Even in conducting the mechanical arrangements of the paper—a business of no small difficulty—he had often occasion to exercise promptness and boldness of decision in cases of emergency. Printers in those days were a rather refractory class of work men, and not unfrequently took advantage of their position to impose hard terms on their employers, especially in the daily press, where everything must be promptly done within a very limited time. Thus on one occasion, in 1810, the pressmen made a sudden demand upon the proprietor for an increase of wages, and insisted upon a uniform rate being paid to all hands, whether good or bad. Walter was at first disposed to make concessions to the men; but having been privately informed that a combination was already entered into by the compositors, as well as by the pressmen, to leave his employment suddenly, under circumstances that would have stopped the publication of the paper, and inflicted on him the most serious injury, he determined to run all risks, rather than submit to what now appeared to him in the light of an extortion.
The strike took place on a Saturday morning, when suddenly, and without notice, all the hands turned out. Mr. Walter had only a few hours' notice of it, but he had already resolved upon his course. He collected apprentices from half a dozen different quarters, and a few inferior workmen, who were glad to obtain employment on any terms. He himself stript to his shirt-sleeves, and went to work with the rest; and for the next six-and-thirty hours he was incessantly employed at case and at press. On the Monday morning, the conspirators, who had assembled to triumph over his ruin, to their inexpressible amazement saw The Times issue from the publishing office at the usual hour, affording a memorable example of what one man's resolute energy may accomplish in a moment of difficulty.
The journal continued to appear with regularity, though the printers employed at the office lived in a state of daily peril. The conspirators, finding themselves baffled, resolved upon trying another game. They contrived to have two of the men employed by Walter as compositors apprehended as deserters from the Royal Navy. The men were taken before the magistrate; but the charge was only sustained by the testimony of clumsy, perjured witnesses, and fell to the ground. The turn-outs next proceeded to assault the new hands, when Mr. Walter resolved to throw around them the protection of the law. By the advice of counsel, he had twenty-one of the conspirators apprehended and tried, and nineteen of them were found guilty and condemned to various periods of imprisonment. From that moment combination was at an end in Printing House Square.
Mr. Walter's greatest achievement was his successful application of steam power to newspaper printing. Although he had greatly improved the mechanical arrangements after he took command of the paper, the rate at which the copies could be printed off remained almost stationary. It took a very long time indeed to throw off, by the hand-labour of pressmen, the three or four thousand copies which then constituted the ordinary circulation of The Times. On the occasion of any event of great public interest being reported in the paper, it was found almost impossible to meet the demand for copies. Only about 300 copies could be printed in the hour, with one man to ink the types and another to work the press, while the labour was very severe. Thus it took a long time to get out the daily impression, and very often the evening papers were out before The Times had half supplied the demand.
Mr. Walter could not brook the tedium of this irksome and laborious process. To increase the number of impressions, he resorted to various expedients. The type was set up in duplicate, and even in triplicate; several Stanhope presses were kept constantly at work; and still the insatiable demands of the newsmen on certain occasions could not be met. Thus the question was early forced upon his consideration, whether he could not devise machinery for the purpose of expediting the production of newspapers. Instead of 300 impressions an hour, he wanted from 1500 to 2000. Although such a speed as this seemed quite as chimerical as propelling a ship through the water against wind and tide at fifteen miles an hour, or running a locomotive on a railway at fifty, yet Mr. Walter was impressed with the conviction that a much more rapid printing of newspapers was feasible than by the slow hand-labour process; and he endeavoured to induce several ingenious mechanical contrivers to take up and work out his idea.
The principle of producing impressions by means of a cylinder, and of inking the types by means of a roller, was not new. We have seen, in the preceding memoir, that as early as 1790 William Nicholson had patented such a method, but his scheme had never been brought into practical operation. Mr. Walter endeavoured to enlist Marc Isambard Brunel—one of the cleverest inventors of the day—in his proposed method of rapid printing by machinery; but after labouring over a variety of plans for a considerable time, Brunel finally gave up the printing machine, unable to make anything of it. Mr. Walter next tried Thomas Martyn, an ingenious young compositor, who had a scheme for a self-acting machine for working the printing press. He was supplied with the necessary funds to enable him to prosecute his idea; but Mr. Walter's father was opposed to the scheme, and when the funds became exhausted, this scheme also fell to the ground.
As years passed on, and the circulation of the paper increased, the necessity for some more expeditious method of printing became still more urgent. Although Mr. Walter had declined to enter into an arrangement with Bensley in 1809, before Koenig had completed his invention of printing by cylinders, it was different five years later, when Koenig's printing machine was actually at work. In the preceding memoir, the circumstances connected with the adoption of the invention by Mr. Walter are fully related; as well as the announcement made in The Times on the 29th of November, 1814—the day on which the first newspaper printed by steam was given to the world.
But Koenig's printing machine was but the beginning of a great new branch of industry. After he had left this country in disgust, it remained for others to perfect the invention; although the ingenious German was entitled to the greatest credit for having made the first satisfactory beginning. Great inventions are not brought forth at a heat. They are begun by one man, improved by another, and perfected by a whole host of mechanical inventors. Numerous patents were taken out for the mechanical improvement of printing. Donkin and Bacon contrived a machine in 1813, in which the types were placed on a revolving prism. One of them was made for the University of Cambridge, but it was found too complicated; the inking was defective; and the project was abandoned.
In 1816, Mr. Cowper obtained a patent (No.3974) entitled, "A Method of Printing Paper for Paper Hangings, and Other Purposes."
The principal feature of this invention consisted in the curving or bending of stereotype plates for the purpose of being printed in that form. A number of machines for printing in two colours, in exact register, was made for the Bank of England, and four millions of One Pound notes were printed before the Bank Directors determined to abolish their further issue. The regular mode of producing stereotype plates, from plaster of Paris moulds, took so much time, that they could not then be used for newspaper printing.