Printing history
Valery Shtolyakov, Moscow State University named after. Ivan Fedorov
The history of the mind knows two main eras:
invention of letters and typography,
all others were its consequences.
N.M. Karamzin
The invention of printing presses and the subsequent invention of typesetting and bookbinding equipment should be considered in close connection with the development of printing, which, along with the advent of writing, became one of the greatest progressive landmark events in the history of world culture.
The first identical (circulation) prints appeared in 8th century AD in the East. For this purpose, a technique was developed for engraving text on wood - woodcut ( from Greek xylon - felled tree and grapho - writing). To implement this method, manual operations and simple tools were used, and therefore it was labor-intensive and unproductive.
868 is significant in that in that year the Diamond Sutra, the oldest example of woodblock printing, was printed (kept in the British Museum). The scroll consists of seven successively glued sheets approximately 30-32 cm wide; The length of the entire scroll when unfolded is more than 5 m. Several hundred hand-engraved boards were required to produce this scroll.
The development of printing equipment began in the mid-15th century with the invention of 1440 Johann Guttenberg created a manual printing press, which made it possible to mechanize the main technological process - printing. If before this books in Europe were produced by woodcut and were very rare, then with the invention of Gutenberg, starting from the first half of the 15th century, they began to be printed using the printing method (Fig. 1). Despite the simplicity manual operations, Gutenberg’s printing press laid down the basic design principles of the future printing apparatus, which have been successfully implemented in modern printing machines. The design of the first printing press turned out to be so successful that it existed without fundamental technical changes for about 350 years.
The invention of the printing press contributed to the development of printing technology, which does not stop to this day, constantly being updated with new technical solutions. Using the example of improving printing production, all stages of the transformation of the simplest tools and mechanisms into automatic printing machines are clearly traced.
This publication provides a chronology of the appearance of some original inventions and technologies, which allows us to assess the pace of development and improvement of printing equipment.
1796- Alois Senefelder, having seen the clear rusty imprint of a razor on a garden stone, invents, based on the principle of analogy, new way flat printing - lithography ( from Greek lithos - stone and grapho - writing), which was first implemented in a manual lithographic printing press of a roller design. As a form, A. Senefelder used a limestone on which an image was applied with ink, after which the surface of the stone was treated with an acid solution to form gap elements in areas of the stone not protected by ink. A year later, A. Zenefelder invents a ribbed printing press for producing an impression from a lithographic stone (Fig. 2).
1811— F. Koenig patented a printing apparatus, which used the idea of transmitting pressure along a line (according to the “plane-cylinder” principle), implemented in a flat-bed printing machine, where the form was placed on a movable table - a thaler, and a sheet of paper was moved to the form by a rotating printing cylinder with grips. In the period from 1811 to 1818, F. Koenig and his companion A. Bauer created and launched four types of flat-panel printing machines without a prototype.
1817— Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Bauer founded the flat-bed printing machine factory Schnellpressenfabrik Koenig & Bauer in the Oberzell monastery (Würzburg), 25 years ahead of their competitors in the field of industrial production of printing equipment.
1822- English scientist William Congreve developed a technology for multi-level relief stamping (convex-concave) of an image without paint on cardboard under the force of a heated punch and matrix - the so-called embossing (embossing), which has become an effective design technique printed publications.
1829- Lyon typesetter Claude Genoud developed a method for making stereotypical matrices from paper, using which it was possible to cast several monolithic copies (stereotypes) of the original letterpress form.
1833- English printer D. Kitchen invented a simple and cheap printing machine designed for small-format, short-run and single-color products. Having implemented F. Koenig's idea of changing the position of the piano and the form, he moved them to a vertical position. The swinging pian (pressure plate) was driven lever mechanism, so it soon became known as a crucible (hence the name of the machine). Since the middle of the 19th century, crucible machines of various designs were actively produced, which, due to their mass production in the USA, were called “American machines”. Due to the versatility of platen printing machines, their small dimensions, light weight, low cost and ease of maintenance, they are very economical and still work in printing houses.
1838- Academician B.S. Jacobi (St. Petersburg) developed a technology of electroplating that makes it possible to produce exact metal copies from original engraving forms.
1839- the invention of photography, which is associated with the names of Zh.N. Niepsa, L.G. Daguerra and V.G. Talbot.
1840- the London company Perkins, Bacon and Petch printed the first postage stamp, which was called the “Penny Black”. It was absolutely the new kind printing products - stamps printed on a metallographic machine.
The beginning of the 19th century is characterized by sociologists as the emergence and development of an industrial society, which is characterized by a high level of industrial production and active use natural resources. During this period, there was a rapid development of the printing industry, making extensive use of the achievements of science and technology. Confidence in the paper medium of information is increasing, which is facilitated by the beginning of mass production of newspapers, books and magazines.
1847— A. Appleget (England) creates a multi-platform sheet-fed printing machine, in which eight printing cylinders with a diameter of 0.33 m were located around a vertical plate cylinder with a diameter of 1.63 m. Printing forms made from ordinary rectangular letters were attached to them. The feeding and ejection of the sheet from the printing cylinders was carried out by a complex ribbon system. The machine was a bulky multi-tiered structure, which was served by eight handlers and eight receivers (Fig. 3). She worked for 14 years and printed up to 12 thousand notes per hour by hand, which was considered high productivity at that time. Due to their large overall dimensions, multi-platform printing machines were called “mammoth machines”. However, since 1870, due to large sizes and the large number of operating crews, these printing machines were forced out of newspaper production by more efficient and economical web presses.
1849- Danish inventor Christian Sørensen patented a “tacheotype”, which is a variant of a typesetting machine capable of mechanizing a whole range of manual typing operations.
1849- American inventor E. Smith designed a folding knife machine.
1850- French inventor Firmin Gillot patented a method for making illustration printing plates using chemical etching on zinc.
1852— the inventor R. Hartmann in Germany made the first attempt to mechanize the process of cutting a stack of sheets.
