TYPESETTING AND PRINTING MACHINERY

WHO WON the war?” The question immediately brings forth numerous contenders who claim the honor, respectively, for the aviator, the chemist, the engineer, the mechanic, the farmer, the shipbuilder, etc. As a matter of fact, all these and many others as well were invaluable contributors to the final success, and “there is glory enough for all.”
The question, “What branch of technology or what branch of machinery has done most for civilization?” finds a similar division of opinion, with partisans in favor of the steam engine, machine tools, electrical machinery, iron manufacture, paper making, printing, etc. Again, it is clearly evident that all have been most valuable contributors and none may carry off all the honors. However, partisans of the printing press are entitled to place that machine among the foremost because it has certainly been most useful in preserving and disseminating all classes of knowledge and in promoting the progress of civilization.

EARLY CHINESE PRINTING

It is hardly necessary for us to refer to Johann Gutenberg’s invention in 1436 of separate type for each letter. Many centuries before that the Chinese[301] had made wood engravings of complete pages and printed them on paper. Their method was to prepare an ink copy on a sheet of paper and then transfer the copy by pressing the paper on the wood before the ink was dry, after which they carved away all the surface except those parts which were inked. This gave them a reverse plate from which any number of copies could be printed. The invention of individual type which could be used over and over again for setting new copy was a marked improvement over the Chinese system.

DEVELOPMENT OF PRINTING PRESSES

The primitive screw press saw little improvement except in minor details down to the end of the eighteenth century. Then steam began to take the place of hand power and the idea was conceived of using a rotary cylinder in place of a flat press. The types were tapered so that they could be fitted about a cylinder. The paper was fed between the type cylinder and a soft impression cylinder faced with leather. The ink was applied to the type by means of a roller which was fed by an inking apparatus.
In 1814 two rotary presses were installed in the offices of the London “Times,” making it possible to turn out that newspaper at the marvelous rate of 11,000 impressions per hour. In this country, Richard Marsh Hoe invented a machine in which four, six, eight, or ten impression cylinders operated on a single form of type, thereby increasing the output of the press correspondingly. The first machine, a four-impression cylinder press, was used by the Philadelphia “Ledger” in 1846, and it printed 8,000 papers per hour.
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Next came the “perfecting” press that printed on both sides of the paper, and then came the continuous web press, in which the paper was fed from a roll as a continuous sheet and, after receiving the type impression, was cut, folded, and delivered as a complete newspaper.

THE STEREOTYPE PLATE

Meanwhile stereotyping was introduced into newspaper printing. In stereotyping an impression in plastic material is made of the type face and then a casting is made from this impression which, of course, exactly duplicates the type face. The type is thus relieved from wear in the press and it is immediately released for use in setting up other copy while the printing is done from the stereotype plate. While the use of stereotyping in book printing dates back to the eighteenth century, it was not thought practicable for newspaper printing because of the length of time taken in making the plate, but in 1861 papier-maché was introduced as a matrix material and a system of rapidly drying the mold was developed so that a plate could be cast in a comparatively short time; furthermore, impressions could be made from a flat face of type and then the mold could be bent so as to make curved stereotype plates for use on the cylinder presses. In newspaper work it takes but five minutes to make a stereotype plate. Stereotype metal does not stand the wear of printing very long and the plates must be renewed from time to time. This fits in well with newspaper requirements because clean cut work is not called for, and as the news keeps coming in new editions must constantly be printed, which means that new plates must be[303] made from time to time. For the finer printing of magazines and books, copper-faced electrotype plates are used in place of the soft stereotype plates of newspaper printing.

