Marinoni's Rotary Printing Press

The greatest progress that has been made in recent years in the art of printing is in the invention of the high speed press provided with continuous paper.
Three French constructors, Messrs. Marinoni, Alauzet, and Derriey, have brought this kind of apparatus to such a degree of perfection that the majority of foreign journals having a large circulation buy their presses in France. We reproduce in Fig. 1 a perspective view of the Marinoni press, and in Fig. 2 a diagram showing the parts of the same. In order to give a complete description of it, we cannot do better than to reproduce the very interesting study that has been made of it by Mr. Monet, a civil engineer.

FIG. 1.--MARINONI'S ROTARY PRINTING PRESS.
The roller, J (Fig. 2), is placed in the machine in the state in which it is received from the paper manufactory. The paper unwinds, runs over the rollers, e and e', which serve only for tautening it, and then passes between the two cylinders, A and B. The cylinder, A, carries the form, and B carries the blanket, and the paper thus receives its first impression. It afterward passes between the cylinders, A' and B', and receives an impression on the other side, the cylinder, A', carrying the form, and B' the blanket. Being now printed on both sides, it passes between the cylinders, KK', which cut it off and allow the sheet to slide between the cords of the rollers. These latter lead the sheets over the rollers, g h, on which they wind, one over the other, when the rollers, a a', are in the position shown by unbroken lines in the cut.
The part of the machine that holds the rollers, g h, and the different cords that wind over them, is the accumulator, and it is in this part of the press that the sheets accumulate, one over the other, to any number desired.
The size of the rollers, g h, and their distance apart are so regulated that when the sheet reaches the accumulator, it falls exactly on those that have preceded it. When the proper number of sheets is in the accumulator (4 or 5 being the number most employed for afterward facilitating the separation into packets on the receiving table), the two small rollers, a a', advance over the rack, N, and the sheets, instead of continuing to roll over into the accumulator, fall on the rack and are deposited by it upon the receiving table, O.

FIG. 2.--MARINONI'S PRESS.
The rack having fallen twenty times, and deposited five sheets each time, or one hundred in all, the table moves in such a way as to prevent the sheets subsequently deposited from getting mixed with them. When the rack has fallen twenty times, the table returns to its initial position.
The distributing rollers, D, come in contact with the inking rollers, I, once during each revolution of the printing cylinders, and are mounted on racking levers provided with regulating screws that permit of easily regulating the amount of ink taken up. The supports of the inking rollers are movable and can be made to approach or recede from the distributing rollers, so as to still further vary the amount of ink taken up by them.
The distributing rollers supply the ink to a roller, E, of large diameter, which, having a backward and forward motion, begins to distribute the ink and to transmit it to a second roller, F, of the same diameter. This latter then spreads it over a metallic cylinder, G, which is of the same diameter as the printing cylinders, and against which revolve three distributing rollers, H, that have a backward and forward motion.
Between the cylindrical inking table, G, and the type cylinder, there are situated inking cylinders, T, of large diameter, that constantly take up ink from the inking table and distribute it over the types.
The machine here described, when designed for printing large sized journals, has cylinders whose circumference corresponds to the size of paper for two widths of pages, and whose length is sufficient to allow it to receive two forms. Each cylinder, then, carries four forms, or eight in all, and prints two complete copies at each revolution.
The large sheet cut off by the cylinders, K K', contains, then, two copies; and this sheet, on passing under the roller, f is again cut in two by a disk which separates it in a direction perpendicular to the cylinders.
To this press there may be added a mechanical folder of Mr. Marinoni's invention, capable of folding a journal five times.--Annales Industrielles.

