso-Relation oder Zeitung, edited in Prague but printed in Wolfenbüttel, and the Relation of the Strasburg printer Johann Carolus, both in 1609 ‘Corantos’, as

they were called began to spread and the first appeared in England from the press of Thomas Archer in 1621 These were in the form of newsbooks, but around mid-century the handier news-sheet emerged, among the earliest being

the London Gazette of 1665, still with us today At the same time, the periodical

began to serve a desire for more leisurely background reading; the aim was well expressed in the cumbersome title of one example, started in Leipzig in 1688: ‘Entertaining and serious, rational and unsophisticated ideas of all kinds

of useful and agreeable books and subjects’ By the turn of the century the newspaper and magazine were established institutions and made rapid strides With the introduction of the daily post from Dover to London in 1691, bringing in foreign news each day, the daily paper became a practical

proposition The Daily Courant in London in 1702 was the first Meanwhile the

weekly journal developed into the organ for enlightenment and entertainment,

above all in the hands of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison with their Tatler (1709) and Spectator (1711), which exerted an immense influence on

eighteenth-century reading One of the most successful of these periodicals was the

Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1907), which reached a circulation of 15,000 in

1745 and gave the name ‘magazine’ to this type of production

The enterprise shown by the printers, publishers and booksellers in developing this remarkably wide variety of reading matter was in striking contrast to the conservatism of their technology The earliest illustration of a press is a rather crude woodcut of 1499, the ‘Dance of Death’ print from Lyons The equally well-known Badius prints of 1507 and 1520 provide a better idea of an early press room Yet the first detailed account in any

language did not appear until 1683–4 in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick exercises on the whole an of printing Clearly little had changed and Moxon’s work served as

the basis of later handbooks throughout the age of hand printing A few components were made of iron, but wood remained the principal material, above all for the frame That restricted the total load that could be imposed by the platen upon the bed of the press and that meant that only half a sheet could be printed at one pull Production is said to have attained 250 sheets an hour, but that was doubtless an upper limit rather than an everyday average Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the composition of the type-metal was changed slightly to give greater toughness to withstand the longer print runs that were becoming the rule As to the paper, once mediaeval Europe had made slight modifications to the materials and techniques received from the East, there was little change until the Industrial Revolution The raw material was rag, usually linen, and this was cut up into small pieces, boiled, allowed to ferment to assist disintegration and finally subjected to the action of wooden stampers That completed the separation into fibres which, mixed with water

to the consistency of thin porridge, formed the ‘stock’ from which the paper was made The papermaker dipped into the pulp his mould, consisting of a rectangular wooden frame with a mesh of closely spaced brass wires and heavier wires at right angles more widely spaced The size of the sheet was determined by a second frame, or deckle, placed over the first When he had scooped up an even layer of pulp on the mould, he gave it a shake to help interlock the fibres and release some of the water He had made a sheet of paper The rest of the process, then as now, consisted of getting rid of the rest

of the water The mould wires gave rise to the characteristic wire and chain marks of hand-made paper, although Whatman introduced ‘wove’ paper in

1757, using a mould with woven wire to produce a smooth surface

Stamping was mechanized and water-powered during the thirteenth century and this stage of the process was greatly accelerated around 1650 by the invention of the hollander, a vessel in which a vertical spindle with knife blades rotated to lacerate the rags

Book illustration had settled into a rut During the early period woodcuts were used, the raised portions receiving the ink with the type, so that text and illustration could be printed together But towards the end of the sixteenth century, the copper engraving began to supplant the wood block, on account

of the finer detail that could be reproduced In this intaglio process, the ink was received by lines incised into the metal and a sheet of paper in contact with the plate was forced through an engraving press, rather like a mangle The illustrations thus had to be printed separately from the text and were on sheets interspersed throughout the text or gathered together at the end Only in recent years has a reconciliation between text and illustration been effected by modern offset litho printing

