THE PRESS AND ITS WORKING.
HISTORY OF THE PRESS.
OLD COMMON PRESS.
While poets and orators have expatiated on the glory and power of the press, rulers have exhausted their cunning in attempts to curb and regulate the art of which it is the symbol. Hedged in by arbitrary restrictions, it is not wonderful that printing was long carried on with clumsy implements. The earliest press resembled a screw-press, with a contrivance for running the form of types under the point of pressure. After the impression was taken, the screw was relaxed, and the form withdrawn and the sheet removed.
This rude press continued in general use till 1620, when Willem Jansen Blaeu, at first a joiner and afterward a mathematical instrument maker of Amsterdam, contrived a press in which the bed or carriage was brought under the point of pressure by moving a handle attached to a screw hanging in a beam with a spring, the spring causing the screw to fly back as soon as the impression was given. This movement was afterward effected by means of a double strap or belt, two ends of which were attached to an axle, and the others to opposite ends of the bed. The platen was so small that two pulls were necessary to print one side of a sheet, and each sheet, therefore, required four pulls to produce a complete impression.
Adam Ramage, who came from Scotland to Philadelphia about 1790, and who for a long time was the chief press-builder in the United States, made some improvements in the old press, one of which was the substitution of an iron bed for the stone one before in use.