THE PRINTING PRESS
The birth of printing dates back to China, in the year 593, when played for the first time and multiply, drawings and texts with the help of printed characters carved wooden boards (woodcut). The invention is because Buddhist monks, that permeated sizes color printing them on silk or paper rags. The movable type printing, and with them, typesetting, are due to the Chinese alchemist Pi Cheng (1040).
These techniques reached the West much later. Gutenberg knew the difficulty of print full pages woodcarvings and devised a more rational print mode, based on movable type. Thus, the first remains found in intaglio technique dating from 1446 and belonging to a German teacher who recorded on copper plates using a chisel. After printing is performed on wet paper and with the help of a press. This techniques would be enhanced in 1878 by the Austrian Karl Klietsch, using the application cylinder (photogravure).
Contemporary image of Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of printing with movable type.
This process will allow the massive, fast and cheap reproduction of relief printing forms based on lead plates.
In 1796, Alois Senefelder invented the Austrian printing technique called lithography. This is the first printing process level. If after fat printing ink on the stone is applied wet areas not accept, while adhering to the rest of the plate, being able to proceed to printing.
In 1822, after the French Ballanche Simon conceived the idea of building an automatic composing texts, the American William Church manages to build the first machine of this type, the compounder. The idea was machined and maximum ease the complicated task of manually compose lead type typography, one by one, forming full texts, as was done since Gutenberg. This raises the first printing of automatic offset. This machine was perfected by Augustus Applegath and Edward Cooper, British engineers, I siguienddo the principle of the machine invented by Hoe, while still working only with loose sheets of paper. Some years later, in 1851, the British constructor T.
Nelson finally manages to develop a rotary printing on continuous paper rolls and, later, in 1863, the American inventor William A. Bullock get the patent for the first rotary press for printing books on continuous role model for Subsequent presses. This finding is particularly relevant because from the handpiece designed by Gutenberg to fuse types had hardly changed this technique. This technique, called hectografía, will soon become the standard procedure normally used for small print runs.
Horizontal rotating coil. Used created by John Walter III, the London newspaper The Times owner.
In 1884 highlights an important milestone printing history, the invention of the linotype by the German watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler, based on the fully automated composition of texts. Thus, once the composition of a line, the negative impression mold with liquid lead, yielding a lead seal for printing melted.
In 1904 the art of lithography, and overall printing world and reaches its peak with the development of offset printing, used today.