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION IN THE

NINETEENTH CENTURY Change, when at last it came, began in the country where the Industrial Revolution had already begun to change so much: England It revolutionized not only the look and feel of the printed book but the reading habits of the industrialized nations The move to mechanize paper production began with the making of a model papermaking machine by Nicolas Louis Robert in 1797

at a mill in Essonnes, south of Paris After applying for a patent the following year, Robert fell out with his backer and owner of the mill, Didot, although the latter did contact John Gamble in England to see if capital could be raised there for a full-sized machine—all this against the background of the Napoleonic Wars Gamble and the London stationers the brothers Fourdrinier called in the engineer Bryan Donkin and in 1807 they patented a much superior version of Robert’s invention Pulp passed over a ‘breast box’ in a continuous stream on to a wove-wire screen The fibrous sheet was passed between rollers to remove some of the water The paper was then transferred

to a felt blanket and a second pair of rollers to remove more water and finally wound on to a drum while still quite wet Steam-heated drying cylinders were introduced by Thomas Crompton in 1820 and at last it was possible to produce a continuous sheet or web of dry paper Later, detailed modifications were made to improve quality and widen the range of papers available, but the modern machine, although much larger and faster, operates on the same principle as the early Fourdrinier examples Even those early machines were able to raise production from the 25–45kg (60–100lb) a day of the old manual process to 450kg (1000lb) a day with a corresponding reduction in cost to the customer This development was well timed, as the improvements in the printing press that were about to take place would have been useless unless paper production had kept pace

The first major change in the press was brought about by Charles Mahon, 3rd Earl Stanhope, who in 1800 introduced the first successful iron press, the famous Stanhope press The iron frame not only enabled the whole forme (the frame containing the body of type for a complete sheet) to be printed at one pull, thus speeding up production, but larger formes could be handled without

straining the frame While retaining the screw-operated platen (the plate which pressed the type against the paper), a system of levers attached to the bar increased the pressure at the moment of contact This gave beautifully sharp impressions on the paper and also eased the strain on the pressman

Production rate rose to about 300 sheets an hour The Times, soon to be and

long to remain in the vanguard of technical progress, was printed on a battery

of Stanhopes during the early 1800s

A number of improved designs of iron hand-press soon followed, the most celebrated being the American Columbian press, invented by Floyd Clymer in

1813 The screw device was replaced by a system of levers assisted by a counterweight in the form of a gilded cast-iron eagle, which gave the press its characteristic flamboyant touch Many of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature were printed on such presses—most book work until mid-century and much thereafter flowed from them—but they could not meet the needs of the newspaper proprietors

The first machine press was invented by Friedrich König and Andreas Bauer of Würzburg in 1811 As the German engineering industry was not sufficiently well developed to manufacture their invention they moved to England and their first successful press was patented in 1812 A revolving cylinder carried the paper, which received an impression from a reciprocating bed carrying the type forme The machine could be operated by hand but steam power could also be harnessed The real breakthrough came when

König and Bauer constructed a twin-cylinder machine for John Walter of The Times On that famous night of 29 November 1814, behind closed doors to

avoid disruptive attentions from conservative-minded printers, a newspaper was printed for the first time on a machine press Production shot up to 1100 sheets an hour, but more was to come After so many years of stagnation progress now became rapid indeed The Applegath and Cowper four-cylinder

press of 1827, made for The Times again, carried the rate up to 4000 sheets an

hour Their type-revolving press twenty years later took it up to 8000 It was the newspaper that led the demand for higher speeds and stimulated yet further development

The next stage was to replace the reciprocating flat-bed by a continuously rotating cylinder press, carrying the type on a curved forme The first press of

this kind was constructed by R.Hoe & Co in 1846 for the Philadelphia Ledger

in the USA The cylinder of this huge machine was about 2m (6.5ft) in diameter and, with four impression cylinders printing off at four points around the circumference, output attained 8000 sheets an hour Even larger machines

of this kind followed, with ten impression cylinders giving 20,000 sheets an

hour Paris received its first Hoe press in 1848 and London in 1856; The Times

ordered two of them

The way forward to greater speed was to print on both sides of the paper at once—a perfecting press—and on to a continuous web of paper instead of

separate sheets The first to be constructed was the Bullock press in

Philadelphia in 1863 and five years later The Times built one, known as the

Walter press, after the then editor John Walter III This could print 15,000 completed copies, or over 60,000 sheets an hour The printing press thereby achieved its final form; future developments were in size and greater speed rather than in design principles In the Bullock press the paper, although fed from a reel, was cut up into sheets before printing; on the Walter press a continuous web of paper was fed through, printed on both sides, separated into sheets and copies delivered alternately to two delivery points

The mass-circulation newspaper, springing up in the 1880s, called for yet more speed and the Walter concept was refined, using several printing formes to a cylinder, combining several cylinders in a machine (Hoe in 1882) and then these were placed vertically The first folding device was incorporated in 1870 In 1920 the Goss Company introduced the Unit press with several printing units placed in line and the webs from each gathered together at one point for folding and cutting From the early years of the twentieth century steam or gas power gave way to electricity and the modern high-speed press had arrived

