The Columbian mechanical advancement consisted of the use of rollers for inking the type,—very much like the process now employed in inking the type when a rough proof is desired,—thus dispensing with the balls, which were managed by boys; the use of screws under the bed of the press to hold in position the form, into which had been securely adjusted the type; and the application of a long bar to obtain pressure sufficient to make the impression on the paper. The picture of this press shows the flat carriage upon which was placed the type, the platen or pressing surface, the bar which forced the platen upon the type, the spring which carried the platen back to position when the impression had been taken, and the track upon which the carriage was moved forward and backward,—primitive enough, and sufficiently simple in construction to show the limited capacity of the inventive genius of our great-grandfathers.
It was about 1829 when the Columbian gave way to the Washington press, and this was used for some time for fine book-work. The feature of it was an automatic inking roller attachment.
While the Washington press had the capacity for producing fine work, it was deficient in the speed required for meeting the demand then growing for books and newspapers. Then the printers turned to a cylinder press which had appeared in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The London “Times” had taken hold of it, and brought it to such a condition that its speed was raised to something like a thousand impressions an hour. König, a native of Saxony, in 1815, produced a press for printing both sides of the sheet. It resembled two single presses placed with their cylinders toward each other, the sheet being carried by tapes from the first to the second cylinder. Its capacity was 750 sheets, both sides, an hour.
THE COLUMBIAN PRESS.
Cambridge University about this time was furnished with a press in which the types were placed on the four sides of a prism, the paper being applied by another prism. It proved unsuccessful. In this press, however, were first introduced the inking rollers formed of a combination of glue and molasses. Rollers are made of these two materials to this day.
Cowper, an Englishman, in 1815, introduced curved stereotyped plates and fixed them to a cylinder. Two place cylinders and two impression cylinders were soon afterward worked together on one press by Cowper, printing both sides of the sheet at the rate of one thousand copies an hour.
This seems to have been the period when inventive skill began to assert itself in the printing press. The educational advancement of the people in this country and in Europe, with the lack of facility for furnishing information of the campaigns of Napoleon Bonaparte, the desire for facts regarding the events transpiring in England, France, and Germany, the meagreness of the details which had been furnished of the conflict between Great Britain and the United States in 1812, convinced the publishers of newspapers in this country and abroad that the laws of supply and demand were not equally balanced. The outcome of this was a press constructed to print both sides of the sheet from type, and was soon followed by the introduction of four impression cylinders. These were applied to the reciprocating bed to carry the type for one side of the sheet, the sheets being fed from four feeding boards, the impression cylinders alternately rising and falling, so that two sheets were printed during the passage one way, the other two on the return passage. A pair of inking rollers between the impression cylinders obtained ink from the reciprocating board.
WASHINGTON HAND PRESS.