MODERN NEWSPAPER PRESSES

A modern large newspaper press is a bewildering sight to behold; there is such a vast number of rolls and cylinders, and the web of paper moves so rapidly. But, after all, the machine is multiplex rather than complex. It consists of a large number of printing cylinders, all operating in a single frame. Take, for instance, a double-octuple, color-combination press. It consists really of two separate presses, each operating on four webs of paper that feed from opposite ends toward the middle. There are two type cylinders for each web, one for each side of the paper. Each cylinder is long enough to take four stereotype plates side by side, and since each plate extends but half way around the cylinder we have eight pages printed on each side of the web. This makes sixteen pages per web or sixty-four for each half of the machine, giving a total of 128 page impressions at each turn of the cylinders. It is seldom that a 64-page paper is required, hence the webs are slit in two by a revolving knife blade and each section of the press has two folding mechanisms so that two sets of 16-page papers are printed, folded, and delivered by each section. Arrangements are provided whereby the product may consist of 32-page papers. The papers are delivered by a traveling conveyor and every fiftieth paper is pushed out ahead of the others so as to provide a simple method of keeping count of the product.
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PRINTING 240,000 PAGES PER HOUR

The cylinders turn at the rate of 300 revolutions per minute which means that the paper runs through the machine at nearly 14 miles per hour. Summing up all the webs we have a total consumption of 108 miles of paper per hour. The paper is 6 feet wide and the weight of paper in an hour’s run is about 18 tons and the hourly production is 150,000 sixteen-page papers. When color is used, the press will deliver 50,000 24-page papers per hour with the two outside pages printed in three colors and black. The course of the color printed web must necessarily be different from that of the plain black printed web. It must pass through a number of printings; and to prevent the moist ink from transferring to the impression rolls and from them back to a succeeding page, thus soiling or blurring the impression, an extra roll of thin paper is passed between the printed web and the impression cylinders. This acts in a measure as a blotter. The offset paper is taken up on a roll and used over and over again. It is used not only for color work, but also when fine half tone engravings are to be printed so that a cleaner impression may be obtained.
The inking system of printing press is very elaborate. It is highly essential that the ink be spread upon the type surface in just sufficient quantity to be picked up by the paper and that the ink be uniformly distributed over the whole surface. There is an ink reservoir and a set of inking rollers for each cylinder. The reservoir consists of a trough running the whole length of the cylinder. At each turn a revolving roller dips into the ink[305] and transfers a thin film of ink to a series of small rollers. These are grouped about a large roller to which they deliver the ink. The small rollers have an axial reciprocating motion whereby the ink is uniformly spread over the large roller. The latter transfers its thin coating of ink to a pair of rollers known as “form rollers” and these in turn deliver the ink to the printing cylinder.

A SEA CAPTAIN’S CONTRIBUTION

The folding mechanism of a printing press is interesting. The paper is first fed over a wedge-shaped form which folds the paper lengthwise and then it is given a cross-wise fold. Curiously enough the folding mechanism for printing presses was first invented by a Yankee sea captain, named Cromwell, who could not read a drawing but developed his invention by whittling out wooden models. He also contributed other valuable improvements for the printing press worked out in the same primitive way.
The rotary press was evolved especially for the printing of daily papers and for a long time magazines continued to be printed on flat-bed presses. But as the circulation of magazines grew into the hundreds of thousands it became necessary to build high speed presses to turn out these large editions. Accordingly rotary machines were constructed similar in design to newspaper presses, but with refinements to enable them to produce the better class of work required of magazine printing. Although there are many magazines still printed on flat bed presses, particularly those which publish small editions of less than a hundred thousand, all the big national weekly journals and monthly[306] magazines are printed on rotary presses and some of them even use web presses.