An essential element in the quest for speed was the rotary principle, by which the type forme was curved to follow the shape of a cylinder, replacing the flat forme on a flat-bed press At first type was cast in wedge-shaped moulds and clamped to the cylinders, but this led to problems with dislodged type, so curved stereotypes were introduced During the eighteenth century attempts had been made to make a mould of a forme of type and cast a printing plate from it to enable copies to be run off while the original type was distributed for use of a fresh piece of work William Ged, a Scottish goldsmith, experimented with plaster moulds in the 1720s, but opposition from the printers, who feared that the innovation would lead to loss of work, put an end to these experiments In France, however, contemporary work along the same lines found a readier response, particularly in the making of plates for printing currency during a period of high inflation But it was Stanhope’s second great contribution to printing technology to perfect a method for making printing plates: stereotypes Later the plaster moulds were found to be heavy and fragile and in 1829 the French printer Claude Genoux substituted papier mâché, known as wet flong This in turn was replaced by dry flong in 1893, paving the way for a mechanized process, the Standard Autoplate Caster by Henry A.Wise Wood in 1900 Stereotypes for rotary presses were of course cast in type metal in curved formes Recently modern materials have replaced metal for printing certain kinds of material, such as synthetic rubber and plastics

Not all printers demanded the high speeds required by the newspaper proprietors For book printing, let alone the miscellaneous work of the jobbing printer, something more sedate was favoured, something the printer

could feel was more like a hand-press Indeed, the hand-press carried on for much commercial book work well into the nineteenth century, but two types

of machine were developed to serve his needs: the cylinder and the platen William Rutt designed a small hand-operated press based on the König & Bauer in which the impression cylinder came to rest after printing a sheet to allow the flat bed carrying the type to be moved back to the starting position This showed no saving in time over the hand-press, but the Naypeer of 1824, developed by David Napier and commissioned by T.C.Hansard for book printing, was more successful By 1830, the machine had incorporated two important advances: gripping fingers on the cylinder to take a sheet of paper through the machine, enabling the sheet to be accurately placed on the cylinder; and a continuously revolving cylinder, rising to allow the bed to return after each impression Between 1830 and 1860 many patents were taken out for cylinder presses The best known was the Wharfedale, from the name of the valley in Yorkshire where Otley, its place of origin, is situated Developed by Dawson and Payne in 1859, it was of the stop-cylinder pattern and of robust construction Similar machines were made in other countries and the name Wharfedale became the generic term for this veritable workhorse of the industry for many years The version manufactured by König & Bauer in Würzburg in the early years of the twentieth century could print 1200 sheets an hour

Even that was too elaborate for the jobber and the platen press was evolved

to serve his needs A foot-operated press was patented in London in 1820 by the appropriately named American inventor Daniel Treadwell, but it did not succeed Other American inventors took up the idea and the Ruggles press of

1851 set the pattern, with a vertical type bed against which the paper-bearing platen closed This was followed by Gordon’s Franklin press in 1856 which became the general form for small jobbing platen presses When small electric motors to work such machines became available in the early 1900s (see Chapter 6), automatic paper-feed was added and the field was dominated by the Heidelberg and Thompson platens until this kind of press began to be superseded by the small office offset litho machine in the 1950s

The Fourdrinier papermaking machine, the power-operated rotary, cylinder, and platen presses, and the stereotype, made possible the mass dissemination

of literature of all kinds There was the improving literature promoted by such bodies as the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge founded in 1826

with such notable publications as the Penny Magazine and Penny Encyclopaedia

founded in 1832 and 1835 by the great popular educator Charles Knight They made possible a wide readership for Dickens’s bestsellers; they also produced a flood of cheap trash The Industrial Revolution had helped to bring about a desire for both educational and entertaining reading matter among the artisan and new rising middle classes, but it was the technical advances that led the revolution in reading habits of the masses

The copper engraving had by 1800 done yeoman service for centuries, but copper is a soft metal and ill-suited to the wear imposed by long print runs Steel engraving, begun in the USA in 1810 for bank notes, spread to Europe and soon superseded copper, thus helping to bring down the price of illustrated books and place them within reach of the masses The wood engraving was also a popular medium, brought to perfection by Thomas Bewick Here, the wood block was cut across the grain instead of with it, as for earlier wood cuts, and finely engraved illustrations could be made cheaply and quickly, retaining quality after long print runs They made possible cheap illustrated magazines

like the Penny Magazine, the Illustrated London News (1842) and Punch (1841).

