Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 | Page 5

in the line. They are taken, one by one, between thumb and forefinger,
while the mind not only spells out each word, but is always carrying
phrases and whole sentences ahead of the fingers, and each letter,
syllable and word is set in its order in lines in the composing stick, each
line being spaced out in the stick so as to exactly fit the column width,
this process being repeated until the stick is full. Then the stickful is
emptied upon a galley. Then, when the page or the paper is "up," as the
printers phrase it, the galleys are collected, and the foreman makes up
the pages, article by article, as they come to us in the printed paper--the
preliminary processes of printing proofs from the galleys, reading them
by the proof readers, who mark the errors, and making the corrections
by the compositors (each one correcting his own work), having been
quietly and swiftly going on all the while. The page is made up on a
portable slab of iron, upon which it is sent to the stereotyping room.
There wet stereotyping paper, several sheets in thickness, is laid over
the page, and this almost pulpy paper is rapidly and dexterously beaten
evenly all over with stiff hair brushes until the soft paper is pressed
down into all the interstices between the type; then this is covered with
blankets and the whole is placed upon a steam chest, where it is

subjected to heat and pressure until the wet paper becomes perfectly
dry. Then, this dried and hardened paper, called a matrix, is placed in a
circular mould, and melted stereotype metal is poured in and cooled,
resulting in the circular plate, which is rapidly carried to the press room,
clamped upon its cylinder, and when all the cylinders are filled, page
by page in proper sequence, the pressman gives the signal, the burr and
whirr begin, and men and scarcely less sentient machines enter upon
their swift race for the early trains. As a matter of general interest it
may be remarked that this whole process of stereotyping a page, from
the time the type leaves the composing room until the plate is clamped
upon the press, averages fifteen minutes, and that cases are upon record
when the complex task has been accomplished in eleven minutes.
The paper is brought from the mill tightly rolled upon wooden or iron
cores. Some presses take paper the narrow way of the paper, rolls for
which average between 600 and 700 pounds. Others work upon paper
of double the width of two pages, that is, four pages wide, and then the
rolls are sometimes as wide as six feet, and have an average weight of
1,350 pounds. Each roll from which the New York Tribune is printed
contains an unbroken sheet 23,000 feet (4-1/3 miles) long. A few hours
before the paper is to be printed, an iron shaft having journal ends is
passed through the core, the roll is placed in a frame where it may
revolve, the end of the sheet is grasped by steel fingers and the roll is
unwound at a speed of from 13 to 15 miles an hour, while a fan-like
spray of water plays evenly across its width, so that the entire sheet is
unrolled, dampened, for the better taking of the impression to be made
upon it, and firmly rewound, all in twenty minutes. Each of these rolls
will make about 7,600 copies of the Tribune.
When all is ready, paper and stereotyped pages in place, and all
adjustments carefully attended to, the almost thinking machine starts at
the pressman's touch, and with well nigh incredible speed prints, places
sheet within sheet, pastes the parts together, cuts, folds and counts out
the completed papers with an accuracy and constancy beyond the
power of human eye and hand.
The printing press has held its own in the rapid advance of that
wonderful evolution which, within the last half century, in every phase
of thought and in every movement of material forces placed under the
dominion of men, has almost made one of our years the equivalent of

one of the old centuries. Within average recollection the single cylinder
printing machine, run by hand or steam, and able under best conditions
to print one side of a thousand sheets in one hour, was the marvel of
mankind. In 1850, one such, that we started in an eastern Ohio town,
drew such crowds of wondering on-lookers that we were obliged to bar
the open doorway to keep them at a distance which would allow the
astonishing thing to work at all.
To-day, in the United States alone, five millions of dollars are invested
in the building of printing presses, many of which, by slightest violence
to