PRINTING MACHINESAn Evolution of

Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg

Johannes Gutenberg was a German craftsman and inventor. Gutenberg is best known for the Gutenberg press, an innovative printing press machine that used movable type. It remained the standard until the 20th century. Gutenberg made printing cheap. movable type printing started the Printing Revolution and is widely regarded as the most important event of the modern period. It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation,

Yuan Dynasty woodblock edition of a Chinese play

• Block printing

Block printing is a technique for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia both as a method of printing on textiles and later, under the influence of Buddhism, on paper. As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to about 220.

Korean moveable metal typeset form, used to print 1n 1447(1)

A case of cast metal type pieces and typeset matter in a composing stick(2)

Movable type is the system of printing and typography using movable pieces of metal type, made by casting from matrices struck by letter punches.

Around 1040, the first known movable type system was created in China by Bi Sheng out of porcelain. Metal movable type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230). Neither movable type system was widely used, one reason being the enormous Chinese character set.

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• Rotary printing press

A rotary printing press is a printing press in which the impressions are carved around a cylinder so that the printing can be done on long continuous rolls of paper, cardboard, plastic, or a large number of other substrates. Rotary drum printing was invented by Richard March Hoe in 1847, and then significantly improved by William Bullock in 1863.

Intaglio printing pressIntaglio is a family of printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface, known as the matrix or plate. Normally, copper or zinc plates are used as a surface, and the incisions are created by etching, engraving, dry point, aquatint or mezzotint. Collographs may also be printed as intaglio plates. To print an intaglio plate the surface is covered in thick ink and then rubbed with tarlatan cloth to remove most of the excess. The final smooth wipe is usually done by hand, sometimes with the aid of newspaper or old public phone book pages, leaving ink only in the incisions. A damp piece of paper is placed on top and the plate and paper are run through a printing press that, through pressure, transfers the ink from the recesses of the plate to the paper.

Color printing

Chromolithography became the most successful of several methods of colour printing developed by the 19th century; other methods were developed by printers such as Jacob Christoph Le Blon, George Baxter and Edmund Evans, and mostly relied on using several woodblocks with the colors. Hand-coloring also remained important; elements of the official British Ordnance Survey maps were colored by hand by boys until 1875. Chromolithography developed from lithography and the term covers various types of lithography that are printed in color.

Lithography (1796)

Lithography is a printing process that uses chemical processes to create an image. Thus, when the plate is introduced to a compatible ink and water mixture, the ink will adhere to the positive image and the water will clean the negative image. This allows for a relatively flat print plate which allows for much longer runs than the older physical methods of imaging. In offset lithography, which depends on photographic processes, flexible aluminum, polyester, mylar or paper printing plates are used in place of stone tablets. Modern printing plates have a brushed or roughened texture and are covered with a photosensitive emulsion

stone used for a lithograph with a view of Princeton University (Collection: Princeton University Library, NJ)

Offset press

Offset printing is a widely used printing technique where the inked image is transferred (or "offset") from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on the repulsion of oil and water, the offset technique employs a flat (planographic) image carrier on which the image to be printed obtains ink from ink rollers, while the non-printing area attracts a film of water, keeping the non-printing areas ink-free.

Machines

Electrostatic printing

Known best for its printing of large world maps, the electrostatic printer uses no plates, nor does it directly use any ink or toner. Rather, it uses paper coated in a layer of zinc oxide. This paper is charged with the appropriate image, and runs through a literal ink bath, where the correct inks are attracted to the paper. What emerges is a high quality print. This printer requires low setup, and also has low price per print and high speeds.

Machine

Screen Printing

Popular with textile (wood, ceramic, metal) and clothes printers, screen printing is a special technique which creates screens from a fabric. Usually silk, nylon, or polyester, the screen has stencil of the image cut into it, and it is then stretched over the material to be printed on. According to Printing Machines, this printing method was seen in the "beginning of the 19th century and gained popularity during the first world war for making banners and printing flags."

Flexography

Flexographical printers are used for packaging materials, both for food and boxes. This printer uses plastic or rubber plates which are fed onto a belt, which then goes into an impression cylinder. This impression cylinder, as the name implies, makes an impression of the image. Flexography usually has lower quality, but has versatility in what it can print on.

Photocopier

Xerographic office photocopying was introduced by Xerox in the 1960s, and over the following 20 years it gradually replaced copies made by Verifax, Photostat, carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and other duplicating machines. The prevalence of its use is one of the factors that prevented the development of the paperless office heralded early in the digital revolution.

Thermal printer

A thermal printer (or direct thermal printer) produces a printed image by selectively heating coated thermochromic paper, or thermal paper as it is commonly known, when the paper passes over the thermal print head. The coating turns black in the areas where it is heated, producing an image.

Laser printer (1969)

The laser printer, based on a modified xerographic copier, was invented at Xerox in 1969 by researcher Gary Stark weather, who had a fully functional networked printer system working by 1971.