Article February 29, 1908 Issue

FROM THE ECONOMIC STANDPOINT

CHARLES T. ROOT.

Many of the important labor-saving devices which aid in the spread of civilization and add to the comfort of human life, were in their early forms crude cumbrous machines of relatively low efficiency. Not until they had undergone evolution amounting almost to revolution did they attain satisfactory usefulness. The first loom, dynamo, harvester, and sewing machine, for example, were heavy, bulky, slow-running affairs; but the demand for such devices was imperative, and so high mechanical talent worked at them, lightening, refining, speeding them up, until they had been improved to the point of transformation. Then each was brought to economic success, and those who were credited with that result were justly rewarded with wealth and honors.

Perhaps the most striking example of this phase of material progress is offered by the history of the newspaper printing-press. Beginning with a one-cylinder machine, printing on one side at a time sheets fed to it singly by hand, and each press requiring its own separate "form" of type or plates, increased production was first obtained by adding more presses of the same kind. But this plan soon necessitated too much investment and too much space. Then relief was sought by building two cylinders in one frame, then by superposing pair over pair of cylinders until ten-cylinder presses were built, which, set in pits dug below the basement level, towered up through the second story of the newspaper, building. These skyscrapers of iron, steel, and brass, with staircases running up and down their sides, and requiring the attendance of from twenty to thrity men, saved after all nothing but floor space. They still called for a set of plates or type for each cylinder, and still printed on one side, single, hand-fed sheets; and the time required for all these operations, plus the subsequent folding of the papers, set a speedy limit to the number of copies which any journal could get out in time for sale.

Then a bold American inventor conceived the idea of printing a continuous roll of paper from a single set of plates. Immediately the complicated mountain of metal collapsed and vanished, and in its place stood the compact little web perfecting press, served by four or five men, and throwing out finished and folded papers at more than double the rate of its giant predecessor. On that day all limitations upon circulation were lifted. and journalism on its present scale was inaugurated. The first web perfecting press was put into operation in the office of a metropolitan daily in the year 1875; and it was hailed as the greatest labor-saving triumph of that generation. But, without depreciating the actual importance of this achievement, it must be remembered that the same year was marked by one far greater; and it occurred on this wise.

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