Page 11 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

project to project, while pulling a hand-press was primarily a mechanical process which remained fairly constant for the first two hundred years after its introduction. In the mid-eighteenth century a competent printer could expect to print on average, about 200 sheets per hour. Enhancements to the technology by the end of the eighteenth century, such as the iron Stanhope hand-press—more rigid than wood—allowed the forme to be printed by one pull of the press instead of two, but output increased to only around 250 sheets per hour.
With the growth of literacy in the nineteenth century, and the widening of newspaper circulation, there was strong demand for increased printing speed to produce more and more copies of daily newspapers, some of which produced both morning and evening editions.4 Invention of the steam-pow- ered press by Friedrich Koenig in 1810–1813 provided the first truly signif- icant increase in speed, first noticeably exploited by the Times of London newspaper, which in November 29, 1814 published its first issue printed on a double steam-driven Koenig cylinder press. The output of the new machine was initially 1,100 sheets per hour—more than four times that of the manu- ally operated presses previously used by the newspaper. For about ten years I have been interested in the early history of the mechanization of book production. Some of the results of my research may be read in a theme in the database concerning developments from 1739 to 1901: “Book Production in the Industrial Revolution: Origins of Mass Media.”
Since the way I approach some of these problems is through referencing surviving examples of primary sources, there is a disconnect when we relate interpretations of the past, based on sometimes unique books or manu- scripts, and relatively finite or scanty evidence—very small editions, quanti- ties of books and media most often gradually increasing with the advance of time—to issues of modern media and computing and the Internet, which require us to think on an almost unimaginably larger scale, explosive growth
4 James Moran’s Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times (1973) provides useful analysis of the advances in printing press technology and press output. The first edition of Moran’s book is also a superbly designed, printed and bound monograph.
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