Landmarks in printing; from movable type to the microchip

UNESCO Courier, July, 1988 by Werner Merkli

LANDMARKS IN PRINTING

FOR more than 400 years after Johannes Gutenberg's invention of a process of printing from movable metal type in the fifteenth century, all type was cast in a hand mould, the text was composed by hand, and printing was carried out on hand presses. It was not until the nineteenth century that typesetting and printing processes were mechanized. Since the mid-twentieth century, electronics and the microcomputer have revolutionized text composition, reproduction of illustrations and printing techniques.

Papermaking | The art of papermaking (1) was invented by the Chinese as long ago as the second century BC (see article page 32), and travelled westward when Chinese papermakers, taken prisoner by the Arabs near Samarkand in AD 751, were forced to disclose their manufacturing secrets. In 1150 the art reached Spain, and by the time of Gutenberg, paper mills had been established in several European cities (2). Gutenberg thus had at his disposal a perfect printing material that was much cheaper than the parchment on which manuscripts were produced in the monasteries.

Papermaking was not mechanized until around 1800, when the first papermaking machine was invented by a Frenchman, Nicolas-Louis Robert, in the Didot paper mills near Paris. It used a moving belt, and paper was made one sheet at a time (3). In 1805 the English engineer Joseph Bramah devised a paper-moulding machine which used a rotating cylinder. This development later led to the production of continuous reels or "webs" of paper (4). The manufacture of paper is now almost entirely automated and quality control can be carried out by computer. The art of printing

Letterpress | Monastic libraries contain printed sheets dating from the ninth and tenth centuries which were produced from relief engraving on wooden blocks (5). Between 1041 and 1048, the Chinese smith Bi Sheng used a technique of printing texts on paper with movable characters made of earthenware, and printing was also carried out with characters cast in copper in a Korean printing works in 1403. Between 1436 and 1444, Johannes Gensfleisch zum Gutenberg, of Mainz, Germany (6), developed the type mould or matrix and originated a method of printing from movable metal type that was used without important change until the twentieth century.

Gutenberg cut a punch in hard metal for every letter, accent and punctuation mark and struck it into a softer metal to make the mould for casting identical pieces of type. The type was made from an alloy of lead, antimony and tin. The finished characters were kept in compartmentalized typecases (7) from which the text was assembled. For printing, Gutenberg built a wooden worm-screw hand press (8), similar to a wine press. His printing ink consisted of a mixture of pinewood soot and linseed oil, which was spread on the printing surface with leather pads. To ensure better absorption of the ink, the paper was dampened before printing.

It is not surprising that the first book Gutenberg chose to print was the Bible, for at that time it was the work most in demand. His "forty-two-line Bible" (see back cover), so named because of the number of lines in each column, was printed in Mainz between 1452 and 1455, in an edition of 200 copies. The coloured initial letters to chapters and the decorations were added afterwards by hand, because so far as the design of the type (9) and the layout was concerned Gutenberg followed closely the model set by fine book manuscripts in the monasteries.

The art of printing spread rapidly all over Europe. Many efforts were made to improve the efficiency of the wooden press, and Wilhelm Haas, a typefounder of Basel, Switzerland, followed the basic design of the wooden press when in 1787 he developed the first all-metal hand press, which produced a better quality impression.

The idea that a rolling cylinder might be used in printing to overcome excessive manual strain was put forward in the early seventeenth century, but it was not until 1811 that the first steam-driven cylinder printing machine was patented by the German compositor and inventor Friedrich Koenig (10). Further progress was achieved in 1818 with the double rotary press designed by Koenig and his associate Andreas Bauer, in which paper printed on one side under one of the cylinders passed to the other cylinder to be printed on the other side.

In 1844 Richard Hoe in the USA patented the first rotary press in which the type was carried on a metal cylinder instead of a flat plate. In 1866 the proprietor of the London Times, John Walter, had the first rotary press fed by a continuous roll of paper constructed according to the American model invented by Jeptha Wilkinson (11), making it possible to print 14,000 copies of the newspaper per hour.

Gravure | This technique developed from the art of copperplate engraving, in which the design is cut with a gouge, or chemically etched, into a polished copper plate (12). The earliest known etching was made by the Basel goldsmith, painter and graphic artist, Urs Graf, in the fifteenth century. Printing from the engraved plates was done by hand. Later an engraved cylinder was used instead of a flat plate, and reels of the material to be printed were fed between it and the pressing cylinder. This idea proved attractive to printers of cloth in the eighteenth century, and in 1783 a multi-colour gravure press for making cotton prints was constructed in England by a copperplate printer, Thomas Bell. In 1860 Auguste Godchaux, a Paris publisher, obtained a patent for a gravure rotary press which would print on each side of the sheet.