1853- the invention by the American John L. Kingsley of rubber elastic forms, the basis of which was natural rubber, was a prerequisite for the emergence of a new printing method - flexography, which became a type of letterpress printing. It is characterized by the use of an elastic elastic form and quick-drying liquid paints. Initially, this printing method used aniline synthetic dyes, hence the term “aniline printing” (die Anilindruck) or “aniline rubber printing” (die Anilin-Gummidruck).
1856— D. Smith (USA) received a patent for a thread sewing machine.
1857- Robert Gattersley, an engineer from Manchester, patented a typesetting machine.
1859— in Germany, K. Krause created the first paper-cutting machine with an inclined movement of the knife, where he was the first to use automatically acting foot pressure from a load (Fig. 4).
1861- English physicist James Clerk Maxwell was the first to reproduce a color image using photographic methods.
1865— William Bullack from Philadelphia created the first roll-fed printing press, which had two cylinders: a printing cylinder and a plate cylinder, on which the stereotype was attached. Before being fed into the printing machine, the roll paper was cut according to format and sealed, after which it was removed with ribbons for acceptance. The idea of creating a machine for printing on paper tape, the manufacturing method of which was mastered at the beginning of the 19th century, occupied the minds of inventors. However, these ideas were realized only after the industrial production of round stereotypes - cast letterpress forms - began in the 1850s.
1867— P.P. Knyagininsky patented an automatic typesetting machine (automatic typesetter) in England, technical solutions which were largely repeated by the inventor of the monotype T. Lanston (Fig. 5).
1868— a phototype method was invented, providing raster-free production of flat-panel printing forms.
1873— Hugo and August Bremer (Germany) invented a method of sewing notebooks with wire.
1875— Thomas Alva Edison patented the mimeograph, which is a printing device for producing simple, short-run products using screen printing. Following this, he designed an “electric pen”, which was moved by a miniature motor and pierced the paraffin paper in the right places, which served as a form for a mimeograph machine. Edison also formulated a paint with the required degree of viscosity to penetrate through holes punched in paper.
1876— rotating rods were invented to control the direction of movement of paper ribbons in a roll-to-roll printing machine.
1876— Hugo and August Bremer made a wire sewing machine (a prototype of a four-part wire sewing machine), which sewed notebooks with four staples in one connector.
1883— American L.K. Crowell invented the folding funnel for longitudinally bending sheets or tape while the machine was running, which made it possible to equip web printing presses with folding devices. These inventions paved the way for the creation of roll-fed printing machines designed for printing multi-page publications, since thanks to the funnel it was possible to double the width of the ribbons, and the presence of rods made it possible to select them for joint processing.
1880— the basics of offset printing technology have been developed.
1886— Ottmar Mergenthaler designed the Linotype, a type-setting line casting machine.
1890— I.I. Orlov invented a method of multicolor letterpress printing, implemented on a printing machine for the production of securities. The method he invented for forming a multi-color raw image on a prefabricated form and then transferring it to paper, called the “Oryol seal,” made it possible to protect securities from fake. In Fig. Figure 6 shows a diagram of the printing apparatus designed by I.I. Orlov.
Rice. 6. Diagram of the printing apparatus of the “Oryol press” (a): 1, 2, 3, 4 - printing forms, 5 - assembled printing form, 11, 21, 31, 41, - elastic rollers; implementation of the Oryol effect with intaglio printing in a security stamp (old style)
for alcoholic products (produced by FSUE Goznak) - b
Before this, they tried to protect securities by manufacturing complex shapes on special guilloche machines, obtained by mechanical engraving of various geometric patterns and figures with variable step frequencies and different stroke thicknesses. However, this did not protect the banknotes from counterfeiting, and only applying a rich colored “rainbow” pattern to the paper using the “Orlov seal” method could protect them to some extent.
1893- invention of I.I. Orlova was awarded the Grand Prix at an industrial exhibition in Paris and is protected by patents from Russia, Germany and Great Britain. However, I. Orlov’s machines did not receive worthy support in Russia - they began to be manufactured in a slightly modified form in Germany at the KVA company. Currently, the KVA-Giori company has developed special printing equipment that uses some of the principles of the Oryol printing method. On these special purpose vehicles different countries We print more than 90% of the world's banknotes and documents with a high degree of security.
1890s— the need for the production of large-scale printed publications is increasing, so the circulation and volume of newspapers is noticeably increasing, and publishing is turning into one of the largest industries. As a result, roll letterpress presses appeared to produce first 8- and 16-, and then 32-page newspapers.
1893— Gustav Kleim (Germany) designs the first automatic folding machine equipped with a mechanical sheet feeder.
1894-1895— schematic diagrams of the first phototypesetting machines were developed.
1895- American inventor Sheridan built the first machine for gluing book blocks with preliminary milling of the spine and manual feeding of blocks in the form of a closed conveyor with carriages.
1896— Tolbert Lanston designed a monotype type-setting typesetting machine.
1896- in England, later in the USA and Germany, the use of roll-to-roll gravure printing machines was mastered, and in 1920 the production of 4- and 6-section machines for multicolor printing began. Due to the long drying time of the turpentine paints used at that time, the belt speed in the first machines did not exceed 0.5 m/s. Subsequently, thanks to the improvement of drying devices and the use of inks based on volatile solvents, the operating speed of the machines increased to 30 thousand revolutions of the plate cylinder per hour.
1897- The Harris company built a two-color planetary-type letterpress printing machine, where two plates were placed around the printing cylinder.
At the end of the 19th century, the companies Heidelberg and Mann Roland were created, which over time became leading manufacturers of printing equipment.
1905— a feeder was invented, which made it possible to increase the productivity of sheet-fed printing machines to 5 thousand letters per hour.
1906-1907— the first designs of offset printing machines were developed, the creation of which is associated with the names of lithographers K. Hermann and A. Rubel. Probably at the same time, concepts such as offset ( English. offset) and offset printing.