For higher quality work, such as art reproductions, the mezzotint and aquatint gave good results Mezzotints are a kind of engraving in which the metal plate is roughened with a ‘rocker’ with a serrated edge The areas corresponding to the lighter parts of the picture are then smoothed with a scraper to a varying degree Aquatints are produced by etching the metal plate, that is, eroding it with acid, through a porous ground The lightest portions are then etched and given a varnish coating to protect them from further action of the acid Darker areas are then formed by successive etching and varnishing

By these means, subtle gradations of tone can be produced Mezzotints were used mainly for reproducing paintings and portraits, aquatints for topographical scenes and descriptive illustations

Both methods were supplanted by lithography, invented by happy accident

by Johann Alois Senefelder of Munich when he found that after marking the flat surface of a piece of limestone with a greasy crayon, dampening the surface and passing an inked roller over it, the ink covered the greasy marks but was rejected by the rest If paper was pressed on to the surface, it took up the image

in reverse Senefelder began to use lithography (‘stone printing’) in 1800 He tried unsuccessfully to keep the process to himself, publishing no account of it until 1818 The following year Ackermann brought out an English translation,

A Complete Course of Lithography, and from 1830 lithography had virtually

triumphed for printed illustrations, except for mezzotints for paintings, steel engravings for cheap books and wood engravings for both popular periodicals and books

A slab of limestone had certain disadvantages; it was cumbersome and broke if handled clumsily Metal plates were sometimes used instead—zinc from around 1830 and aluminium became a practical proposition in 1904 The versatility of the process was greatly increased by the offset principle, first used

to print on to tinplate The hard unyielding printing surface was replaced by a resilient rubber surface by transferring or ‘offsetting’ the image from one to the other and then printing on to the tin surface Robert Barclay patented this process in 1875 but printing on to paper had to await the development of a suitable rotary press for offset litho printing, by Harris in the USA and George Mann & Co in Britain in the early years of this century

For much of the nineteenth century, the great mass of the printed illustrations produced required the services of armies of artists, whether for

‘artistic’ work or for purely factual representation for instruction purposes or news media The invention and development of photography from the late 1820s (see p 731ff.) provided a method of factual representation, but the large-scale mechanical reproduction of photographs was not easy: it was not until the 1880s that a photo-process engraved plate, that could be printed in a press

like a hand-engraved one, became a possibility The Daily Telegraph in 1882 was

the first newspaper to use photographic line blocks, known as zincographs

because sensitized zinc plates were used, while the Daily Graphic was the first to

publish such illustrations in bulk So far only the lines in a photograph could

be printed The breakthrough to reproducing the whole range of tones was achieved with the invention of the half-tone process The original was copied

by a process camera in which a cross-line screen was interposed in front of the negative, producing a photograph consisting of thousands of dots which, viewed from a distance, gave the illusion of tone variation From the ‘dotted’ negative, a ‘dotted’ sensitized printing plate was prepared, which could be printed off with the rest of the text The use of half-tone blocks in newspapers dates from 1877 by the Jaffé brothers in Vienna, taken up by Horgan in the

USA with the New York Daily Graphic in 1880 The London Daily Graphic was

using them in 1894 and the daily newspaper illustrated by a new breed, the

press photographer, was in being Harmsworth’s Daily Mirror, starting in 1903,

the first newspaper to be sold at a halfpenny, epitomized the new mass journalism, made possible by rotary press, papermaking machine, stereotype and half-tone block

Another way of mass-printing photographs has been photogravure, an engraving or intaglio process Artists had for centuries graved in copper plates lines that held the ink, which was transferred by pressure to the paper In 1879, Karl Klic exhibited plates derived from photographs The ink was held in a myriad of minute cells in the surface of the plate, of varying depth according to the tones of the original Klic next developed a gravure cylinder for use in a rotary press The cylinder dipped into free-flowing ink which was then wiped off by a ‘doctor’ blade, leaving the ink in the cells

With all this plethora of progress in nineteenth century printing technology, one process remained obstinately at the primitive, hand-worked stage— typesetting The making of the type was successfully mechanized as early as

