The nineteenth century saw the printing press develop from a simple wooden device into a fast power machine.
The point of mechanizing printing, always well understood, was to print faster for less. But it was not enough to make a faster printing press unless all the other elements of printing were upgraded to match it. For example, if a press printed so fast that its inking rollers were damaged, then the material the rollers were made from would have to be changed. And fast presses were more expensive, so the number of editions would have to be larger in order to reduce the unit cost of printing.
In 1814 London, a German engineer, Friedrich Koenig, unveiled his new press at the offices of The Times. It was the fastest printing machine ever produced. Koenig’s flatbed cylinder machine was years ahead of the field. The invention was a success at The Times, however, only because no other publication had a newspaper circulation large enough to justify the cost of the machine.
The first attempt to mechanize printing in America came in 1824 when Daniel Treadwell of Boston added gears and power to a wood-framed platen press. Treadwell’s machine inspired Isaac Adams and Otis Tufts, among other press builders. The bed-and-platen press, as this class of machine was called, was about four times as fast as a hand press. Its speed was limited, however, by the fact that the motions of its flatbed and flat platen were reciprocal, rather than rotary: travelling back and forth, with a stop at each end. But its work was considered to be of high quality, and therefore kept a place in fine book printing throughout the nineteenth century.
American flatbed cylinder machines, following European models, also made their appearance in the 1820s and became the workhorses of newspaper and larger job offices. Type was still supported on a flatbed which had to move back and forth, but the impression cylinder could turn continuously, speeding up the paper feeding operation. Typically, flatbed cylinder presses delivered a thousand sheets per hour, printed on one side.
By the middle of the century, successful rotary or type revolving machines were on the market. On these presses the type itself was wrapped around a cylinder, which turned against the impression cylinder. All motions were now rotary except for the feeding and delivery of sheets of paper. The largest such presses were nearly 40 feet long and 20 feet high; they achieved speeds of 20,000 sheets per hour. By the 1870s even greater speeds were attained by much smaller rotary presses that printed from a roll, or web, of paper instead of sheets, then perfected the paper (printed it on the second side), and finally cut it into sheets. Several web perfecting presses were exhibited in the Centennial Exposition of 1876. And by the end of the century, rotary web perfecting machines in city newspaper offices would print, cut, and fold 50,000 12-page papers an hour.