Each page of the average newspaper has six columns, and in each column there is on an average 1800 words. Six multiplied by six and the product of that by twenty-five, and that again by 1800, you will find makes 1,620,000, which is just about the number of words that this press prints in a second when it is turning out six-page papers at the rate of twenty-five a second. That is something that will stagger any man’s imagination if he tries to realize what it is.
This press will print, cut, paste, fold, count, and deliver 72,000 copies of an eight-page newspaper in one hour, which is equivalent to 1200 a minute and 20 a second.
It will print, cut, paste, count, and deliver complete 48,000 copies of a ten- or twelve-page newspaper in one hour, which is equivalent to 800 a minute and a fraction over 13 a second.
It will print, cut, paste, fold, count, and deliver complete 36,000 copies of a sixteen-page newspaper an hour, which is at the rate of 600 a minute, or 10 a second.
It will print, cut, paste, fold, count, and deliver complete 24,000 copies of a fourteen-, twenty-, or twenty-four-page newspaper an hour, which is at the rate of 400 a minute, or very nearly seven a second.
This is lightning work with a vengeance, and yet it is possible that there may be some who read this who will live to call it slow. That will probably be when they have found out all about how to put a harness on electricity. No one can predict when inventive genius will reach its limits in the printing press. Before this press was built, the fastest presses in the world were Hoe’s quadruple presses, which will turn out 48,000 four-, six-, or eight-page papers an hour, 24,000 ten-, twelve-, fourteen-, or sixteen-page papers an hour, and 12,000 twenty- or twenty-four page papers an hour, all cut, pasted, and folded.
The sextuple press has a well-nigh insatiable appetite for white paper. To satisfy it it is fed from three rolls at the same time, one roll being attached at either end of the press, and the third suspended near the centre. It is the only press which has ever been able to accomplish that feat. Each roll is sixty-three inches wide. When doing its best this press will consume 25-7/8 miles of 63-inch wide white paper in one hour, and eject it at the two deliveries, each copy containing an epitome of the news of the world for the preceding twenty-four hours, and each copy cut, pasted, and folded ready for delivery. It is a sight worth seeing to see it done, and in its way it is just as impressive as Niagara.
A man turns a lever, shafts and cylinders begin to revolve, the whirring noise sets into a steady roar, you see three streams of white paper pouring into the machine from the three huge rolls, and you pass around to the other side and—it is literally snowing newspapers at each end of the two delivery outlets. So fast does one paper follow the other that you catch only a momentary glitter from the deft steel fingers which seize the papers and cast them out.
The machine weighs about fifty-eight tons. It is massive and strong, with the strength of a thousand giants. And yet, though its arms are of steel and its motions are all as rapid as lightning, its touch is as tender as that of a woman when she caresses her babe. How else does the machine avoid tearing the paper? Paper tears very readily, as you often ascertain accidentally when turning over the pages. Truly wonderful it is, and mysterious to anybody but an expert, how this huge machine can make newspapers at the rate of twenty-five a second without rending the paper all to shreds.
It has six plate cylinders, each cylinder carrying eight stereotype plates, and six impression-cylinders. These cylinders, when the press is working at full speed, make two hundred revolutions a minute. The period of contact between the paper and the plate cylinders is therefore inconceivably brief, and how in that fractional space of time a perfect impression is made even to the reproduction of the finest, is one of those things which, to the man who is not “up” in mechanics, must forever remain a mystery.