"Jingles!" said Jimmie again, for what can a boy say to such figures as those.
When Jimmie reached home that night he announced to his father that he was going to be a newspaper man.
"I'm willing," replied his father. "The printing press has done more for the progress of civilization than anything else, and the modern newspaper is one of the greatest factors in the world's advancement. Go ahead. You'll live to see the printing press reach even more people than it does now."
Sextuple Perfecting Press
Mr. Granger was right. When Jimmie was no older than his uncle had been on the day that Jimmie first saw a big press, Jimmie did indeed see another wonder. It was a Hoe Double Octuple Press—the biggest press in the world in 1912—which, with others built on the same principle even if they were smaller, made newspaper printing cheap enough so that a sixteen-page paper could be sold for one cent.
The grown-up Jimmie felt as he stood by the new press very much as he felt years before. Could there be a more wonderful machine? Eight rolls of paper were feeding the monster; eighteen plate cylinders were revolving, each carrying type enough for eight pages of a large newspaper; the cylinders, turning at a speed of three hundred revolutions a minute, were consuming paper at the rate of 108 miles of paper six feet wide in an hour. Jimmie, then an experienced newspaper man, watched the four sets of folders pouring out thirty-two-page papers at the rate of 75,000 an hour, until he turned away, saying, "Can it be possible that printing will ever be easier? How I wish Benjamin Franklin could see this press! How he would glory in its possibilities! It is perfectly true that the printing press is to literature what the steam engine is to the industries, and what the locomotive is to traffic."