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.

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[155]
[156] 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.

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[158]
[159] 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.

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.

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.

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[163]
[164] 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.

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.

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.

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.