1907- thanks to the experience in operating single-color lithographic machines and the successful use of the “Oryol printing” method, the German company “Fohmag”, under the patent of K. Hermann, built a sheet-fed offset machine for double-sided printing, which allows printing a sheet on both sides in one run.
1907— attempts are being made to use it in printing production telegraph communication for transmitting text over long distances.
1912- a new stage in the development of flexography began thanks to the development of the Parisian company S.A. la Cellophane" production of cellophane bags, which were printed with aniline paints. The scope of flexography is gradually expanding, which is facilitated by certain advantages of this printing method over classical ones.
1922- Englishman E. Hunter developed the design of a phototypesetting machine, which consisted of a typesetting and perforating mechanism, a counting and switching device and a photoreproduction apparatus. Due to some of its similarities with the monotype, experts called it “Monophoto”.
1923- German engineer G. Spiess created a cassette folding machine.
1929- in Munich, the famous German inventor Rudolf Hell, who created the transmitting television tube, founded the Hell company.
1929-1930— American engineer Walter Gaway designed a photoelectric engraving machine.
1935- German researcher G. Neugebauer and our compatriot N.D. Nuremberg outlined scientific theory basics of multicolor printing.
1936— in the USSR, the technology of printing illustrations with a stereoscopic effect was introduced into production.
1938— Emil Lumbek invented a new method of seamless fastening along the spine of a book block, which used quick-setting polyvinyl acetate dispersion (PVAD), developed in 1936 in Germany.
1938- American inventor Chester Carlson and German physicist Otto Korney developed a method for making prints using the electrophotographic method, which marked the beginning of the birth of electrophotographic printing devices for quickly obtaining both black and white and color copies from the original placed on a glass slide (Fig. 7).
1938- a three-color image was transmitted from Chicago to New York via phototelegraph communication.
1947-1948- Soviet engineer N.P. Tolmachev designed an electronic engraving machine with a change in the scale of cutting clichés.
1950-1952— in the USSR, the theoretical foundations for creating an automatic printing house equipped with a high-performance printing and finishing line for the production of books were developed.
1951- Hell company began the first work on the creation of electronic engraving machines for making clichés.
1951- a patent was issued in the USA for an inkjet head, which was actually the first digital printing device. This invention was the beginning of a fundamentally new direction in operational printing - inkjet printing.
1960s— Magnetographic printing machines are being actively developed in the USSR, to which interest has now revived abroad. The principle of their operation is similar to the operation of electrophotographic machines.
1963- Hell released the first electronic color separation machine, ChromaGgraph, the use of which for the production of color separated photo plates significantly reduced the technological process of obtaining plates for color printing.
1965- Hell, being the founder of electronic phototypesetting, produces a series of Digiset phototypesetting machines, in which the outlines of fonts and illustrations are reproduced on the screen of a cathode ray tube.
1968— a method of printing from holographic forms has been patented in the USA.
Late 1960s- The American company Cameron Machine Co. has developed a design for a printing and finishing unit for producing pocket-sized books in one run.
1966— the world’s longest phototelegraph line for newspaper transmission from Moscow to Novosibirsk, Irkutsk and Khabarovsk came into operation.
Mid-20th century characterized by the beginning of the development of post-industrial society, when science becomes the main productive force. The structure of economic relations is changing, as a result of which intellectual capital (stocks of knowledge and skills), which is more often called human capital, becomes the main source of national wealth. The role of innovative processes (innovations) is becoming more active, without which today it is impossible to create products with a high degree of knowledge intensity and novelty. Innovation is the result of human creative activity, ensuring the achievement of high economic efficiency in the production or consumption of products. Product renewal times in the most dynamic areas are reduced to two to three years. The importance of information increases significantly, a new community of people emerges - a netocracy, whose members own information, the Internet, information networks: for them, the main thing is information, not money. Digital technologies for converting information are actively beginning to develop, which has determined significant revolutionary changes in the printing industry.
The World Wide Web (Internet) and others are developing Information Systems. At the same time, there is a danger of increasing the risk of leakage of socio-economic, scientific, technical, educational and other information, since a reliable legal barrier for this still does not exist. Road information A in production, but the costs of its distribution and reproduction are minimal, which gives rise to new problems with the advent of the Internet for the creators and copyright holders of intellectual property.
In printing, the period of transition to a post-industrial society can be conditionally linked to 1970s, when varieties of desktop publishing systems are developed and put into operation, in which the principle of converting graphic information into digital form was laid down. This made it possible to quickly process it at the stage of pre-press processes and print it in the form of single single-color copies. This is where the name “desktop printing” came from, as such systems could produce short runs of sheet-fed printed products. The quality of printing was determined by the technical capabilities of the printing devices used in desktop publishing systems. The advantage of such systems is manifested in the ability to quickly combine the shaping process with the printing of any graphical information entered digitally, excluding traditional photochemical operations. This technology is called computer-to-print - “from a computer to a printing device.”
1970s— experimental models of laser engraving machines have been developed.
1971— in the First Exemplary Printing House (Moscow) the “Book” line came into operation - the first domestic automatic line for the production of hardcover books.
1976- Linotrone AG ceased production of type-setting line casting machines, which had been going on for almost 90 years.
1977— The Leningrad Printing Machines Plant has released an industrial series of the Cascade phototypesetting complex, designed for organizing the typesetting process in printing houses of any profile.
1980s— for operational printing, the Riso Kadaku Corporation (Japan) has developed a series of digital screen printing machines - risographs, or digital duplicators. In these machines, the processes of preparing the working matrix (screen form) and the start of printing are practically combined, which makes it possible to obtain the first print with a resolution of up to 16 dots/mm 20 s after placing the original on the glass slide.
1980s- the beginning of production by the Japanese company Canon of a series of color copiers of various models.