The Printing Press

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.
(Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, 1833)

The Renaissance spread to Germany, France, England, and Spain in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. In its migration northward, Renaissance culture adapted itself to conditions unknown in Italy, such as the growth of the monarchical state and the strength of lay piety. In England France, and Spain, Renaissance culture tended to be court-centered and hence anti-republican. In Germany, no monarchical state existed but a vital tradition of lay piety was present was present in the Low Countries. The Brethren of the Common Life, for example, was a lay movement emphasizing education and practical piety. Intensely Christian and at the same time anticlerical (shades of what was to come!), the people in such movements found in Renaissance culture the tools for sharpening their wits against the clergy -- not to undermine faith, but restore its ancient apostolic purity.

Northern humanists were profoundly devoted to ancient learning but nothing in northern humanism compares to the paganizing trend associated with the Italian Renaissance. The northern humanists were chiefly interested in the problem of the ancient church and the question of what constituted original Christianity.

Two factors operated to accelerate the spread of Renaissance culture after 1450: growing economic prosperity and the printing press. Prosperity -- the result of peace and the decline of famine and the plague -- led to the founding of schools and colleges. In these schools the sons of gentlemen and nobles would receive a humanistic education imported from Italy. The purpose of such an education was to prepare men for a career in the church or civil service.

Sometime in the 13th century, paper money and playing cards from China reached the West. They were "block-printed," that is, characters or pictures were carved into a wooden block, inked, and then transferred to paper. Since each word, phrase or picture was on a separate block, this method of reproduction was expensive and time-consuming.

The extension of literacy among laypeople and the greater reliance of governments and businesses upon written records created a demand for a less-costly method of reproducing the written word. The import of paper from the East as well as "block-books" (see above), were major steps in transforming the printing of books. However, woodcuts were not sufficiently durable as they tended to split in the press after repeated use. Furthermore, a new block had to be carved for each new impression, and the block was discarded as unusable as soon as a slightly different impression was needed.

By the middle of the 15th century several print masters were on the verge of perfecting the techniques of printing with movable metal type. The first man to demonstrate the practicability of movable type was Johannes Gutenberg (c.1398-1468), the son of a noble family of Mainz, Germany. A former stonecutter and goldsmith, Gutenberg devised an alloy of lead, tin and antinomy that would melt at low temperature, cast well in the die, and be durable in the press. It was then possible to use and reuse the separate pieces of type, as long as the metal in which they were cast did not wear down, simply by arranging them in the desired order. The mirror image of each letter (rather than entire words or phrases), was carved in relief on a small block. Individual letters, easily movable, were put together to form words; words separated by blank spaces formed lines of type; and lines of type were brought together to make up a page. Since letters could be arranged into any format, an infinite variety of texts could be printed by reusing and resetting the type.

By 1452, with the aid of borrowed money, Gutenberg began his famous Bible project. Two hundred copies of the two-volume Gutenberg Bible were printed, a small number of which were printed on vellum. The expensive and beautiful Bibles were completed and sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, and cost the equivalent of three years' pay for the average clerk. Roughly fifty of all Gutenberg Bibles survive today.

In spite of Gutenberg's efforts to keep his technique a secret, the printing press spread rapidly. Before 1500 some 2500 European cities had acquired presses. German masters held an early leadership, but the Italians soon challenged their preeminence. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published works, notably editions of the classics.

The immediate effect of the printing press was to multiply the output and cut the costs of books. It thus made information available to a much larger segment of the population who were, of course, eager for information of any variety. Libraries could now store greater quantities of information at much lower cost. Printing also facilitated the dissemination and preservation of knowledge in standardized form -- this was most important in the advance of science, technology and scholarship. The printing press certainly initiated an "information revolution" on par with the Internet today. Printing could and did spread new ideas quickly and with greater impact.

Printing stimulated the literacy of lay people and eventually came to have a deep and lasting impact on their private lives. Although most of the earliest books dealt with religious subjects, students, businessmen, and upper and middle class people bought books on all subjects. Printers responded with moralizing, medical, practical and travel manuals. Printing provided a superior basis for scholarship and prevented the further corruption of texts through hand copying. By giving all scholars the same text to work from, it made progress in critical scholarship and science faster and more reliable.

