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At
the beginning of the 19th century most printing was carried
out in small, haphazardly adapted workshops, on heavy wooden
hand presses, using traditional methods which had changed
very little in 300 years. By the end of the century the industry
was dominated by fewer, larger firms, operating in specially-built
factories housing batteries of noisy machines, and where nearly
all the processes were fully mechanised.
Much of
the pressure for improvement came from the newspaper press,
where rapidly rising circulation figures led to the development
of rotary printing machines capable of producing up to 12,000
impressions an hour. By the middle of the century machine
printing had also extended to conventional book production,
with the introduction of cylinder and powered platen machines,
and the much-improved Wharfedale cylinder press in 1858. Once
the printing process had been mechanised it became necessary
to speed up the manufacture of type, and the laborious process
of composition which employed an estimated 10,000 men in London
alone by the time linotype was introduced at the end of the
century. But fundamental to all these advances was the mechanisation
of paper manufacture, which began early in the century and
led to a ninefold increase in production by 1860, with a desperate
need for new raw materials to replace increasingly scarce
rags. Experiments with all kinds of substitutes, from straw
to potatoes, eventually resulted in the almost universal use
of esparto grass and wood pulp.
The emphasis on
speed was matched by remarkable technical developments, especially
for reproducing illustrations. The two basic kinds of printing
- relief (printing from a raised surface) and intaglio (printing
under pressure from incised marks) - were constantly refined
and adapted for use with machine presses. They were gradually
joined by a third process of lithography, and by the end of
the century all three involved the use of photography in transfering
the original design to the printing surface. Above all, there
was the commercial development of colour printing from the
1830s - for the first time brightly coloured texts and pictures
were widely and cheaply available.
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