1991— Heidelberg specialists demonstrated at the Print-91 exhibition (Chicago) a four-section offset printing machine GTOV DI, built on the basis of the serial GTO machine. If previously information from a computer was printed only on a printer, now it can be replicated on an offset printing machine. The abbreviation DI in the designation of the GTO production car is translated from English as “direct exposure”. This technology allows you to quickly create a color-separated printing form in each section based on digital data from the prepress stage for offset printing without dampening. The demonstration of the GTOV DI at the exhibition in Chicago was a great success, and the Heidelberg exposition received the Grand Prix. For the first time, the company demonstrated an offset printing machine operating on the computer-to-press principle. The developers of the GTOV DI printing machine managed to combine the efficiency of a computer with the high quality of offset printing. It was a breakthrough into the field of new digital technologies, which significantly supplemented the known printing methods with new capabilities.
1993— the Indigo company (Israel) launched the E-Print digital printing machine, for which an original printing process technology was developed that combines the principles of electrophotography and offset printing.
1996- Canadian company Elcorsy Technology at the NEXPO exhibition in Las Vegas demonstrated a new digital technology for forming colorful images - elcography based on electrochemical process— electrocoagulation, as a result of which a colorful image is formed on a metal cylinder when paint (a hydrophilic polymer) is applied to it. A feature and advantage of elcography is the ability to selectively transfer layers of paint of different thicknesses to areas of the print, that is, to adjust the optical density over a wide range.
1997— NUR Macroprinters (Israel) produces a Blueboard digital inkjet printer, which allows you to print a 4-color image 5 m wide with a productivity of 30 m2/h.
2000— testing of technological principles of work flow (WorkFlow), which ensures the organization of end-to-end digital control of the production process in the form of a clearly structured chain of all technological operations (route of work) for their continuous implementation.
2008— at the drupa 2008 exhibition, the organic electronics association Organic Electronic Association OE A demonstrated its achievements in the development of high technologies, taking into account the use of printing equipment. Thanks to this, in the near future a new direction in printing will be developed - the so-called printed electronics.
According to experts, the development of printing equipment and technologies designed to serve the needs of society in the near future will be focused on converting, combining traditional printing equipment with digital printing machines and technologies. Such a combination makes it possible to quickly replicate multicolor products with both variable and constant data at a sufficiently high printing level. Considering the emerging trend of world society abandoning printed books and printed products in general (according to a survey of readers), there is an active introduction of digital technologies for the production of printed products in electronic format, which was demonstrated at the drupa 2012 exhibition.
When working on books, the masters of the Rare Book from St. Petersburg Publishing House use antique printing equipment. The texts are printed on an antique manual all-metal printing press from the 19th century “Dinglersche maschinen”, manufactured by Dingler, Zweibrücken. This machine is the crown of inventive innovations of German masters of the late 19th century, part of which are the developments of Johann Godfried Dingler (1778-1855) and his son Emil Maximilian Dingler (1806-1874).
Having arrived in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, this machine traveled a century-long journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg, but did not lose its technical qualities, and today book masterpieces are born on it.
And no matter how technological progress develops, the manual machine will never lose its importance. It is not assigned the role of a museum exhibit. IN in capable hands Masters of the Publishing House, prints full of grace and richness are made on the machine, thereby continuing the tradition of creating hand-made books.
Starting with Gutenberg and up until the beginning of the 19th century, printing houses worked exclusively on hand presses, not much different from the press of the inventor of printing and his immediate successors.
Reconstruction of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press. Gutenberg Museum Mainz:
Printing press device:
1. Press frame.
2. Frame with a ready-made set.
3. Press screw.
4. Cook - handle of the press. The kuka lever handle is part of the crank lever system, with the help of which the piano is raised and lowered.
5. Pian - a smooth board that is located above the typesetting frame. Pian is a movable part of the printing press that serves to imprint the type onto a printed sheet. It is driven by a system of crank arms that help to smoothly lower and raise the piano, as well as regulate the pressure on the print.
6. Thaler - retractable board - a moving part of a manual printing press. Designed for placing and feeding typographic set with deckle and racket into the printing area. The thaler is a massive cast plate with a smooth surface processed after casting for laying the set. The thaler moves freely along the frame runners with the help of bushings and guides located on the “lower” surface of the plane. Attached to the thaler on hinges are: - a deckle - a narrow frame covered with dense material, and a rashket, or mask - a sheet of parchment with “windows” cut into it, corresponding to the size of the typesetting stripes. The purpose of the rashket is to protect the paper from covering the margins with paint.
7. The lower frame of the press along which the thaler moves.
8. Handle for extending the thaler.
The main part of the printing press is a press with a lever, under which there is a smooth flat table - thaler.
The thaler is designed so that it can be pulled out from under the press.
To prevent the paper from slipping off the type when printing, a special device is used - a deckle (a frame into which the sheet for printing is placed, covered with thick fabric). It is attached to the front of the thaler on hinges. A sheet of paper is placed on the deckle.
On top, the sheet is covered with a frame - a rashket (a narrow frame covering the margins of the sheet with thick paper glued to it, where slots are made - windows corresponding to the size of the typesetting strips installed on the taler), attached to the deckle on hinges. The purpose of the rashket is to protect the paper from being smeared with paint. Thanks to the rashket, the paint is printed only on those places of the paper that correspond to the slots.
The printer rolls the typesetting strips with special printing ink using a hand roller or leather matz.
The deckle is covered with a rashket and the whole thing is lowered onto the thaler.
By turning the side handle, the printer pushes the thaler under the press. By pulling the kuku toward him for a few seconds, the printer forces the pian to lower by pressing and pressing evenly on the thaler. In this case, the paper sheet lying on the deckle is pressed tightly against the typesetting stripes and receives the imprint of the letters.
Next, the pian is raised, the thaler is removed from under it, the deckle is folded back, the racket is raised, and the stamped sheet is removed from the deckle. The first printed page is ready! In order to get a better print, the paper is sometimes slightly moistened with water. Then the finished sheets are dried on a rope. Printed sheets are lined with thin paper as they are produced to prevent fresh prints from getting dirty.
