Inventions in the Century Part 19

Parchment manufactured from the skins of young calves, kids, lambs, sheep, and goats, was an early rival of papyrus, and was known and used in Europe before papyrus was there introduced.

The softening of vegetable and woody fibre of various kinds, flax and raw cotton and rags, and reducing it into pulp, drying, beating, and rolling it into paper, seem to have been suggested to Europe by the introduction of papyrus, for we learn of the first appearance of such paper by the Arabians, Saracens, Spaniards and the French along through the eighth, ninth, and tenth and eleventh centuries. Papyrus does not, however, appear to have been superseded until the twelfth century.

Public doc.u.ments are still extant written in the twelfth century on paper made from flax and rags; and paper mills began to put in an appearance in Germany in the fourteenth century, in which the fibre was reduced to pulp by stampers. England began to make paper in the next century. Pulping the fibre by softening it in water and beating the same had then been practised for four centuries. Rollers in the mills for rolling the pulp into sheets were introduced in the fifteenth century, and paper makers began to distinguish their goods from those made by others by water marks impressed in the pulp sheets. The jug and the pot was one favourite water mark in that century, succeeded by a fool's cap, which name has since adhered to paper of a certain size, with or without the cap. So far was the making of paper advanced in Europe that about 1640 wall paper began to be made as a subst.i.tute for tapestry; although as to this fas.h.i.+on the Chinese were still ahead some indefinite number of centuries.

Holland was far advanced in paper-making in the seventeenth century. The revolution of 1688 having seriously interrupted the art in England, that country imported paper from Holland during that period amounting to 100,000. It was a native of Holland, Rittenhouse, who introduced paper-making in America and erected a mill near Philadelphia in the early years of the eighteenth century, and there made paper from linen rags.

The Dutch also had subst.i.tuted cylinders armed with blades in place of stampers and used their windmills to run them. The Germans and French experimented with wood and straw.

In the latter part of the eighteenth century some manufacturers in Europe had learned to make white paper from white rags, and as good in quality, and some think better, than is made at the present day. The essentials of paper making by hand from rags and raw vegetable fibres, the soaking of fibres in water and boiling them in lyes, the beating, rolling, smoothing, sizing and polis.h.i.+ng of the paper, were then known and practised. But the best paper was then a dear commodity. The art of bleaching coloured stock was unknown, and white paper was made alone from stock that came white into the mill. The processes were nearly all hand operations. "Beating" was pounding in a mortar. The pulp was laid by hand upon moulds made of parallel strands of coa.r.s.e bra.s.s wire; and the making of the pulp by grinding wood and treating it chemically to soften it was experimental.

The nineteenth century produced a revolution. It introduced the use of modern machinery, and modern chemical processes, by which all known varieties and sizes of paper, of all colours, as well as paper vessels, are made daily in immense quant.i.ties in all civilised countries, from all sorts of fibrous materials.

Knight, in his _Mechanical Dictionary_, gives a list of nearly 400 different materials for paper making that had been used or suggested, for the most part within the century and up to twenty years ago, and the number has since increased.

The modern revolution commenced in 1799, when Louis Robert, an employee of Francois Didot of Essones, France, invented and patented the first machine for making paper in a long, wide, continuous web. The French government in 1800 granted him a reward of 8,000 francs. The machine was then exhibited in England and there tested with success. It was there that Messrs. Fourdrinier, a wealthy stationery firm, purchased the patents, expended 60,000 for improvements on the machine, and first gave to the world its practical benefits. This expenditure bankrupted them, as the machines were not at once remunerative, and parliament refused to grant them pecuniary a.s.sistance. Gamble, Donkin, Koops, the Fourdriniers, d.i.c.kenson, and Wilkes, were the first inventors to improve the Robert machine, and to give it that form which in many essential features remains to-day. They, together with later inventors, gave to the world a new system of paper making.