GATHERING AND BINDING MAGAZINES

When a newspaper leaves the press it is folded, cut, and ready for the news stand. Not so with the book and magazine press. There are too many pages to be handled by a single press, and, furthermore, the pages must be bound together. Some large magazines contain regularly more than 500 pages and occasionally they will run over a thousand pages. Obviously no single press could handle so many pages and it takes the product of many presses to make up a single copy. Each press prints what is known as a form or signature and these signatures from the different presses are then gathered, wire-stitched, and bound into individual copies. There are machines which will do this work of gathering and binding at the rate of sixty 1,000-page magazines or catalogues every minute. The machines are adjustable for pages of different dimensions. The forms may consist of four, eight, sixteen, or thirty-two pages. A separate compartment is provided for each signature. A large machine will handle thirty-six 32-page signatures. The compartments are kept supplied by an operator, there being usually six compartments for each operator to attend to. The bottom signature in each compartment is brought into position by a suction device which seizes the signature and draws it out, depositing it in a steel trough. Here a belt conveyor moves the signature along at the right speed to carry it before the next compartment just as a signature is being withdrawn therefrom. Thus the magazine or book is progressively built up and the[307] signatures reach the end of their course properly assembled. A very delicate adjustment is provided to insure the proper adjustment of signatures. The grippers are adjusted to receive signatures of a certain thickness. If the operator should make a mistake and put a signature of a wrong size in the compartment the whole machine would come to a standstill. The adjustment is so delicate that even a variation of a single thickness of paper is enough to operate the stop mechanism. Each assembly of signatures as it reaches the end of the trough is squared up and then bound with wire stitching. From this point it moves on to receive its cover. A thin coating of hot glue is applied to the rear edge of the signatures. The cover is automatically applied and firmly pressed into place. The finished book is then carried on out of the machine and deposited neatly on a pile of previously bound books. To operate such a machine there are required one chief operator and an assistant and six girls to feed the signatures to the compartments.

SETTING TYPE BY MACHINE

The publication of a modern daily newspaper with its many special editions would be well nigh impossible if we still had to depend upon hand setting of type. Tens of thousands of type characters are required to make up a single newspaper page, and although skilled hand compositors work with extreme rapidity it would take a large corps of men to set type for even a small newspaper in the short time available. Speed is of prime importance in newspaper work and the task of handling thousands of little pieces of type metal and arranging them correctly into words and sentences was[308] long recognized as a serious handicap, but the problem of doing this work by machine was by no means simple one and baffled inventors for years. One of the principal difficulties lay in the size and shape of the type and another was that of justifying the lines, that is, providing just the right width of spaces between words to fill out the lines completely so that they would all be of equal length, giving a straight instead of a ragged margin to the column. After that came the problem of redistributing the type.
The first really successful composing machine was the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1888. Mergenthaler overcame the difficulties that had balked other inventors by attacking the problem from a radically new angle. Instead of setting precast type, his machine cast its own type from a set of matrices. By operating a keyboard, the matrices were assembled in a line which was justified automatically after the line was composed and then the whole line of type was cast in a single slug. Hence his machine earned the name “linotype.” Then the matrices were returned automatically distributed to the proper channels of the matrix magazine ready to be used over again for succeeding slugs.

THE LINOTYPE MATRIX AND SPACE BAR

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FIG. 72—A LINOTYPE MATRIX

A picture of a linotype matrix is shown in Figure 72. It is a plate of brass formed with ears A at the four corners. The type mold is shown at B and of course the thickness of the matrix varies with the width of the type letter it is designed to cast. In the top of the matrix there is a V-shaped slot C formed with teeth which are designed to engage grooves in a V-shaped bar over the matrix magazine. The teeth on the matrices are variously cut away and serve as keys to the different channels of the magazine. There is a different combination of teeth for each letter of the alphabet and all matrices of the same letter have the same combination of teeth. The teeth on the distributing bar are also cut away according to various combinations. After the line has been cast the matrices are all raised by their ears and fed one by one upon the distributing bar. Each matrix moves along until it arrives over the channel it is designed to enter when it comes to a gap in the teeth of the bar that are supporting it and drops into the magazine. Although there are but seven teeth on each side of the V-shaped bar, there are more than enough combinations possible to provide a characteristic one for every key of the keyboard. A matrix always has at least one pair of teeth in engagement with the bar until it reaches the gap that lets it fall into its own special channel of the magazine. The number[310] of matrices of each character varies with the normal frequency of use of that letter. For instance, the letter e is very commonly used, and there must be many more e matrices than z matrices, but in any case the number need not be very large because the process of casting a line and redistributing the type does not take very long and the matrices are soon back in the magazine ready to be used over again. The casting and distributing operations are entirely automatic and while they are in process the compositor is setting a new line.
The method of spacing which was a later development of the linotype is also very ingenious. The compositor does not have to bother with the width of spaces required to fill out a line. He merely touches the space key at the end of each word and and a space bar drops into place. Each space bar is formed of a pair of wedges and after the line has been assembled the space bars are automatically expanded to fill out the line completely by mechanism which holds down one wedge member (A, Figure 73) and slides up the other (B).

