mortiz004

So the setting of type by hand remained an increasingly slow and costly process.  By the middle of the 19 th century presses were producing 25 000 sheets per hour, but the each letter in every body of text in every publication still had to be set by hand. This limited even the most profound daily newspapers to only eight pages. Because of this books still remained relatively precious.  After dozens of experiments, the first patent for a type-composing machine was registered in 1825. Millions of people invested countless amounts of money in this field of automating typesetting, including writer Mark Twain. In 1886, after a decade of struggling, Ottmar Mergenthaler perfected a revolutionary invention in the history of printing – the Linotype machine. It was a keyboard-operated machine that was first demonstrated in the New York Tribune office on July 3 rd that year. The Linotype got it’s name from the editor of the NY Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, when he reacted to the invention in...

So as display type expanded in size, printers and founders experienced increasing problems. For example, during the casting process, it was difficult to keep the metal in liquid form while pouring. Uneven cooling occurred because of this and, in turn, resulted in slightly concave printing surfaces. With time, printers found large metal cast types to be excessively expensive, brittle and heavy. In response to this problem Darius Well began to experiment with hand-carved wooden types. In 1827 he successfully invented a lateral router that enabled the economical mass manufacture of wood types for display printing. In contrast to the metal types, wooden types were durable, light and less than half as expensive as large metal types. Shortly after this invention Wells launched the wood-type industry with his first specimen book in 1828. In 1834 William Leavenworth combines the pantograph with the router. Because of this, new wood-type fonts were so easily produced and distributed that custom...

It was inevitable that the merciless progression of the Industrial Revolution would radically alter printing. In attempt to improve the hand press, inventors applied mechanical theory and metal parts to it which improved the efficiency and size of the impression it made. But it was Lord Stanhope's printing press that showcased some of the more revolutionizing improvements to the hand press. Constructing his printing press completely of cast-iron parts made it stronger and, thus, more efficient. The reason for this being that the metal screw mechanism added to the press only required one-tenth the manual forced needed to print a wooden press. Stanhope's press also enabled a doubling of the printed sheet size. His first successful prototype was installed and experimented with in William Bulmer's printing office. Friedrich Koenig was responsible the next step in revolutionizing printing by converting it to a high-speed steam powered factory operation around 1804. The first ste...

Larger scale, greater visual impact and new tactile and expressive characters were demanded as rapid expansion of jobbing, advertising and posters were produced by the industrialized societies. For this exact reason lithographic printers were giving letterpress printers a very competitive run for their money, as lithographic printing was limited only to the artist’s imagination in comparison to letterpress printing's more rigid designs. The reason for the competitive edge that lithographic printing brought to the printing industry lies in the production process of it. The following videos explains the process of both Lithographic and Letterpress printing quite thoroughly so that the difference is easy to spot and the competition easily understood.  Lithographic Printing Letterpress Printing So as one can see, the two processes produce completely different looking results. Keep in mind the letterpress cannot produce pictures. One has to either paint the image and print over it...