A Millennium of Printing

 by Brett Rutherford

Those of us old enough to have touched and used metal type have a sense of the astonishing printing progress made in the last half-century. The all-digital generations following us will have grown up with digital cameras, desktop publishing, and instant Internet access to vast libraries of “virtual” books. To them, the history of printing will be quaint and charming. Its only inheritance may be the traditional esthetics that distinguish fine design and printing from semi-literate junk. People will know that printing looked better in the “good old days,” but they won’t know why.

            Our printing descendants, if they visit a museum displaying printing presses and typesetting machinery, might marvel at how printers, at the turn of the 20^th century, still rubbed greasy ink on raised metal type and pressed it against paper, much as Johannes Gutenberg had done in the 1450s.

            The chronology of printing is fascinating, with its long letterpress “stone age,” followed by a burst of 19^th Century inventions such as the rotary press, the Linotype machine, the halftone screen, and photoengraving. The triumph of offset lithography after World War II, however, started a revolution in invention that is now reaching its apogee — with innovations coming so fast that the industry can barely keep up with them.

            The printing industry, even as late as the 1970s, would still have been recognizable to a printer of 100 years earlier. The industry we are becoming in the post-2000 world, though, will be one the old-fashioned printer could not even imagine. We are already at the point where we can get a book or magazine to a printing press without consuming any materials such as film, chemicals, proofs, or plates. In less than two decades, the book or magazine itself will become a  “virtual” product, with readers printing out text passages or color images only if they want to keep or share them. Coffee table art books will transfer images to virtual paintings on our walls. Virtual magazines will have moving, talking advertisements, and celebrity interviews that can be heard as well as read. Libraries will be accessible 24 hours a day, with on-line reading/printing of public domain texts. 

            We really can’t even imagine where it will all lead, but all these things are steps along the way to the inventor’s ideal: imaging machinery that has no moving parts, never wears out, and uses no “consumables” other than energy.

 

How We Got Here

            Gutenberg, Senefelder, Mergenthaler and other inventors who moved us toward our all-digital age might be startled to see where the industry they steered has gone. Most of the inventors of the past sought a short-term goal, and envisioned the profits they would make because their machines could copy words and pictures faster, cheaper and better.

            We can look back on certain inventions and say, with some certainty, that they mattered a great deal in liberating printing from the days of scribes to the days of ink dots and pixels. Here are the creative landmarks that I believe have mattered most to the printing industry in the millennium now ended, a timeline of inventions and “firsts.”

            AD 800. Books are produced in quantity in Korea and Japan from hand-carved woodblocks.

            1041. Books are printed in China from movable ceramic clay type. Although books are printed and widely distributed by Imperial order, Europeans remain unaware of Chinese printing methods for almost half a millennium.

            1221. Books are printed in China from moveable type made from hand-carved wood blocks. As many as 30,000 separate Chinese characters were required!

            1453 to 1456. Gutenberg’s Bible. The first finished, complete European book proving that cast metal type could be used to produce a Bible comparable to the best work of scribes and illuminators. By the year 1500, there would be ten million printed books in Europe. By 1507, the Church began censoring some printed books, banning others. A few printers are ordered strangled or burned at the stake.

            1495. In Venice, Aldus Manutius is the first successful printer-publisher. He uses elegant, readable typefaces, woodcut illustrations, and smaller page sizes to produce affordable copies of Greek and Latin classics.

            1535. First printing press in the New World is set up in Mexico.

            1550. Wood engravings are the predominant method of producing illustrations, but intaglio engravings in copper gain appeal. The tradition of “multi-process” books, with text produced by one method and illustrations printed on separate sheets or signatures by another method, takes shape.

            1639. First printing in North America -- “The Freeman’s Oath” in Massachusetts.

            1725. The first stereotype plate is cast from a metal type form in Scotland. This is the first instance of a permanent “plate” apart from handset type. This meant that the original type could be redistributed and re-used. The method was not widely used, though, until much later in the 18^th century.

            1796. Alois Senefelder develops the art of stone lithography, printing from a flat, grained stone surface. This is the predecessor of offset lithography.

            1800. America’s first “coffee table” art book is published, a book of hand-colored engraved plates of “The City of Philadelphia.”

            1806. Machine-made paper becomes available for the first time, thanks to the invention of the Fourdrinier paper machine—the process still used today for papermaking. Before this time, all paper was hand-made.

            1814. The London Times uses steam power to print newspapers on a cylindrical press.

            1829. First typewriter is patented in Detroit, Michigan. Typewriters capable of working at the same speed as writing longhand would be not developed until the 1870s.

