FOUR ROLLER TWO-REVOLUTION PRESS.
A double folder forms part of the machine. A single folder would not be equal to the task imposed on it. As it is, this double folder has to exercise such celerity to keep up with the streams of printed paper which descend upon it that its operations are too quick for the eye to follow.
The press has two delivery outlets. At each the papers are automatically counted in piles of fifty. No matter how rapidly the papers come out, there is never a mistake in the count. It is as sure as fate. By an ingenious contrivance—if I should try to describe it more definitely most people would be none the wiser—each fiftieth paper is shoved out an inch beyond the others which have been dropped on to the receiving tapes, thus serving as a sort of tally mark.
Truly it is a marvelous machine—this sextuple press. Nowhere you will find a more perfect adaptation of means to ends, nowhere in any branch of industry a piece of mechanism which offers a finer example of what human skill and ingenuity is capable of. And it is free from that reproach which is sometimes brought against the greatest triumphs of inventive genius in other departments of human activity,—that they make mere automatons out of human beings.
There was recently manufactured by the Hoe Company for a New York paper an addition to this wonderful piece of machinery designated an octuple press. Running at full speed it will print, paste, cut, fold, and count 96,000 eight-page papers an hour. It is nearly 14 feet high, and 25 feet long. Ten men are required to operate it. The cylinders revolve 200 times in every 60 seconds.
This monster is divided into two working parts. The printing is done on the half of the machine to the right. The paper passes over the cylinders there, where it is printed from the stereotype plates, and then runs through the other half of the machine on the left, where it is cut, inserted, pasted, delivered, and counted from four outlets folding in half-page size.
This press shows four distinct double printing machines, each fed by its own roll of paper. The paper from each roll passes against two sets of stereotype plate cylinders—one for each side of the printed sheet. The machine is so perfectly adjusted that by simply turning a screw and moving a gear a few inches each of the four sets of cylinders can be thrown out of operation; that is to say one quarter, one half, three quarters, or the whole press can be operated at will.
The folder is harmonized for each adjustment of the printing cylinder. The folding of the papers has been brought to the highest state of perfection. The sheets are folded, cut, and delivered by a rotary motion at a speed that could never have been attained with the reciprocating arms, such as were used prior to the Hoe inventions.
When a sixteen-page paper is being printed it comes in four-ply thickness, and then doubles and shoots eight thicknesses under the knife.