The History of Letterpress, Part 3

May we get personal for a moment?
 
We were doing research on our own presses, planning to work blurbs about them into our history lessons, and we discovered that our little friends have been holding back some good stories from us. Our presses have fascinating histories of their own – fascinating enough, in fact, that we think they deserve more than blurbs. We think they need their own article. So, given that, here are the life stories of the Chandler & Price New Series and the Heidelberg Windmill, as told to us over glasses of wine and axle grease in the wee hours of Gilah.
 
May we introduce you to the Chandler & Price New Series. 
 

 
Harrison T. Chandler and William H. Price essentially got their start copying earlier designs from a press called the Franklin Jobber, which was the brainchild of one George Gordon. 
 
Gordon was one of the first people to release a jobbing press after the Card & Billhead press (first-ever jobber, 1851) arrived on the scene. The Card & Billhead was an inspiration to many inventors, and Gordon was among those who tried their hands at one-upping it. His first effort was called the Alligator, which was rather apt given the press' tendency to snap shut on the fingers of its operator. It did not catch on.
 
The Alligator was followed by several moderately-successful designs, then in 1854 Gordon struck gold. His Franklin press, named after his hero Ben, was a huge hit.
 

 
Gordon took out over 50 patents on various components of his press between 1850 and 1875. As the patents started expiring towards the end of the century, other manufacturers started releasing presses modeled after the successful Franklin.  Chandler & Price, founded in Ohio in 1881, was one of those manufacturers.
 
The New Series press, which was a sturdier and more user-friendly improvement on their original model, was impressive enough that by 1930 about 90% of presses operating in the U.S. were manufactured by Chandler & Price.
 

 
As offset lithography started butting into jobbing press' territory, entering the field of small runs and cards and the like, Chandler & Price fell out of relevance, and their last New Series platen press was manufactured in 1964.
 
Now we'd like you to meet one of our other presses, the Heidelberg Windmill.
 

 
Andreas Hamm started his company in Heidelberg, Germany in 1850 to make engines. In 1856 he met up with a man named Andreas Albert, who was something of an expert in letterpress manufacturing, and the two put their heads together and came up with some reasonable and moderately-successful designs. Albert ended up leaving the company in 1873 and the two became competitors, which undoubtedly led to a lifetime of regret on Albert's part.
 
In 1912 a man named Karl Georg Ferdinand Gilke came on board and invented what would become the trademark of the Heidelberg company: the rotating feeder arm.
 
The arm rotates in quarter turns.  First it picks up a sheet of paper with little vacuum suckers, then it continues holding on while the platen presses the paper against the text, then it drops the printed paper off on a receiving tray. The fact that the arm is double-sided means an instant doubling of sheets per hour, because as one page is being removed another is already being inserted. 
 

 
The Heidelberg Original, featuring this iconic rotating arm, was released in 1913, and it was such a runaway success that in 1924 Hamm created the first-ever press factory assembly line, which completed 100 new presses every month. 
 
One major factor in the success of the Heidelberg press was the creative marketing of the new management board director, Hubert H.A. Sternberg. Sternberg mounted one of the presses to a car and drove around the continent, visiting print shops and giving live demos. He would pull into a shop's driveway and print their own work right then and there, proving the superior efficiency of his product to anyone who cared to watch.
 

 
During WWII the shop cut back on its press manufacturing and started also producing metal lathes and hydraulic devices, so that the government wouldn’t have any excuse to draft its skilled workers – if they're already contributing by making war-necessary products, you don’t have to drag them away to battle, right? In this way the company managed to retain most of its trained workers through the war.
 
Once the war ended the Heidelberg company started up where it had left off, doing major business internationally and continuing to innovate. In 1957 they opened the largest printing press factory in the world in the town of Weisloch (near Heidelberg). They started producing offset presses in 1962, but unlike most press companies, they continued making their platen machines as well. 

The History of Letterpress, Part 2

Gutenberg's press design was pretty much unchanged from the 15th century until 1800. Our old friend here:



…kept that up for a good three hundred years, until a man named Earl Stanhope made three significant improvements that made our pressman friend's life much easier.

First, he built his press entirely out of iron, which made it much stronger and allowed for larger images. Second, he invented a series of clever levers that reduced the pressman's efforts by about 90%, allowing him to work faster and more efficiently. Third, he added a moving carriage—so instead of raising the platen (the surface that presses the paper onto the type, i.e. the top piece of sandwich bread) high enough to ink the type every time, he only needed to raise it an inch or so and the type bed would slide out from under it for inking.

Taken together, these improvements increased the speed of the printing press fourfold, to 480 pages per hour.



But the real innovation was to arrive several years later, when Freidrich Kroenig invented the first automated press, powered by steam.

He'd spent a decade of his life trying to put together a mechanized printing press, and the final concoction was not only the first press powered by steam, it was also the first to use a cylindrical platen–so instead of being impressed by a flat surface coming down all at once, the type bed went under a roller that would press the paper down an inch at a time.



Nobody in Kroenig's native Germany wanted to buy one of the presses; they were too weird. He tried instead in England, and found his first customer in the London Times. Once all the kinks got worked out, and Kroenig added a new invention called a "perfecting machine" that allowed for both sides of the paper to be printed at once, the steamy press was churning out over 2,000 pages per hour. Stanhope's 480, which had been a major breakthrough only a decade earlier, suddenly looked sad, and his press became obsolete.

Many historians credit Kroenig's invention with the spread of newspapers, and with an increase in literacy generally.