            1835 to 1841. W.H. Fox Talbot develops the techniques for making photographic negatives, and from them, any number of positive copies. Modern photography is born, with a profound impact on printing. The discovery that light-sensitive materials could capture and preserve toned images of real life was a bombshell. Until then, only a trained artist could represent reality, and only using hand tools and complicated techniques to represent tone and shadow.

            1840. First paper made from wood pulp instead of rag fibers. Bookworms started the march to extinction since they couldn’t eat paper made from wood pulp.

            1844. Richard Hoe’s first letterpress using an image carrier (stereotype) cylinder.

            1850. First stone lithographic press with automatic inking and impression cylinders. Lithographs rapidly became the principal means to produce posters and low-cost art reproductions.

            1860. First rotary gravure printing on paper in France. Gravure would one day become a printing giant, used for Sunday supplements, catalogs, and long-run magazines.

            1864. The halftone screen is invented. For the first time, a printing press could reproduce a photograph, simulating all its gradations of tone using dots of various sizes.

            1865. First web press built by William Bullock, with rotary letterpress image carrier and impression cylinders. Web printing is off and running.

            1868. First rotary litho press using zinc plates.

            1870. In-line folding machines fold sheets into signatures as they come off press. Laid-off New York City bindery girls, in desperation, become dance hall performers.

            1872. Photoengraving of letterpress plates is introduced. Engravings of halftones or line drawings can now be printed on the same form with metal type.

            1875. Carl Klitsch develops photochemical engraving for gravure printing.

            1879. Thomas Edison invents the electric lamp, with a profound impact on American culture and industry. The electrification of cities and factories means the end of reliance on steam and human power for printing machinery.

            1886. Ottmar Mergenthaler unveils the Linotype machine, the first successful device to automate typesetting. The Linotype, one of the greatest inventions of all time, cast individual, justified lines of metal type, using matrices that dropped from an overhead compartment. After being used to cast the type in molten lead, the matrices were automatically redistributed. Productivity was 500% greater than setting type by hand. His invention would sweep the world and would be the dominant method of typesetting for more than 60 years.

            1891. Tolbert Lanston introduces the Monotype typesetter.

            1892. First color printing using three-color halftone screens.

            1904. Offset lithography is invented. The act of printing “second hand” from a cylindrical rubber blanket instead of by direct contact with the image carrier had profound implications – so profound that offset, in less than half a century, would become the dominant printing process.

            1930. First four-color offset press is installed. American “photolithographers” would spend decades perfecting the four-color printing process.

            1942. Magnetic tape introduced. Although it took decades for cheap, recordable/ erasable magnetic media to impact the graphic arts, today we rely on it to store all our jobs.

            1951. First color television. A technology that would lead to color computer monitors and the whole world of color perceived as RGB.

            1954. Phototypesetting begins with the introduction of the Harris Fotosetter. During the next 20 years, phototypesetting became faster and cheaper, and the typesetting industry came into its glory days as entrepreneurs bought the new technology. Metal typesetting was all but obsolete by 1970.

            1957. Helvetica typeface introduced. A dark day for printing.

            1960. Invention of the laser. No single invention since the Linotype has had more impact on the graphic arts industry. The laser’s ability to focus a microscopic dot at high energy levels has brought it into use in all kinds of imaging devices – and the end is not in sight.

            1962. First Xerox copier. The copier would come to dominate the black and white printing market within two decades.

            1964. Introduction of word processing systems. The existence of text in stored media instantly presented both challenge and opportunity to typesetters and printers. By 1975, word processors became affordable standalone units with disk storage. The first inklings here of putting the prepress into the hands of the customer – another trend that isn’t over yet.

            1968. First all-digital typesetter. No more film fonts, since fonts are now “software.”

            1972. First color copiers. A harbinger that “color on demand” would one day be the customer’s credo.

            1980. The desktop laser printer. Within 20 years, there would be a desktop printer accessible to almost anyone with a computer.

            1981. Introduction of PostScript by Adobe, Inc. , the first device-independent file format for text and graphics. Today’s wildly popular PDF format is an offshoot of PostScript.

            1984. Apple Computers introduces the Macintosh, the first computer whose operating system included on-screen type and graphics.

            1985. Desktop publishing is introduced to Mac users in Aldus Pagemaker, and to PC users with Xerox Ventura Publisher. For the first time, ordinary computer users are able to lay out complete publications and see them represented on screen exactly as they will print.

            The 1990s. Well, you’ve lived through them. An explosion of new technology, at plummeting prices. Cheap color printers, cheap scanners, 50-cent type fonts, huge PC disk drives, the Internet, digital presses, wide format printing – yegods, where will it all lead us?