Technological factors

See also: History of Western typography and Medieval technology

At the same time, a number of medieval products and technological processes had reached a level of maturity which allowed their potential use for printing purposes. Gutenberg took up these far-flung strands, combined them into one complete and functioning system, and perfected the printing process through all its stages by adding a number of inventions and innovations of his own:

Early modern wine press. Such screw presses were applied in Europe to a wide range of uses and provided Gutenberg with the model for his printing press.

The screw press which allowed direct pressure to be applied on flat-plane was already of great antiquity in Gutenberg's time and was used for a wide range of tasks.^[13] Introduced in the 1st century AD by the Romans, it was commonly employed in agricultural production for pressing wine grapes and (olive) oil seeds, both of which formed an integral part of the mediterranean and medieval diet.^[14] The device was also used from very early on in urban contexts as a cloth press for printing patterns.^[15] Gutenberg may have also been inspired by the paper presses which had spread through the German lands since the late 14th century and which worked on the same mechanical principles.^[16]
Gutenberg adopted the basic design, thereby mechanizing the printing process.^[17] Printing, however, put a demand on the machine quite different from pressing. Gutenberg adapted the construction so that the pressing power exerted by the platen on the paper was now applied both evenly and with the required sudden elasticity. To speed up the printing process, he introduced a movable undertable with a plane surface on which the sheets could be swiftly changed.^[18]

Movable type sorted in a letter case and loaded in a composing stick on top

The concept of movable type was not entirely new in the 15th century; sporadic evidence that the typographical principle, the idea of creating a text by reusing individual characters, was well understood and employed in pre-Gutenberg Europe had been cropping up since the 12th century and possibly before. The known examples range from Germany (Prüfening inscription) to England (letter tiles) to Italy.^[19] However, the various techniques employed (imprinting, punching and assembling individual letters) did not have the refinement and efficiency needed to become widely accepted.
Gutenberg greatly improved the process by treating typesetting and printing as two separate work steps. A goldsmith by profession, he created his type pieces from a lead-based alloy which suited printing purposes so well that it is still used today.^[20] The mass production of metal letters was achieved by his key invention of a special hand mould, the matrix.^[21] The Latin alphabet proved to be an enormous advantage in the process because, in contrast to logographic writing systems, it allowed the type-setter to represent any text with a theoretical minimum of only around two dozen different letters.^[22]
Another factor conducive to printing arose from the book existing in the format of the codex, which had originated in the Roman period.^[23] Considered the most important advance in the history of the book prior to printing itself, the codex had completely replaced the ancient scroll at the onset of the Middle Ages (500 AD).^[24] The codex holds considerable practical advantages over the scroll format; it is more convenient to read (by turning pages), is more compact, less costly, and, in particular, unlike the scroll, both recto and verso could be used for writing − and printing.^[25]

A paper codex of the acclaimed 42-line Bible, Gutenberg's major work

A fourth development was the early success of medieval papermakers at mechanizing paper manufacture. The introduction of water-powered paper mills, the first certain evidence of which dates to 1282,^[26] allowed for a massive expansion of production and replaced the laborious handcraft characteristic of both Chinese^[27] and Muslim papermaking.^[28] Papermaking centres began to multiply in the late 13th century in Italy, reducing the price of paper to one sixth of parchment and then falling further; papermaking centers reached Germany a century later.^[29]
Despite this it appears that the final breakthrough of paper depended just as much on the rapid spread of movable-type printing.^[30] It is notable that codices of parchment, which in terms of quality is superior to any other writing material,^[31] still had a substantial share in Gutenberg's edition of the 42-line Bible.^[32] After much experimentation, Gutenberg managed to overcome the difficulties which traditional water-based inks caused by soaking the paper, and found the formula for an oil-based ink suitable for high-quality printing with metal type.^[33]