Triumphs of Invention and Discovery in Art and Science. J. Hamilton Fyfe

out and in, and the clerks have a busy time of it, shovelling money into the till all day long. But come back in the evening, and the place will wear a very different aspect. All signs of drowsiness have disappeared, and the office is all lighted up, and instinct with bustle and activity. Messengers are rushing out and in, telegraph boys, railway porters, and "devils" of all sorts and sizes. Cabs are driving up every few minutes, and depositing reporters, hot from the gallery of the House of Commons or the House of Lords, each with his budget of short-hand notes to decipher and transcribe. Up stairs in his sanctum the editor and his deputies are busy preparing or selecting the articles and reports which are to appear in the next day's paper. In another part of the building the compositors are hard at work, picking up types, and arranging them in "stick-fulls," which being emptied out into "galleys," are firmly fixed therein by little wedges of wood, in order that "proofs" may be taken of them. The proofs pass into the hands of the various sets of readers, who compare them with the "copy" from which they were set up, and mark any errors on the margin of the slips, which then find their way back to the compositors, who correct the types according to the marks. The "galleys" are next seized by the persons charged with the "making-up" of the paper, who divide them into columns of equal length. An ordinary Times newspaper, with a single inside sheet of advertisements, contains seventy-two columns, or 17,500 lines, made up of upwards of a million pieces of types, of which matter about two-fifths are often written, composed, and corrected after seven o'clock in the evening. If the advertisement sheet be double, as it frequently is, the paper will contain ninety-six columns. The types set up by the compositors are not sent to the machine. A mould is taken of them in a composition of brown paper, by means of which a "stereotype" is cast in metal, and from this the paper is printed. The advertisement sheet, single or double, as the case may be, is generally ready for the press between seven or eight o'clock at night. The rest of the paper is divided into two "forms,"—that is, columns arranged in pages and bound together by an iron frame, one for each side of the sheet. Into the first of these the person who "makes up" the paper endeavours to place all the early news, and it is ready for press usually about four o'clock. The other "form" is reserved for the leading articles, telegrams, and all the latest intelligence, and does not reach the press till near five o'clock.

      The first sight of Hoe's machine, by several of which the Times is now printed, fills the beholder with bewilderment and awe. You see before you a huge pile of iron cylinders, wheels, cranks, and levers, whirling away at a rate that makes you giddy to look at, and with a grinding and gnashing of teeth that almost drives you deaf to listen to. With insatiable appetite the furious monster devours ream after ream of snowy sheets of paper, placed in its many gaping jaws by the slaves who wait on it, but seems to find none to its taste or suitable to its digestion, for back come all the sheets again, each with the mark of this strange beast printed on one side. Its hunger never is appeased,—it is always swallowing and always disgorging, and it is as much as the little "devils" who wait on it can do, to put the paper between its lips and take it out again. But a bell rings suddenly, the monster gives a gasp, and is straightway still, and dead to all appearance. Upon a closer inspection, now that it is at rest, and with some explanation from the foreman you begin to have some idea of the process that has been going on before your astonished eyes.

      The core of the machine consists of a large drum, turning on a horizontal axis, round which revolve ten smaller cylinders, also on horizontal axes, in close proximity to the drum. The stereotyped matter is bound, like a malefactor on the wheel, to the central drum, and round each cylinder a sheet of paper is constantly being passed. It is obvious, therefore, that if the type be inked, and each of the cylinders be kept properly supplied with a sheet of paper, a single revolution of the drum will cause the ten cylinders to revolve likewise, and produce an impression on one side of each of the sheets of paper. For this purpose it is necessary to have the type inked ten times during every revolution of the drum; and this is managed by a very ingenious contrivance, which, however, is too complicated for description here. The feeding of the cylinders is provided for in this way. Over each cylinder is a sloping desk, upon which rests a heap of sheets of white paper. A lad—the "layer-on"—stands by the side of the desk and pushes forward the paper, a sheet at a time, towards the tape fingers of the machine, which, clutching hold of it, drag it into the interior, where it is passed round the cylinders, and printed on the outer side by pressure against the types on the drum. The sheet is then laid hold of by another set of tapes, carried to the other end of the machine from that at which it entered, and there laid down on a desk by a projecting flapper of lath-work. Another lad—the "taker-off"—is in attendance to remove the printed sheets, at certain intervals. The drum revolves in less than two seconds; and in that time therefore ten sheets—for the same operation is performed simultaneously by the ten cylinders—are sucked in at one end and disgorged at the other printed on one side, thus giving about 20,000 impressions in an hour.

      Such is the latest marvel of the "noble craft and mystery" of printing; but it is not to be supposed that the limits of production have even now been reached. The greater the supply the greater has grown the demand; the more people read, the more they want to read; and past experience assures us that ingenuity and enterprise will not fail to expand and multiply the powers of the press, so that the increasing appetite for literature may be fully met.

      We have briefly alluded to stereotyping; but some fuller notice seems requisite of a process so valuable and important, without which, indeed, the rapid multiplication of copies of a newspaper, even by a Hoe's six-cylinder machine, would be impossible. If stereotyping had not been invented, the printer would require to "set up" as many "forms" of type as there are cylinders in the machine he uses; an expensive and time-consuming operation which is now dispensed with, because he can resort to "casts." There is yet another advantage gained by the process; "casts" of the different sheets of a book can be preserved for any length of time; and when additional copies or new editions are needed, these "casts" can at once be sent to the machine, and the publisher is saved the great expense of "re-setting."

      The reader is well aware that while many books disappear with the day which called them forth, so there are others for which the demand is constant. This was found to be the case soon after the invention of printing, and the plan then adopted was the expensive and cumbrous one of setting up the whole of the book in request, and to keep the type standing for future editions. The disadvantages of this plan were obvious—a large outlay for type, the amount of space occupied by a constantly increasing number of "forms," and the liability to injury from the falling out of letters, from blows, and other accidents. As early as the eighteenth century attempts seem to have been made to remedy these inconveniences by cementing the types together at the bottom with lead or solder to effect their greater preservation. Canius, a French historian of printing, states that in June 1801 he received a letter from certain booksellers of Leyden, with a copy of their stereotype Bible, the plates for which were formed by soldering together the bottom of common types with some melted substance to the thickness of about three quires of writing-paper; and, it is added, "These plates were made about the beginning of the last century by an artist named Van du Mey."

      This, however, was not true stereotyping; whose leading principle is to dispense with the movable types—to set them again, as it were, at liberty—by making up perfect fac-similes in type-metal of the various combinations into which they may have entered. These fac-similes being made, the type is set free, and may be distributed, and used for making up fresh pages; which may once more furnish, so to speak, the punches to the mould into which the type-metal is poured for the purpose of effecting the fac-simile.

      The inventor of this ingenious process of casting plates from pages of type was William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, in 1735. Not possessing sufficient capital to carry out his invention, he visited London, and sought the assistance of the London stationers; from whom he received the most encouraging words, but no pecuniary assistance. But Ged was a man not readily discomfited, and applying at length to the Universities and the King's printer, he obtained the effective patronage he needed. He "stereotyped" some Bibles and Prayer-books, and the sheets worked off from his plates were admitted equal in point of appearance and accuracy to those printed from the type itself.

      But every benefactor of his kind is doomed to meet with the opposition of the envious, the ignorant, or the prejudiced. "The argument used by the idol-makers of old, 'Sirs, ye know that by this craft we have our