Twentieth Century Inventions: A Forecast

by George Sutherland

Transparency painting will no doubt be one of these methods. The artist will paint on a set of sheets of transparent celluloid or glass, mounted in frames of wood and hinged so that they can, for purposes of observation, be put aside and yet brought back to their original positions quite accurately. Each different transparent sheet will be intended for one pure colour, the only pigments used being of the most transparent description obtainable.

The picture may thus be built up by successive additions and alterations, not all put upon one surface, but constituting a number of "monochromes," superimposed one upon the other. When finished, each of these one-colour transparencies can then be reproduced by photo-mechanical means for multi-colour printing in the press.

By what are known as the photographic "interruption" processes, a kind of converse method has achieved a certain degree of success. A landscape or a picture is photographed several times from exactly the same position, but on each occasion it is taken through a screen of a different coloured glass, which is intended for the purpose of intercepting all the rays of light, except those of one particular tint. Coloured prints in transparent gelatine or other suitable medium are then made from the various negatives, each in its appropriate tint; and when all are placed together and viewed through transmitted light, the effect of the picture, with all its colours combined, is fairly well produced. More serviceable from the artistic point of view will be the method according to which the artist makes his picture by transmitted light, but the finished printed product is seen on paper, because this latter lends itself to the finest work of the artistic printer.

The principal branch of the work of the photographer must continue to be portraiture. He cannot greatly reduce the cost of getting a really good negative, because so much hand-labour is required for the task of "retouching"; but he can give, perhaps, a hundred prints for the price which he now charges for a dozen, and make money by the enterprise. It has already been proved that there is no necessity for using expensive salts of gold, silver or platinum in order to secure the most artistic prints; and, as a matter of fact, some of the finest art work in the photography of the past quarter of a century has been accomplished with the cheapest of materials, such as gelatine, glue and lampblack.

Pigmented gelatine is, without doubt, the coming medium for photographic prints, and the methods of making them must approximate more and more closely to those of the typographic printer. By producing a "photo-relief" in gelatine—sensitised with bichromate of potash, and afterwards exposed first to the sun and then to the action of water—an impression in plastic material can be secured, from which, with the use of warm, thin, pigmented gelatine, a hundred copies or more can be printed off in a few minutes.

The very general introduction of such a process has naturally been delayed owing to the extra trouble involved in the first methods which were suggested for applying it, and also, no doubt, on account of the recent fashion for platinotype and bromide of silver prints. But as soon as more convenient details for the making of pigmented gelatine prints have been elaborated, the cheapness of the material and the wonderful variety of the art shades and tints in which photographs can be executed will give the gelatine processes an advantage in the competition which it will be hopeless for other methods to challenge.

The daily newspapers of a few years hence will be vividly illustrated with photographic pictures of the personages and the events of the day. The gelatine photo-relief, already alluded to, will no doubt afford the basis of the principal processes by which this will be effected. Hitherto the chief drawback has been the difficulty of imparting a suitable grain to the printing blocks made from these reliefs; but this has been practically overcome by the use of sheets of metallic foil previously impressed with the form of a finely-engraved tint-block. The actual printing surface, of course, consists of an electrotype or stereotype taken from this metallic-grained photographic face.

For "high-art" printing on fine paper with the more expensive kinds of ink, the half-tone zinco processes will doubtless maintain their supremacy and gradually diminish the area within which lithographic printing is required. In the case of newspaper work, however, where haste in getting ready for the press is necessarily the prime consideration, the flat and very slightly-indented surface of the zinco block is found to be unsuited to the requirements. Flat blocks, which require careful "overlaying" on the machine, waste too much time for daily news work. Without going into technical details it may be surmised in general terms that in the near future almost every newspaper will contain, each day, one or more photo-illustrations of events of the previous day or of the news which has come to hand from a distance.

Type-setting by hand is, for newspaper purposes, being so rapidly superseded, that only in the smaller towns and villages can it remain for even a few years longer. But in the machines by which this revolution has been effected, finality has been by no means reached. Every line of matter which appears in any modern daily newspaper has to pass through two processes of stereotyping before it makes a beginning to effect its final work of printing upon paper.

First, there is the stereotyping or casting of the line in its position in the type-setting machine after the matrices have been ranged in position by the application of the fingers to the various keys; and, secondly, when all the lines have been placed together to make a page, it is necessary to take an impression of them upon papier mâché, or what is technically called "flong," and then to dry it and make the full cast from it curved and ready for placing on the cylinder of the printing machine. The delay occasioned by the need for drying the wet flong is such a serious matter—particularly to evening newspapers requiring many editions during the afternoon—that several dry methods have been tried with greater or less success.