An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 70

PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 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 672 LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 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 673 PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 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 674 LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND GRAPHIC ARTS 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 675 PART FOUR: COMMUNICATION AND CALCULATION 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 676 ... - tailieumienphi.vn