By 1872 two hundred and ninety-nine Fourdrinier machines were running in the United States alone. In the improved Fourdrinier machine or system, rags, or wood, or straw are ground or otherwise reduced to pulp, and then the pulp, when properly soaked and drained, is dumped into a regulating box, pa.s.sing under a copper gate to regulate the amount and depth of feed, then carried along through strainers, screeners or dressers, to free the ma.s.s from clots and reduce it to the proper fineness, over an endless wire ap.r.o.n, spread evenly over this ap.r.o.n by a shaking motion, subjected to the action of a suction box by which the water is drawn off by air-suction pumps, carried between cloth-covered rollers which press and cohere it, carried on to a moving long felt blanket to further free it from moisture, and which continues to hold the sheet of pulp in form; then with the blanket through press rolls adjustable to a desired pressure and provided with means to remove therefrom adhering pulp and to arrest the progress of the paper if necessary; then through another set of compression rollers, when the condensed and matted pulp, now paper, is carried on to a second blanket, pa.s.sed through a series of steam cylinders, where the web is partially dried, and again compressed, thence through another series of rollers and drying cylinders, which still further dry and stretch it, and now, finally completed, the sheet is wound on a receiving cylinder. The number of rollers and cylinders and the position and the length of the process to fully dry, compact, stretch and finish the sheet, may be, and are, varied greatly. If it is desired to impress on or into the paper water marks, letters, words, or ornamental matter, the paper in its moist stage, after it pa.s.ses through the suction boxes, is pa.s.sed under a "dandy" or fancy scrolled roll provided on its surface with the desired design. When it is desired to give it a smooth, glossy surface, the paper, after its completion, is pa.s.sed through animal sizing material, and then between drying and smoothing rollers. Or this sizing may be applied to the pulp at the outset of the operation. Colouring material, when desired, is applied to the pulp, before pressing. By the use of machines under this system, a vast amount of material, cast-off rags, etc., before regarded as waste, was utilised for paper making.

The modern discoveries of the chemists of the century as to the nature of fibres, best modes and materials for reducing them to pulp, and bleaching processes, have brought the art of paper making from wood and other fibrous materials to its present high and prosperous condition.

What are known as the soda-pulp and the sulphite processes are examples of this. The latter and other acid processes were not successful until cement-lined digesters were invented to withstand their corroding action. But now it is only necessary to have a convenient forest of almost any kind of wood to justify the establishment of a paper mill.

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 const.i.tuting 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 partners.h.i.+p of Faust and Guttenberg in 1450 at Mentz, and their Bible in Latin printed in 1456 on vellum with types imitating ma.n.u.script in form, and ill.u.s.trated 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, Ma.s.s.

The art of printing soon resolved itself into two cla.s.ses: 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 cla.s.sified 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 Was.h.i.+ngton. This was substantially the state of the art at the beginning of the century.

Then Earl Stanhope in England invented a press entirely of iron, and the power consisted of the combination of a toggle joint and lever. The first American improvement was invented by George Clymer, of Philadelphia, in 1817, the power being an improved lever consisting of three simple levers of the second order. This was superseded by the "Was.h.i.+ngton" press invented by Samuel Rust in 1829. It has as essential parts the toggle joint and lever, and in the frame work, as in the Stanhope, type bed, rails on which the bed was moved in and out, means to move the bed, the platen, the tympan on which the sheet is placed, the frisket, a perforated sheet of paper, to preserve the printed sheet, an inking roller and frame. In this was subsequently introduced an automatic device for inking the roller, as it was moved back from over the bed of type on to an inking table. This, substantially, has been the hand press ever since.