But meanwhile, in America! A Bostonian named Daniel Treadwell had seen Kroenig's steam-powered press and was not impressed with its impressions. Kroenig's press did have its drawbacks: its prints tended to be sloppy, with blurred text, and it was extremely difficult to register accurately. Treadwell saw that old-fashioned platen machines produced better work, and he sought to make a mechanical version that used the same basic principle (no cylinders here, thanks), but would be powered by steam and would be fast enough for industrial applications.

In 1824 he unveiled the "Bed and Platen" press. It was somewhat slower than Kroenig's machine, and it took three people to run, but it produced much finer work making it suitable for fine book editions (i.e. lots and lots of Bibles).



Treadwell's press could be rigged to run off of steam, waterwheel, or horse-whim. If your press was horse-driven, though, you would have a problem because at the moment when the platen actually pressed into the paper the horse would get a sudden lurch. As a result, you would need to employ a horse-restarter to kickstart the animal once per cycle, as it would usually stop walking at this point.

Treadwell's presses, and others modeled off his, had a good run in America (they never really made it across the Atlantic), but by the 1880s improvements to cylinder presses like Kroenig's made the bed-and-platen obsolete. Once the cylinder press, which had always been faster, dealt with its sloppiness problems, Treadwells fell out of favor–except, oddly, with one stalewart Bible maker in Tennessee who owned twelve Treadwells and refused to give them up until finally he was forced out of business around the turn of the century. The rest of humanity, though, moved on. [Correction by Doug Charles: The Bible printer may have been using the famous "descendant" of the Treadwell, the Adams press. It is most unlikely—verging on impossible—that any examples of the wooden-framed Treadwell would have survived so long. On the other hand, his ownership of Adams presses would not have been so unusual, as many were running after the beginning of the 20th century.]

In other innovations:

In 1857 Richard M. Hoe invented a rotary press that could print on rolls of paper, removing the need to feed individual sheets and greatly speeding up the process.

The linotype machine was invented in 1887. It allowed an operator to type an entire line of text that would then be cast as a single piece of metal, removing the need to reset individual letters. It was mainly used for newspapers, which had to be printed fast. The main drawback, clearly, was that if the operator made one mistake, the whole line would have to be recast.

The monotype machine, also from 1887, was similar to the linotype machine except that when it cast the letters they weren't actually attached to one another. This way a single letter could be replaced without having to redo an entire line.



So if Kroenig, Treadwell, and Hoe were the godfathers of modern industrial printing, Stephen P. Ruggles was the spiritual ancestor of today's small press movement. As he himself unambiguously put it, "In 1830 or 1831, I invented and built, in New York, the first card or job press, I believe, ever constructed in any part of the world."

A job press is a press designed specifically for the printing of small items, such as cards, billheads, envelopes, and stationery. While Ruggles claims to have built his first "jobber"–as the presses came to be called–in 1830, his design wasn't patented or put into use until 1851. It was called the "Card & Billhead" press, and it's the basic design of all the platen presses being used by craft shops today.



The Card & Billhead was run by a foot-treadle and required just one operator. Unlike larger industrial presses, it had a fast setup time, and it was actually remarkably efficient–a practiced pressman could turn out over 1,000 pages per hour without needing a steam engine or a horse.

Incidentally, Ruggles was also the inventor of a machine that produced Braille Bibles for the blind.

The descendants of Ruggles' press are the platen presses mainly used by craft pressmen working today.

In our next installment, we'll look at the very first movement to refer to itself as the "Private Press Movement," which arose in opposition to the mechanical fist of the Industrial Revolution.

The History of Letterpress, a Series

This is a guest post from Alexis, a friend of Gilah Press + Design. Thanks, Alexis!

I'm going to tell you the history of letterpress printing, slowly, one article every two weeks. I'm going to start with Gutenberg, who didn't invent the letterpress but did invent the movable type that makes the process possible.

Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type around 1440 in Mainz, Germany. He also invented a press based on the wine presses of his time, with a large screw that had to be turned manually by this guy:



While this seems stupid time-consuming by today's standards, it was a huge improvement over the hand-lettering that had been the standard earlier.

Not surprisingly, the first book that Gutenberg printed was a Bible. It had blank spaces for large letters, decoration, and illustration, which customers could have added in by artists after purchase. No one knows exactly how many were made, but only 21 survive today, and they're generally considered to be the most valuable books in the world – no one knows for sure, though, because none have changed hands since 1978. This is the New York Public Library's Gutenberg Bible, the first to be brought to the United States:



The rapid spread of Gutenberg's design was actually due to a legal mishap: one of his investors managed to successfully sue him and he lost the rights to his invention. The investor let the schematic secrets out, and Europe started casting letters and building presses like crazy. By 1500 – about 50 years after Gutenberg printed his first Bible – there were over 1,000 presses that had printed over 8 million books.

Gutenberg's timing would turn out to be impeccable. He invented this tool for the rapid dissemination of information right before Europeans started opening major trade routes with the East and the Americas. Missionaries enthusiastically adopted the new technology and would print Bibles on board ships bound for America, then when they arrived they would be armed and ready for their holy takeovers. The first press to begin running outside of Europe was set up in Mexico City in 1544, and was used by missionaries to facilitate the distribution of holy literature.



(This is a random 17th-century illustration of Europeans arriving in America; note the meal preparation in the lower left.)

Some people weren't as pumped for the press as the Europeans. It was completely banned in the Ottoman Empire until the mid-1700s, on penalty of death. Two reasons: Muslim legal scholars weren't sure that the process was in accordance with Islamic law, and manuscript scribes had a lot of influence. European scribes had also tried to battle the spread of the press, but had less power and thus less success.

Ottoman rulers who found printing presses made this face:



Next time: the invention of the automated letterpress during the Industrial Revolution!