Then printing proceeds in the same order: the typesetting strips are again rolled with ink, the printer again takes Blank sheet paper, puts it on the deckle, lowers the racket; the deckle is lowered onto the set, the thaler is brought under the piano, the cup is pressed... And the same manipulations are repeated until all the necessary sheets are printed. The sheets then go to the bookbinder.
Printing equipment and tools:
How did the first printing press work?
Separate printed characters, letters, were attached to hard metal in a mirror image. The typesetter put them into words and sentences until the page was ready. Printing ink was applied to these symbols. Using a lever, the page was pressed firmly against the paper placed underneath it. On the printed page, the letters appeared in the correct order. After printing, the letters were folded in a certain order and stored in the typesetting desk. This way the typesetter could quickly find them again. Today, a book is usually designed on a computer: the text is typed and sent directly from the computer to print.
Why was the invention of printing important? 
Thanks to new printing methods, it was possible to print a lot of texts in a short time, so suddenly many people had access to books. They were able to learn to read and develop spiritually. Church leaders no longer determined who could gain access to knowledge. Opinions were disseminated through books, newspapers or leaflets. And they were discussed. This freedom of thought was completely new for those times. Many rulers were afraid of her and ordered books to be burned. And even today this happens with some dictators: they arrest writers and journalists and ban their books.
All books printed before January 1, 1501 are called INCUNABULA. This word is translated as “cradle,” that is, the infancy of book printing.
Few incunabula have survived to this day. They are preserved in museums and largest libraries in the world. The incunabula are beautiful, their fonts are elegant and clear, the text and illustrations are placed on the pages very harmoniously. Their example shows that the book is a work of art. One of the largest collections of incunabula in the world, about 6 thousand books, is stored in the Russian National Library in the city St. Petersburg. The collection is located in a special room, the so-called “Faust’s office,” recreating the atmosphere of a Western European monastery library of the 15th century.
Did you know that...
In ancient Rus' did they write on birch bark? This is the name of the outer part of the birch bark, consisting of thin translucent layers that are easily separated from each other. The first typewriter was made in the USA in 1867? Is the number of books published around the world growing every year? True, this only applies to developed countries.
Check yourself.
1. In Germany, in the city of Strasbourg, in the central square there is a monument to Johannes Gutenberg. For what services did grateful descendants perpetuate the memory of this German master?2. Why are printed books from the 15th century called incunabula? 3. What new elements appeared in printed books in the 15th century?4. Explain the meaning of the following concepts using reference books. The Bolshoi will help you encyclopedic Dictionary(any edition) letter typesetting (typesetting) font typography engraving red line
Watch a cartoon about Johannes Guttenberg:
Http://video.mail.ru/mail/glazunova-l/4260/4336.html
farta.livejournal.com
Who invented typography - When was it invented?
According to UNESCO, today about 4 billion inhabitants of our planet are literate, that is, able to read and write at least one language. On average, one reader “swallows” about 20 pages of printed text per day. It is impossible to imagine modern society without books, and yet for most of its history, humanity managed without them.
However, the amount of knowledge accumulated by people became larger and larger every year and decade. In order to transmit information to future generations, it was necessary to record it on a reliable medium. As such a carrier in different time different materials were used. Rock inscriptions, baked clay tablets of Babylon, Egyptian papyri, Greek wax tablets, handwritten codices on parchment and paper were all the predecessors of printed books.
Printing (from the Greek polys “many” and grapho “I write”) is the reproduction of text or drawing by repeatedly transferring paint to paper from a finished printing plate. Modern meaning This term implies the industrial reproduction of printed products, not only books, but also newspapers and magazines, business, and packaging. However, in the Middle Ages, people needed books. The work of a copyist took a lot of time (for example, one copy of the Gospel in Rus' was copied in about six months). For this reason, books were very expensive; they were purchased mainly by rich people, monasteries and universities. Therefore, like any other labor-intensive process, the creation of books sooner or later had to be mechanized.
Woodcut board. Tibet. XVII-XVIII centuries
C. Mills. Young Benjamin Franklin masters printing. 1914
Of course, book printing did not arise out of nowhere; its inventors used many technological solutions that already existed by that time. Carved signet stamps, which allow one to imprint relief designs on a soft material (clay, wax, etc.), have been used by people since ancient times. For example, the signets of the Mohenjo-Daro civilization date back to the 3rd millennium BC. e. In Babylon and Assyria, cylinder signets were used and rolled over the surface.
Another component of book printing, the process of ink transfer, has also been known to mankind for a long time. First, the technology of printing patterns on fabric arose: a pattern cut out on a smoothly planed wooden plate was covered with paint, and then pressed onto a tightly stretched piece of fabric. This technology was used back in Ancient Egypt.
Traditionally, China is considered the birthplace of printing, although the oldest printed texts discovered in China, Japan and Korea date back to approximately the same time in the mid-8th century. The technology for their production differed from modern ones and used the principle of woodcut (from the Greek xylon “wood”). The original text or drawing, made in ink on paper, was ground onto the smooth surface of the board. The engraver cut wood around the strokes of the resulting mirror image. The form was then covered with paint, which only applied to the protruding parts, pressed tightly onto a sheet of paper, and a straight image remained on it. However, this method was used to print mainly engravings and small texts. The first accurately dated major printed text is a Chinese woodcut copy of the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, published in 868.
Real book printing began in China only in the middle of the 11th century, when the blacksmith Bi Sheng invented and put into practice movable type. As the Chinese statesman Shen Ko wrote in his treatise “Notes on the Stream of Dreams,” Bi Sheng carved signs on soft clay and burned them on fire, with each hieroglyph forming a separate seal. An iron board covered with a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash, with a frame to separate the lines, was filled with seals arranged in a row. After the process was completed, the board was heated, and the letters themselves fell out of the frame, ready for new use. Bi Sheng's clay type was soon replaced by wooden and then metal types; the principle of printing from typesetting turned out to be very fruitful.