With one of these hand-presses and the aid of two men about two hundred and fifty sheets an hour could be printed on one side. The increase in the circulation of newspapers before the opening of the 19th century demanded greater rapidity of production and turned the attention of inventors to the construction of power or machine presses. Like the paper-making machine, the power press was conceived in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and like that art was also not developed until the nineteenth century. William Nicholson of England is believed to have been the first inventor of a machine printing press. He obtained an English patent for it in 1720. The type were to be placed on the face of one cylinder, which was designed to be in gear, revolved with, and press upon another cylinder covered with soft leather, the type cylinder to be inked by a third cylinder to which the inking apparatus, was applied, and the paper to be printed by being pa.s.sed between the type and the impression cylinder. These ideas were incorporated into the best printing machines that have since been made. But the first successful machine printing press was the invention of two Saxons, Konig and Bauer, in 1813, who introduced their ideas from Germany, constructed the machine in London, and on which on the 28th of November, 1814, an issue of the _London Times_ was printed. The _Times_ announced to its readers that day that they were for the first time perusing a paper printed upon a machine driven by steam power. What a union of mighty forces was heralded in this simple announcement! The union of the steam engine, the printing press, and a great and powerful journal! An Archimedean lever had been found at last with which to move the world.

The production of printed sheets per hour over the hand-press was at once quadrupled, and very shortly 1800 sheets per hour were printed.

This machine was of that cla.s.s known as cylinder presses. In this machine ordinary type was used, and the type-form was flat and pa.s.sed beneath a large impression cylinder on which the paper was held by tapes. The type-form was reciprocated beneath an inking apparatus and the paper cylinder alternately. The inking apparatus consisted of a series of rollers, to the first of which the ink was ejected from a trough and distributed to the others. In 1815 Cowper patented in England electrotype plates to be affixed to a cylinder. Applegath and Cowper improved the Konig machine in the matter of the ink distributing rollers, and in the adaptation of four printing cylinders to the reciprocating type bed, whereby, with some other minor changes, 5000 impressions on one side were produced per hour. Again Applegath greatly changed the arrangement of cylinders and multiplied their number, and the number of the other parts, so that in 1848 the sheets printed on one side were first 8000 and then 12,000 an hour.

In the United States, Daniel Treadwell of Boston invented the first power printing machine in 1822. Two of these machines were at that time set up in New York city. It was a flat bed press and was long used in Was.h.i.+ngton in printing for the government. David Bruce of New York, in 1838, invented the first successful type-casting machine, which, when shortly afterward it was perfected, became the model for type-casting machines for Europe and America. Previous to that time type were generally made by casting them in hand-moulds--the metal being poured in with a spoon.

Robert Hoe, an English inventor, went to New York in 1803, and turned his attention to the making of printing presses. His son, Richard March Hoe, inherited his father's inventive genius. While in England in 1837-1840, obtaining a patent on and introducing a circular saw, he became interested in the printing presses of the London Times. Returning home, he invented and perfected a rotary machine which received the name of the "Lightning Press." It first had four and then ten cylinders arranged in a circle. As finally completed, it printed from a continuous roll of paper several miles in length, and on both sides at the same time, cutting off and folding ready for delivery, 15,000 to 20,000 newspapers an hour, the paper being drawn through the press at the rate of 1,000 feet in a minute. Before it was in this final, completed shape, it was adopted by the _London Times_. John Walter of London in the meantime invented a machine of a similar cla.s.s. He also used a sheet of paper miles long. It was first damped, pa.s.sed through blotting rolls, and then to the printing cylinders. It gave out 11,000 perfected sheets, or 22,000 impressions an hour, and as each sheet was printed, it was cut by a knife on the cylinder, and the sheets piled on the paper boards. It was adopted by the London _Times_ and the New York _Times_.

A German press at Augsburg, and the Campbell presses of the United States, have also become celebrated as web perfecting presses, in which the web is printed, the sheets cut, a.s.sociated, folded, and delivered at high speed. One of the latest quadruple stereotype perfecting presses made by Hoe & Co. of New York has a running capacity of 48,000 papers per hour. On another, a New York paper has turned off nearly six hundred thousand copies in a single day, requiring for their printing ninety-four tons of paper. Among other celebrated inventors of printing presses in the United States were Isaac Adams, Taylor, Gordon, Potter, Hawkins, Bullock, Cottrell, Campbell, Babc.o.c.k, and Firm.