1838 with the Bruce typecaster, developed by David Bruce in the USA, using a pivotal action of the mould to and from the mouth of a hot-metal pump It was exhibited in London at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and its use became widespread in Britain soon afterwards The Wicks caster of 1878, producing complete sets (founts) of type could turn out some 60,000 types an hour But every letter to be printed still had to be taken out of the type case by the compositor, placed in his hand-held composing stick and transferred to the

galley in batches to be made ready for printing After printing, each type had

to be returned to its place in the type case A veritable army of compositors was needed to satisfy the voracious appetite of the rotary presses Many inventions were devised to mechanize this process, but none was really satisfactory The first approach was to assemble and distribute the types themselves mechanically The first record of such a machine is of that patented

by the London-based New Yorker Dr William Church in 1822, but it seems never to have been constructed Many later forms were tried and some gave useful service, but none was at the same time reliable and mechanized the

whole process One of the most successful was the Kastenbein, used by The Times for many years Here, the type was assembled mechanically for printing

and melted down after use; a fresh fount of type was then cast by a Wicks caster The problem was solved by following a different route— assembling moulds or matrices of the required characters, casting the type and returning the matrices to their original positions ready for use again It was a Württemberg watchmaker and immigrant to the USA, Ottmar Mergenthaler, who achieved the breakthrough with the Linotype machine, which produced casts of slugs, or complete lines of type The first model was completed in

1885 and was first used in the office of the New York Tribune the following year.

An improved model came out in 1890 and hundreds were constructed for sale

in the USA, Great Britain and later in Europe By 1900, 21 London dailies were being set on the Linotype

At much the same time, in 1887, the Monotype machine was developed by the American Tolbert Lanston Its keyboard unit produced a strip of paper tape with holes punched in patterns corresponding to the characters required and this controlled the assembly of matrices in the caster, from which types cast singly were ejected and fed to an assembly point until a complete line had been formed It became a commercial proposition in 1894 and an advanced model was installed by Cassell & Co in London in 1900 Some hand setting carried on until the First World War, but from the 1920s Monotype and Linotype reigned supreme—the former mainly for book work, the latter for newspapers

For the first half of this century hot-metal type setting and relief (letterpress) printing produced the vast majority of the public’s reading matter For long

runs of illustrated magazines gravure printing was more suitable The Illustrated London News was the first in which pictures and text were printed

simultaneously by gravure, from 1913 This process has still not entirely given way to offset lithography for the ‘popular illustrateds’

For half a century printing seemed quite settled in its hot-metal, letterpress ways and few would have predicted that in a relatively few years a revolution

in technology would sweep aside these time-honoured processes and almost do away with metal type The new photocomposing process was envisaged in patents even in the nineteenth century and inventors were seeking ways of

dispensing with metal types in the 1920s, but it was not until after the Second World War that commercially practical machines became available Photocomposing began to be used more widely after improvements in lithographic printing were made and quicker, cheaper methods were found of making letterpress printing blocks from photographs In the 1950s some hot-metal machines were adapted to become photosetters by replacing the matrix with a photographic negative Meanwhile, a new range of specially designed machines, such as the Lumitype of French origin, was being developed, in which the keyboard produced a punched paper tape with coded instructions for operating a photographic printer

Computers were introduced in order to decide about line length, justifying the right-hand margin, spacing between words and so on, decisions previously taken by the compositor Two kinds of photosetter emerged, one where the keyboard generated a paper or magnetic tape that controlled the operation of the photo-matrix and one where the operator controlled this direct A beam of light created the images of the characters on the photographic film or paper The next stage used a system of electronics to build up the images of the characters in a cathode-ray tube, as in the Linotron 505 Beyond that, the character image could be stored in the form of magnetic impulses in a computer (digital storage), cutting out the need for a photographic matrix Here, we have reached the stage where a reporter with a keyboard unit can generate impulses through a telephone line and the computer-controlled photosetter can produce the copy from which, via a process camera, a printing plate can be made for printing by offset lithography This method dispenses not only with metal type, but with the compositor himself The printing industry has traditionally viewed technical advances with suspicion, understandably when they cause job losses, and the new computerized photosetters have certainly met their share of opposition But, properly managed, the advance has been beneficial and hot-metal technology belongs to the past

COLOUR PRINTING The nineteenth century also saw the flowering of colour printing Until that time, nearly all the colour that appeared in books was applied by hand, but then several processes were developed for colour printing on a commercial scale They all, like the Baxter prints and chromolithographs, entailed repeated printing in exact register of each colour that constituted the final picture, a laborious and expensive procedure Technical progress in this field depended on a proper understanding of the theoretical background of the nature of colours and how they could be produced by mixing the three primary colours, red, blue, and yellow Some progress was made in applying