"Diamond Sutra" 868
In Europe, the woodblock printing method was mastered in the 13th century. As in China, at first they used it to print mainly engravings and small texts, then they also mastered books, in which, however, there were more drawings than text. A striking example of such a publication were the so-called Biblia pauperum (“Poor Man’s Bibles”), anthologies of biblical texts illustrated in the manner of modern comics. Thus, in Europe XIII-XV centuries. Two types of book production coexisted: parchment manuscripts for religious and university literature and paper woodcuts for the poorly educated common people.
In 1450, the German jeweler Johannes Gutenberg entered into an agreement with the moneylender Fust to obtain a loan to organize a printing house. The printing press he invented combined two already known principles: typesetting and printing. The engraver made a punch (a metal block with a mirror image of letters on the end), the punch pressed out a matrix into a soft metal plate, and any required number of letters was cast from the matrices inserted into a special mold. Gutenberg's fonts contained a very large number (up to 300) of different characters, such an abundance was necessary in order to imitate the appearance of a handwritten book.
Johannes Gutenberg examines the first printing press. 19th century engraving
Typesetting cash register with letters.
The printing press was a manual press, similar to a wine press, which connected two horizontal planes using a pressure screw: a typesetting board with letters was placed on one, and a slightly moistened sheet of paper was pressed against the other. The letters were covered with printing ink made from a mixture of soot and linseed oil. The design of the machine turned out to be so successful that it remained virtually unchanged for three centuries.
In six years, Gutenberg, working almost without assistants, cast no less than five different types, printed the Latin grammar of Aelius Donatus, several papal indulgences and two versions of the Bible. Wanting to defer loan payments until the enterprise began to generate income, Gutenberg refused to pay interest to Fust. The moneylender sued, by court decision the printing house was transferred to him, and Gutenberg was forced to start the business from scratch. However, it was the trial protocol, discovered at the end of the 19th century, that put an end to the question of the authorship of the invention of the printing press; before that, its creation was attributed to the German Mentelin, the Italian Castaldi and even Fust.
Official story Book printing in Rus' began in 1553, when the first state printing house was opened in Moscow by order of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. During the 1550s it published a number of "anonymous" (non-imprinted) books. Historians suggest that deacon Ivan Fedorov, known as the Russian pioneer printer, worked in the printing house from the very beginning. First printed book, in which the name of Fedorov and Peter Mstislavets, who helped him, is indicated, became the Apostle, work on which was carried out, as indicated in the afterword, from April 1563 to March 1564. The following year, his second book, The Book of Hours, was published in Fedorov’s printing house.
Gutenberg's printing press.
By the middle of the 18th century. There was a need not only for more books, but also for the rapid production of newspapers and magazines in large circulations. A manual printing press could not satisfy these requirements. The printing machine invented by Friedrich König helped radically improve the printing process. Initially, in a design known as the "Zul press", only the process of applying ink to the printing plate was mechanized. In 1810 Koenig replaced the flat pressure plate with a rotating cylinder, this was decisive step on the way to creating a high-speed printing machine. Six years later, a double-sided printing machine was created.
Although the flatbed printing press was a truly revolutionary invention, it still had serious disadvantages. Its printing form performed reciprocating movements, significantly complicating the mechanism, while reverse stroke was single. In 1848, Richard Howe and Augustus Applegate successfully applied the rotary (i.e., based on the rotation of the device) principle for printing needs, which was successfully used for printing designs on fabric. The most difficult thing was to secure the printing form on the cylindrical drum so that the letters did not fall out when it rotated. The first rotary press installed in the printing house of the Times newspaper could make up to 10 thousand impressions per hour.
Improvements in the printing process continued throughout the 20th century. Already in its first decade, first two-color and then multi-color rotary machines appeared. In 1914, the production of machines for intaglio printing was mastered (their printing elements are recessed in relation to the whitespace), and six years later for flat or offset printing (the printing and whitespace elements are located in the same plane and differ physical and chemical properties, while the ink lingers only on those printing). Nowadays, all printing operations are automated and controlled using computers. There has long been no shortage of printed paper books, but now they are competing with electronic books.
With the invention of offset printing, the printing cycle accelerated significantly.
28.01.2018
altpp.ru
Typography
The first books were copied by hand, which was a very labor-intensive process and took a lot of time. Printed books first appeared in the 9th century. Ancient China. Books were printed from printing boards. First, a drawing or text was applied to a rectangular board made of hardwood. Then, using a sharp knife, they cut deep into the areas that were not to be printed. A convex image was created on the board, which was covered with paint. The paint was made from soot mixed with drying oil. A sheet of paper was pressed against a board covered with paint, resulting in a print - an engraving. Then the board was re-painted and a new print was made. By the way, according to the information that has reached us, already in the 11th century in China, the blacksmith Bi-Sheng invented a method of setting printed text using clay movable type. For this purpose, he made letters or drawings from clay and fired them.
In Korea, the process of printing from typesetters was significantly improved and in the 13th century bronze types began to be used instead of clay ones. Books printed in Korea in the 15th century using bronze type have survived to this day. Later, printing from typefaces spread to Japan and Central Asia.
In the mid-14th - early 15th centuries in Western Europe there was a rapid transition from crafts to manufacturing, and the foundations of world trade were successfully laid and developed. Printing is rapidly beginning to replace the handwritten method of publishing books. In Europe, as in Ancient China, the first books were printed from boards on which text and drawings were cut out. The books printed in this way were small in volume. The first printed books that were very popular were: “The Bible of the Poor,” “The Mirror of Human Salvation,” “The Life and Passion of Christ.” Small textbooks on grammar, Latin grammar and others were also in great demand. Playing cards, cheap paintings, and calendars were printed this way. At first they printed only on one side of the sheet, but over time they began to print on both sides. Inexpensive books became increasingly popular over time and were in great demand.
