Printing Through The Ages

Anyone of us can easily make a print. We simply take a piece of wood or a block of linoleum or even half a potato. We cut away part of the flat surface so that we raise pattern. Then we dab the potato with heavy ink or paint. Next we put the ink surface against a piece of paper and press hard. We have made a print and we can make as many more as we like. One of the earliest ways of printing was by means of a seal which was pressed onto soft clay or wax. People have used such seals for thousands of years. But it was a long time before anyone thought of putting ink onto a seal so that many prints could be made on paper or fabric. The first real printing from larger blocks started in China and Japan. Sometimes the Chinese and Japanese printed whole pictures from blocks of wood. Some of these prints found their way westward to Europe. Many hundreds of years later people in Europe began to make prints for themselves. Here is a design being printed as a repeat pattern on a large piece of cloth. Another early method of printing in this case playing cards. To us these methods seem crude but they were the best of their day. The European printers found that they could get a firm and even pressure by using a press like a wine press. Each turn of a screw above increased the pressure on a flat plate beneath. After a while they began to print words in addition to pictures and sometimes a whole page of words was cut in wood. But this was slow business. For each letter had to be cut anew each time it was used. Now the 15th century in Europe the time of many new ideas and inventions people wanted to read about them but still they could get only books copied slowly by hand. A new invention was greatly needed so that more books could be produced. Then in a secret workshop in the town of Mainz in Germany something startling was accomplished. A man named Gutenberg had managed to do something that had never been done before. After 20 years of experimenting he had produced a fine and unusual book. Gutenberg had printed a magnificent Bible. But what was more important he had printed not just one but 200 Bibles all exactly alike. This was unheard of. It meant that as many pages could now be printed in a day as a man could write by hand in a whole year. Well, what was Gutenberg's great invention that made this possible? Gutenberg had reasoned somewhat like this. We use the 26 letters of our alphabet over and over again as we write different words. Look at the letter E for example. Now if many copies of each letter could be made easily in separate pieces they could be used again and again as often as needed. But to cut separate letters in wood was much too slow. So if cast metal letters could be made Gutenberg saw a way of greatly speeding up the printing process. So he got metal craftsmen to make letters. This is the letter S of that time. After the metal letter had been checked and the craftsman was ready to use it as a punch. He selected a softer piece of metal and into it he hammered a deep impression of the letter. This impression became the exact reverse of the letter on the punch. This piece was called the matrix. It was really a deep print of the punch. This matrix was put into a mold. Metal was poured into this mold running into all the crevices of the letter on the matrix. Here in fact was a piece of metal type. Dozens of separate metal letters could be made each day from each matrix all exactly alike. And each could be used over and over again. So the great invention Gutenberg had contributed to printing was movable metal type. At first in Germany the letters as they were written by hand became the models for the metal type to be used in printing. Then exactly the same thing happened in Italy. Written letters became models for type letters. But soon in France printers began to design letters specially for printing which had become the accepted way of producing books. By the 15th century printing presses had been set up over most of Europe working the same way but using printing types that varied a great deal. And shortly newspapers were being started. But old presses were too slow to print newspapers. They still used essentially a central screw acting on a pressure plate beneath through the action of a lever. By this time however the industrial revolution was in full swing. Metal smelting was being developed. New machines were being made all of metal. So the old wooden printing press was replaced by a cast iron press which could do more work and do it more quickly. Other new ideas were invading the trade. Mechanical inking rollers were developed. These could spread the ink over the type quickly and evenly. They became part of the newer presses. The old hand ink pads gave way to mechanical rollers. The old time screw and lever for applying pressure gave way to a revolving drum under which the type could be moved back and forth. The black roller gave it ink and the paper passed between drum and type. Now one press could turn out a thousand copies an hour. Developments followed one another quickly. More and more newspapers were called for. The London Times had been started in the 1780s. A new printing press invented by Koenig was installed by the Times in 1814. It turned out 1,100 prints an hour. In 1827 5,000 prints an hour. By now however flatbed presses were too slow. Another invention speeded up printing and this is the way it worked. The flat page of type was locked in place in the usual way and made flat and even all over. Layers of tissue and blotting paper pasted together were laid over the page. A deep impression of the page was made just as the impression of a single letter had been made long before. The impressed paper matrix was then put into a casting machine which shaped it like a half cylinder. The molten metal poured around it thus had a half cylinder shape. Two of these half cylinders were then mounted around the drum of the press. This drawing shows what happened. Instead of being flat, the pages of metal now fitted around the drum. As the drum turned, the letters received ink, and the sheets of paper were printed on one side as they fed through. The paper making industry in France next helped speed up printing. It brought out this machine, which made paper in one continuous roll instead of separate sheets as had been done previously. With this paper roll available, here is what next happened to the newspaper press. A second printing drum, pressure cylinder, and set of ink rollers could be added. Now, both sides of a continuous sheet of paper could be printed in one operation. By this machine, newspapers could be printed twice as quickly as before. Just 100 years earlier, the printing press had been a simple, hand-operated contrivance. In one century, it had developed into a large and complicated machine. Through the years following, improvements came rapidly. And today, the printing industry is highly organized with scores of specialized jobs. Much of the work is done by machines. As this operator touches the keys, this machine molds each letter of type separately. It is called a monotype machine. And this is a linotype machine. Each line of type is molded in one long piece. In both machines, new type is molded for each job. Here's an interesting machine of the modern printing industry. It is putting together the sections of pages of a magazine in the right order for binding. And on this great press, a quarter of a million copies of tomorrow morning's newspaper are being printed with lightning speed. So, printing today is for everybody. Newspapers, books, magazines by the millions, well-designed and mass-produced. And we have all these today because, down through the ages, men and women in many parts of the world have ever been working to do a better job of printing.