INDIVIDUAL TYPE CASTING AND COMPOSING

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FIG. 73.—A LINOTYPE SPACE BAR

The difficulties of casting the linotype slug proved a serious handicap in the earlier days of the linotype. The product of the machine could not compare in quality with precast hand-set individual type, although it served very well for newspapers; but the machine is now so far perfected that it is widely used for magazine and book composition. However before this stage of perfection was reached the demand for a machine that could do a higher grade of work led to the invention of another machine known as the “monotype.” The monotype consists actually of two machines, one of which is operated by a compositor and the other operated entirely automatically by the product of the first machine. The compositor operates a keyboard and thereby cuts perforations in a long strip of paper. These perforations are arranged in characteristic groups one for each key. The perforated paper is then run through the second machine and in accordance with the various perforations the separate types are cast and assembled into justified lines. Air flowing through the perforations operates a pneumatic mechanism which brings the proper molds into position and casts the separate types. The method of justifying the lines is very interesting. As in the linotype the operator merely touches a space key at the end of each word, but at the end of the line the mechanism automatically estimates the spaces to be filled and divides this by the number of spaces so that a characteristic group of perforations is punched when the compositor shifts to[312] the next line. In the casting machine the paper ribbon runs through backward and the space group of perforations is encountered before the line is cast. This automatically adjusts the mechanism to cast spaces of the requisite size to fill out the line exactly.

WRITING BY MACHINE

In one sense we have taken up the various machines employed in printing in reverse order. Of course the first machine used is the typewriter, after which comes the composing machine, and finally the press.
It was in 1866 that two inventors, C. Latham Sholes and Samuel W. Soule, undertook to make a machine for printing numbers in serial order upon the pages of a blankbook. Carlos Glidden, another inventor, who was engaged in developing a spading machine designed to take the place of a plow, saw their work and suggested that they make their machine write letters and words as well as numbers. The three combined and proceeded to evolve the new machine. By the end of the summer of 1867 they had produced a typewriting machine that could be operated fairly rapidly and that produced fair work. It was one of the letters written by this machine that brought James Densmore into the enterprise. He furnished the money needed to improve the crude typewriter and make it a commercial machine. Many models were built but nothing was produced that seemed good enough for commercial production. This development work was too slow and discouraging for Soule and Glidden and they dropped out, but Sholes inspired by Densmore persevered until at last in 1873 he had produced a machine which he could offer for manufacture.[313] The typewriter was then taken to the Remington factory at Ilion, N. Y., and the next year it was placed on the market and began its public career.
Such is the story of the early development of the typewriter. It has become so widely used and is so indispensable a part of the business office that it arouses the utmost astonishment to learn that there still are a few old-fashioned houses so conservative and so far behind that they continue to write their business letters with the pen. So common a machine, it is hardly necessary for us to describe in detail except to mention two steps in the development of the machine, namely the arrangement of the type bars whereby the typewriting is visible to the typist, and secondly the effort to overcome noise by limiting the stroke of the type bar and making it impinge upon the paper with a pressure stroke rather than a hammer blow.
A recent development is the “stenotype,” a small machine which prints shorthand characters, thus expediting the taking of rapid dictation.

 by A. Russell Bond