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.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
The Typewriter.
[Old English Typewriter of 1714]—[The Burt Typewriter of 1829]—[Progin’s French Machine of 1833]—[Thurber’s Printing Machine of 1843]—[The Beach Typewriter]—[The Sholes Typewriter, the First of the Modern Form, Commercially Developed Into the Remington]—[The Caligraph]—[Smith-Premier]—[The Book Typewriter and Others].
Occupying an intermediate place between the old-fashioned scribe and the printer, the typewriter has in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century established a distinct and important avocation, and has become a necessary factor in modern business life. Chirography, or hand writing, reflecting, as it did, the idiosyncrasies of each writer, was not only slow, but when employed was, in most cases, in the haste and press of active business reduced to an illegible scrawl. For the use of reporters and others requiring extra speed, stenography, or short hand, was resorted to, but there was a distinct need for some easy, quick, legible, and uniform record of the busy man’s correspondence and copy work, and this the modern typewriter has supplied.