Inventions in the Century

by William Henry Doolittle

It was the scarcity of rags, especially of linen rags, that forced inventors to find other paper-producing materials.

It would be impossible and uninteresting in a work of this character to enumerate the mechanical details constituting the improvements of the century in paper-making machinery of all kinds. Thousands of patents have been granted for such inventions. With one modern Fourdrinier machine, and a few beating engines, a small paper mill will now turn out daily as much paper as could be made by twelve mills a hundred years ago.

In moulding pulp into articles of manufacture, satisfactory machines have been invented, not only for the mere forming them into shape, but for water-proofing and indurating the same. From the making of a ponderous paper car wheel to a lady’s delicate work basket, success has been attained.

Paper bag machines, machines for making paper boxes, applying and staying corners of such boxes, for making cell cases used in packing eggs and fruit, and for wrapping fruit; machines for affixing various forms of labels and addresses, are among the wonders of modern inventions relating to paper. It is wonderful how art and ingenuity united about thirty years ago to produce attractive wall papers. Previous to that time they were dull and conventional in appearance. Now beautiful designs are rolled out from machines.

Printing.—We have already seen how paper making and printing grew up together an indefinite number of centuries ago in the Far East. Both block printing and movable types were the production of the Chinese, with which on their little pages of many-coloured paper they printed myriads of volumes of their strange literature in stranger characters during centuries when Europeans were painfully inscribing their thoughts with the stylus and crude pens upon papyrus and the dried skins of animals.

But the European and his descendants delight to honour most the early inventors of their own countries. Italy refers with pride to the printing from blocks practised by the Venetians, and at Ravenna, from 1280 to 1300; from type at Subiaco in the Roman territory in 1465, and to the first Roman book printed in 1470; the Dutch to Laurens Coster, whom they allege invented movable type in 1423. Some of the Dutch have doubted this, and pin their faith on Jacob Bellaert, as the first printer, and Gerard Leeu, his workman, who made the types at Haarlem, in 1483. The Germans rely with confidence on John Guttenberg, who at Strasburg, as early as 1436, had wooden blocks, and wooden movable types, and who, two or three years after, printed several works; on the partnership of Faust and Guttenberg in 1450 at Mentz, and their Bible in Latin printed in 1456 on vellum with types imitating manuscript in form, and illustrated by hand; and, finally, on Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, who then made matrices in which were cast the letters singly, and who thereby so pleased his master, Faust, that the latter gave him his daughter, Christina, in marriage.

From Germany the art spread to Paris and thence to England. About 1474 Caxton was printing his black-letter books in England. Spain followed, and it is stated that in 1500 there were two hundred printing offices in Europe. The religious and political turmoils in Germany in the sixteenth century gave an immense impetus to printing there. The printing press was the handmaid of the Reformation. In America the first printing press was set up in Mexico in 1536, and in Lima, Brazil, in 1586. In 1639, nineteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on the bleak rock at Plymouth, they set up a printing press at Cambridge, Mass.

The art of printing soon resolved itself into two classes: first, composition, the arranging of the type in the proper order into words and pages; and second, press work; the taking of impressions from the types, or from casts of types in plates—being a facsimile of a type bed. This was stereotyping—the invention of William Ged, of Edinburgh, in 1731.

Types soon came to be made everywhere of uniform height; that of England and America being 92-100 of an inch, and became universally classified by names according to their sizes, as pica, small pica, long primer, minion, nonpareil, etc.

After movable types came the invention of Presses. The earliest were composed of a wooden frame on which were placed the simple screw and a lever to force a plate down upon a sheet of paper placed on the bed of type which had been set in the press, with a spring to automatically raise the screw and plate after the delivery of the impression. This was invented by Blaew of Amsterdam in 1620. Such, also, was the Ramage press, and on such a one Benjamin Franklin worked at his trade as a printer, both in America and in London. His London press, on which he worked in 1725, was carried to the United States, and is now on exhibition in Washington. This was substantially the state of the art at the beginning of the century.