However, board printing is a long and labor-intensive process. It cannot fully satisfy the needs of society, the board is used to print one specific book, this method becomes economically unprofitable. It is being replaced by a method of printing using movable letters that can be used long years for a set of completely different books. Printing with movable type was invented in Europe by the German Johannes Gutenberg. Coming from an old noble family of Gonzfleisch, in 1420 he left hometown Mainz took up the craft, taking his mother's surname - Gutenberg. Johann Gutenberg used forms for printing that were assembled from individual typesetting metal types.
To make letters, Gutenberg invented a special alloy of lead, tin and antimony. The alloy was poured into a soft metal matrix, in which 
letter-shaped indentations were pressed out. After the alloy cooled, the type letters were removed from the matrix and stored in typesetting boxes. Now the form for any page could be assembled within a few minutes from the cast type stored in the typesetting desks. Gutenberg invented waterproof ink. But Gutenberg's main achievement was the invention of a method for creating flexible, quickly and easily assembled, universal printing forms. The conventional date for printing books in Europe in this way is 1440. The first books were calendars and Donatus's grammar. In 1455, Gutenberg published the first printed Bible, which had 1,286 pages.
Gutenberg's printing technology remained virtually unchanged until the end of the 18th century. The manual printing press was invented for printing. It was a hand press in which two horizontal planes were connected to each other. Typeface was placed on one plane, and paper was attached to the other plane. Printing in this way quickly spread throughout Europe, and printing houses appeared in different cities. From 1440 to 1500, more than 30 thousand different book titles were published.
mirnovogo.ru
First Printing - Who invented it? | Inventions and discoveries
Johann Gensfleisch. nicknamed Gutenberg, was engaged, in particular, in copying books. During this activity, he came across so-called woodcut books. They were made like this: a mirror image was cut out on a wooden board, then paint was applied to the relief and a sheet of paper was carefully pressed onto it. It occurred to Gutenberg that it would be much more rational to work with movable letters. Already in 1447 he published his first book.
Modern life cannot be imagined without the invention that was given to the world by a simple German artisan. Printing, of which he became the founder, changed the course of world history to such an extent that it is rightfully classified as one of the greatest achievements of civilization. His merit is so great that those who, many centuries before, created the basis for the future discovery are undeservedly forgotten.
Print from a wooden board
The history of book printing originates in China, where back in the 3rd century the technique of so-called piece printing came into use - imprinting on textiles, and later on paper, of various designs and short texts, carved on a wooden board. This method was called woodblock printing and quickly spread from China throughout East Asia.
It should be noted that printed engravings appeared much earlier than books. Individual samples made in the first half of the 3rd century, when China was ruled by representatives of the same period, have survived to this day. The technique of three-color printing on silk and paper also appeared.
The first woodcut book
Researchers date the creation of the first printed book to 868 - this is the date on the earliest edition, made using the woodcut technique. It appeared in China and was a collection of religious and philosophical texts entitled “The Diamond Sutra”. During excavations at the Gyeongji Temple in Korea, a sample of a printed item was found that was made almost a century earlier, but due to some features, it belongs more likely to the category of amulets than books.
In the Middle East, piece printing, that is, as mentioned above, made from a board on which text or a drawing was cut out, came into use in the middle of the 4th century. Woodcut printing, called “tarsh” in Arabic, became widespread in Egypt and reached its peak by the beginning of the 10th century.
This method was used mainly for printing prayer texts and making written amulets. A characteristic feature of Egyptian woodcuts is the use of not only wooden boards for prints, but also those made of tin, lead and baked clay.
The emergence of movable type
However, no matter how the piece printing technology improved, its main drawback was the need to re-cut out all the text for each successive page. A breakthrough in this direction, thanks to which the history of printing received a significant impetus, also occurred in China.
According to the outstanding scientist and historian of past centuries Shen Ko, the Chinese master Bi Shen, who lived in the period from 990 to 1051, came up with the idea of making movable characters from baked clay and placing them in special frames. This made it possible to type a certain text from them, and after printing the required number of copies, scatter them and use them again in other combinations. This is how movable type was invented, which is used to this day.
However, this brilliant idea, which became the basis for all future book printing, did not receive proper development during that period. This is explained by the fact that there are several thousand characters in the Chinese language, and the production of such a font seemed too difficult.
Meanwhile, considering all stages of book printing, it should be recognized that it was not Europeans who first used typesetting. The only known book of religious texts that has survived to this day was made in 1377 in Korea. As the researchers established, it was printed using movable type technology.
European inventor of the first printing press
In Christian Europe, the technique of piece printing appeared around 1300. On its basis, all kinds of religious images made on fabric were produced. They were sometimes quite complex and multi-colored. About a century later, when paper became relatively affordable, Christian engravings began to be printed on it, and at the same time, playing cards. Paradoxically, the progress of printing served both holiness and vice.
However, the full history of book printing begins with the invention of the printing press. This honor belongs to the German artisan from the city of Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg, who in 1440 developed a method of repeatedly applying impressions to sheets of paper using movable type. Despite the fact that in subsequent centuries primacy in this field was attributed to other inventors, serious researchers have no reason to doubt that the emergence of book printing is associated precisely with his name.
The inventor and his investor
Gutenberg's invention consisted in the fact that he made letters from metal in their inverted (mirror) form, and then, having typed lines from them, made an impression on paper using a special press. Like most geniuses, Gutenberg had brilliant ideas, but lacked the funds to implement them.
To give life to his invention, the brilliant artisan was forced to seek help from a Mainz businessman named Johann Fust and enter into an agreement with him, by virtue of which he was obliged to finance future production, and for this he had the right to receive a certain percentage of the profits.
A companion who turned out to be a clever businessman
Despite the outward primitiveness of the technical means used and the lack of qualified assistants, the inventor of the first printing press managed to produce a number of books in a short time, the most famous of which is the famous “Gutenberg Bible,” kept in the Mainz Museum.
