The Walter Press.

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the hour, whereas the Walter machine turns out twelve thousand impressions completed in the same time.

The new Walter Press does not in the least resemble any existing printing machine, unless it be the calendering machine which furnished its type. At the printing end it looks like a collection of small cylinders or rollers. The first thing to be observed is the continuous roll of paper, four miles long, tightly mounted on a reel, which, when the machine is going, flies round with immense rapidity. The web of paper taken up by the first roller is led into a series of small hollow cylinders filled with water and steam, perforated with thousands of minute holes. By this means the paper is properly damped before the process of printing is begun. The roll of paper, drawn by nipping rollers, next flies through to the cylinder on which the stereotype plates are fixed, so as to form the four pages of the ordinary sheet of The Times; there it is lightly pressed against the type and printed; then it passes downwards round another cylinder covered with cloth, and reversed; next to the second type-covered roller, where it takes the impression exactly on the other side of the remaining four pages. It next reaches one of the most ingenious contrivances of the invention—the cutting machinery-by means of which the paper is divided by a quick knife into the five thousand five hundred sheets of which the entire web consists. The tapes hurry the now completely printed newspaper up an inclined plane, from which the divided sheets are showered down in a continuous stream by an oscillating frame, where they are met by two boys, who adjust the sheets as they fall. The reel of four miles long is printed and divided into newspapers complete in about twenty-five minutes.

The machine is almost entirely self-acting, from the pumping up of the ink into the ink-box out of the cis

tern below stairs to the registering of the numbers as they are printed in the manager's room above. It is always difficult to describe a machine in words. Nothing but a series of sections and diagrams could give the reader an idea of the construction of this unrivalled instrument. The time to see it and wonder at it is when the press is in full work. And even then you can see but little of its construction, for the cylinders are wheeling round with immense velocity. The rapidity with which the machine works may be inferred from the fact that the printing cylinders (round which the stereotyped plates are fixed), while making their impressions on the paper, travel at the surprising speed of two hundred revolutions a minute, or at the rate of about nine miles an hour!

Contrast this speed with the former slowness. Go back to the beginning of the century. Before the year 1814 the turn-out of newspapers was only about three hundred single impressions in an hour; that is, impressions printed only on one side of the paper. Koenig, by his invention, increased the issue to one thousand one hundred impressions. Applegarth and Cowper, by their four-cylinder machine, increased the issue to four thousand, and by the eight-cylinder machine to ten thousand an hour. But these were only impressions printed on one side of the paper. The first perfecting-press-that is, printing simultaneously the paper on both sides—was the Walter, the speed of which has been raised to twelve thousand, though, if necessary, it can produce excellent work at the rate of seventeen thousand complete copies of an eight-page paper per hour. Then, with the new method of stereotyping- by means of which the plates can be infinitely multiplied - and by the aid of additional machines, the supply of additional impressions is absolutely unlimited.

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The Walter press is not a monopoly. It is manufactured at The Times office, and is supplied to all comers. Among the other daily papers printed by its means in this country are the Daily News, the Scotsman, and the Birmingham Daily Post. The first Walter press was sent to America in 1872, where it was employed to print the Missouri Republican, at St. Louis, the leading newspaper of the Mississippi Valley. An engineer and a skilled workman from The Times office accompanied the machinery. On arriving at St. Louis, the materials were unpacked, lowered into the machine-room, where they were erected and ready for work in the short space of five days.

The Walter press was an object of great interest at the Centennial Exhibition held at Philadelphia in 1876, where it was shown printing the New York Times, one of the most influential journals in America. The press was surrounded with crowds of visitors intently watching its perfect and regular action, "like a thing of life." The New York Times said of it: "The Walter press is the most perfect printing-press yet known to man ; invented by the most powerful journal of the Old World, and adopted as the very best press to be had for its purposes by the most influential journal of the New World.. It is an honor to Great Britain to have such an exhibit in her display, and a lasting benefit to the printing business, especially to newspapers. ... The first printing-press run by steam was erected in the year 1814, in the office of The Times, by the father of him who is the present proprietor of that world-famous journal. The machine of 1814 was described in The Times of the 29th of November in that year, and the account given of it closed in these words: The whole of these complicated acts is performed with such a velocity and simultaneousness of movement that no less than eleven thousand sheets are im

pressed in one hour.' Mirabile dictu! And the Walter press of to-day can run off seventeen thousand copies an hour, printed on both sides. This is not bad work for one man's lifetime."

It is unnecessary to say more about this marvellous machine. Its completion forms the crown of the industry which it represents, and of the enterprise of the journal which it prints.

CHAPTER VIII.

WILLIAM CLOWES,

INTRODUCER OF BOOK-PRINTING BY STEAM.

"The Images of men's wits and knowledges remain in Books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to be called Images, because they generate still, and cast their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding ages; so that, if the invention of the Ship was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote Regions in participation of their Fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as Ships, pass through the vast Seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other?"-BACON: On the Proficience and Advancement of Learning.

STEAM has proved as useful and potent in the printing of books as in the printing of newspapers. Down to the end of last century "the divine art," as printing was called, had made comparatively little progress. That is to say, although books could be beautifully printed by hand-labor, they could not be turned out in any large numbers.

The early printing-press was rude. It consisted of a table, along which the form of type, furnished with a tympan and frisket, was pushed by hand. The platen worked vertically between standards, and was brought down for the impression, and raised after it, by a common screw, worked by a bar handle. The inking was performed by balls covered with skin pelts; they were blacked with ink, and beaten down on the