_Mail-marking Machines_, in which provision is made for holding the printing mechanism out of operative position in case a letter is not in position to be stamped; address-printing machines, including machines for printing addresses by means of a stencil; machines for automatically setting and distributing the type, including those in which the individual types are caused to enter the proper receptacle by means of nicks in the type, which engage corresponding projections on a stationary guard plate, and automatic type justifying machines. All such have been invented, developed, and perfected in the last half century.

Another invention which has added wonderfully to push the century along, is the _Typewriter_. It has long been said that "The pen is mightier than the sword," but from present indications, it is proper to add that the typewriter is mightier than the pen.

A machine in which movable types are caused to yield impressions on paper to form letters by means of key levers operated by hand, has been one of slow growth from its conception to its present practical and successful form.

Some one suggested the idea in England in a patent in 1714. The idea rested until 1840, when a French inventor revived it in a patent. At the same time patents began to come out in England and the United States; and about forty patents in each of these two countries were granted from that time until 1875. Since that date about 1400 patents more have been issued in the United States, and a large number in other countries. It was, however, only that year and before 1880, that the first popular commercially successful machines were made and introduced.

The leading generic idea of all subsequent successful devices of this kind was clearly set forth in the patent of S. W. Francis of the United States in 1857. This feature is the arranging of a row of hammers in a circle so that when put in motion they will all strike the same place, which is the centre of that circle. The arrangement of a row of pivoted hammers or type levers, each operated by a separate key lever to strike an inked ribbon in front of a sheet of paper, means to automatically move the carriage carrying the paper roll from right to left as the letters are successfully printed, leaving a s.p.a.ce between each letter and word, and sounding a signal when the end of a line is reached, so that the carriage may be returned to its former position--all these and some other minor but necessary operations may seem simple enough when stated, but their accomplishment required the careful study of many inventors for years.

One of the most modern of typewriters has a single electro-magnet to actuate all the type bars of a set, and to throw each type from its normal position to the printing centre. By an extremely light touch given to each key lever the circuit is closed and causes the lever to strike without the necessity of pressing the key down its whole extent and releasing it before the next key strikes. By this device, the operator is relieved of fatigue, as his fingers may glide quickly from one key to another, the printing is made uniform, and far greater speed attained by reason of the quick and delicate action. Mr. Thaddeus Cahill of Was.h.i.+ngton appears to be the first to have invented the most successful of this type of machines.

_Book-binding Machinery_ is another new production of the century. It may be that the old hand methods would give to a book a stronger binding than is found on most books to-day, but the modern public demands and has obtained machinery that will take the loose sheets and bind them ready for delivery, at the rate of ten or fifteen thousand volumes a day.

The "quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore," the Latin folios in oak or ivory boards with bra.s.s clasps, or bound in velvet, or in crimson satin, ornamented with finest needlework or precious stones, or the more humble beech boards, and calf and sheep skins with metal edges and iron clasps, in all of which the sheets were stoutly sewed together and glued, when glue was known, to the covers, are now but relics of the past. Machinery came to the front quite rapidly after 1825, at which time cloth had been introduced as cheaper than leather, and as cheap and a more enduring binder than paper. The processes in book-binding are enumerated as follows; and for each process a machine has been invented within the last sixty years to do the work:

Folding the sheets; Gathering the consecutive sheets; Rolling the backs of folded sheets; Saw cutting the backs for the combs; Sewing; Rounding the back of the sewed sheets.

Edge cutting; Binding, securing the books to the sides, covering with muslin, leather or paper. Tooling and lettering.

Edge gilting.

One of the best modern ill.u.s.trations of human thought and complicated manual operations contained in automatic machinery is the _Linotype_.

It is a great step from the humble invention of Schoeffer five hundred and fifty years ago of cast movable type to that of another German, Mergenthaler, in 1890-92.

The Linotype (a line of type) was p.r.o.nounced by the _London Engineering_ "as the most remarkable machine of this century." It was the outcome of twelve years of continuous experiment and invention, and the expenditure of more than a million dollars. A brief description of this invention is given in the report of the United States commissioner of patents for 1895 as follows: "In the present Mergenthaler construction there is a magazine containing a series of tubes for the letter or character moulds, each of which moulds is provided with a single character. There are a number of duplicates of each character, and the moulds containing the same character are all arranged in one tube. The machine is provided with a series of finger keys, which, when pressed like the keys of a typewriter, cause the letter moulds to a.s.semble in a line in their proper order for print. A line mould and a melting pot are then brought into proper relation to the a.s.sembled line of letter moulds and a cast is taken, called the linotype, which represents the entire line, a column wide, of the matter to be printed. The letter moulds are then automatically returned to their proper magazine tube. The Mergenthaler machine is largely in use in the princ.i.p.al newspaper offices, with the result that a single operator does at least the work of four average compositors."

Mr Rogers obtained a United States patent, September 23, 1890, for a machine for casting lines of type, the princ.i.p.al feature of which is that the letter moulds are strung on wires secured on a hinged frame.

"When the frame is in one position, the letter moulds are released by the keys, slide down the wires by gravity and are a.s.sembled in line at the casting point. After the cast is taken, the lower ends of the guide wires are elevated, which causes the letter moulds to slide back on the wires to their original position, when the operation is repeated for the next line." Operated by a single person, the Mergenthaler produces and a.s.sembles linotypes ready for the press or stereotyping table at the rate of from 3,600 to 7,000 ems (type characters) per hour. It permits the face or style of type to be changed at will and it permits the operator to read and correct his matter as he proceeds.

To the aid of the ordinary printing press came _electrotyping_, stenographic colour printing, engraving, and smaller job and card presses, all entirely new creations within the century, and of infinite variety, each in itself forming a new cla.s.s in typographic art, and a valuable addition to the marvellous transformation.

The introduction of the linotype and other modern machines into printing offices has without doubt many times reduced and displaced manual labour, and caused at those times at least temporary suffering among employees. But statistics do not show that as a whole there are fewer printers in the land. On the contrary, the force seems to increase, just as the number of printing establishments increase, with the multiplication of new inventions. As in other arts, the distress caused by the displacement of hand-labour by machinery is local and temporary.

The whole art rests for its development on the demand for reading matter, and the demand never seems to let up. It increases as fast as the means of the consumers increase for procuring it. One hundred years ago a decent private library, consisting of a hundred or so volumes, one or two weekly newspapers, and an occasional periodical, was the badge and possession alone of the wealthy few. Now nearly every reading citizen of every village has piled up in some corner of his house a better supply than that, of bound or unbound literature, and of a far superior quality. Besides the tons of reading matter of all kinds turned out daily by the city presses, every village wants its own paper and its town library, and every one of its business men has recourse to the typewriter and the printer for his letters, his cards, and his advertis.e.m.e.nts.

To supply the present demand for printed matter with the implements of a hundred years ago, it would be necessary to draw upon and exhaust the supply of labourers in nearly every other occupation. Printing would become the one universal profession.

The roar of the guns at Waterloo and the click of the first power printing press in London were nearly simultaneous. The military Colossus then tumbled, and the Press began to lead mankind. Wars still continue, and will, until men are civilised; but the vanguard of civilisation are the printers, and not the warriors. The marvellous glory of the nineteenth century has proceeded from the intelligence of the people, awakened, stimulated, and guided by the press. But the press itself, and its servitors and messengers, speeding on the wings of electricity, are the children of the inventors.

These inventions have made the book and the newspaper the poor man's University. They are mirrors which throw into his humble home reflections of the scenes of busy life everywhere. By them knowledge is spread, thought aroused, and universal education established.