But the way the world works is that in one person the gift of an inventor rarely coexists with the skills of a cold-blooded businessman. Very soon, Fust took advantage of the part of the profit that was not paid to him on time and, through the court, took control of the whole business. He became the sole owner of the printing house, and this explains the fact that for a long time the creation of the first printed book was mistakenly associated with his name.
Other candidates for the role of pioneer printers
As mentioned above, many peoples Western Europe Germany challenged the honor of being considered the founders of printing. In this regard, several names are mentioned, among which the most famous are Johann Mentelin from Strasbourg, who in 1458 managed to create a printing house similar to the one that Gutenberg had, as well as Pfister from Bamberg and the Dutchman Laurens Coster.
The Italians did not stand aside either, claiming that their compatriot Pamfilio Castaldi is the inventor of movable type, and that it was he who transferred his printing house to the German businessman Johann Fust. However, no serious evidence for such a claim was presented.
The beginning of book printing in Russia
And finally, let us dwell in more detail on how the history of book printing developed in Rus'. It is well known that the first printed book of the Moscow state is “The Apostle”, made in 1564 in the printing house of Ivan Fedorov and both of them were students of the Danish master Hans Missenheim, sent by the king at the request of Tsar Ivan the Terrible. The book's afterword states that their printing house was founded in 1553.
According to researchers, the history of book printing in the Moscow state developed as a result of the urgent need to correct numerous errors that had crept into the texts of religious books that had been copied by hand for many years. Through inattention, and sometimes intentionally, the scribes introduced distortions, which became more and more frequent every year.
A church council held in Moscow in 1551, called the “Stoglavogo” (based on the number of chapters in its final resolution), issued a decree on the basis of which all handwritten books in which errors were noticed were withdrawn from use and subject to correction. However, often this practice only led to new distortions. It is quite clear that the solution to the problem could only be the widespread introduction of printed publications that would repeatedly reproduce the original text.
They were well aware of this problem abroad, and therefore, pursuing commercial interests, many European countries, in particular Holland and Germany, began printing books with the expectation of selling them among the Slavic peoples. This created favorable conditions for the subsequent creation of a number of domestic printing houses.
Russian book printing under Patriarch Job
A tangible impetus for the development of printing in Rus' was the establishment of the patriarchate in it. The first primate of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Job, who took the throne in 1589, from the first days began making efforts to provide the state with an adequate amount of spiritual literature. During his reign, the printing industry was managed by a master named Nevezha, who published fourteen different publications, in his own way. characteristic features very close to the “Apostle”, which was printed by Ivan Fedorov.
The history of book printing of a later period is associated with the names of such masters as O. I. Radishchevsky-Volyntsev and A. F. Pskovitin. Their printing house produced a lot of not only spiritual literature, but also educational books, in particular, manuals on studying grammar and mastering reading skills.
Subsequent development of printing in Russia
A sharp decline in the development of printing occurred at the beginning of the 17th century and was caused by events associated with the Polish-Lithuanian intervention and called the Time of Troubles. Some of the masters were forced to interrupt their work, and the rest died or left Russia. Mass book printing resumed only after the accession to the throne of the first sovereign from the House of Romanov, Tsar Mikhail Fedorovich.
Peter I did not remain indifferent to printing production. Having visited Amsterdam during his European voyage, he concluded an agreement with the Dutch merchant Jan Tessing, according to which he had the right to produce printed materials in Russian and bring them for sale to Arkhangelsk.
In addition, the sovereign ordered the production of a new civil font, which came into widespread use in 1708. Three years later, in St. Petersburg, which was preparing to become the capital of Russia, the largest printing house in the country was established, which later became the synodal one. From here, from the banks of the Neva, book printing spread throughout the country.
Capitalist book publishing in the 19th century was a decisive step forward in comparison with the feudal-absolutist order of the previous era. First of all, we should note the progress in the field of technical re-equipment of book printing. We are talking about the introduction of mechanical engines into the basic processes of book production. From the history of technology, the names of J. Watt, J. Stephenson, J. Fulton and many others are widely known, literally champions of the steam engine, which radically changed the entire production environment of the 19th century, and subsequently the entire way of life of mankind.
In book printing, the inventors were German emigrants - the typographer and bookseller Friedrich Koenig and the mathematician Andrei Bauer. In 1811 in London they built the world's first steam-powered printing press. It was first used in 1814 to print the Times newspaper. It is characteristic that with some improvements this machine also works in modern printing houses.
The new machine was designed by the Englishmen A. Applegate and R. Hohe in 1846 - 1848. and is called rotational. She produced 12,000 impressions per hour. Especially for this machine, they began to use paper not in cut sheets, but in the form of a continuously wound roll. These machines printed from a typesetting form, and individual characters quickly wore out, which was a significant drawback of rotary machines. In addition, they were bulky, awkward and not very easy to use. Sheet rotary machines began to be built again only at the end of the 19th century and more intensively at the beginning of the 20th century, after the automation of sheet laying was successfully completed. The appearance of sheet-fed rotary gravure and offset printing machines dates back to this time.
The first lithographic rotary machine to replace low-productivity flat-plate printing machines was built in France in 1868 by the Marinoni company, which, after the invention of the offset printing method and in connection with the expansion of the volume of printing work on sheet metal, on its basis created the first lithooffset machine, which began to be produced in the USA Only since 1904, the Americans W. Bullock in 1863 and H. Scott in 1869 proposed printing from stereotypes, which were first made of paper, and then with an increased layer of durable metal, due to which circulation stability increased.
In those same years, flat-bed printing technology was born to produce primarily illustrations - lithography. The owner of a small music printing house in Munich, Alois Senefelder, experimenting, in 1799 patented printing from the smooth surface of a porous stone, where a hand-made drawing was first applied with a special, greasy paint. A mighty impulse in further development book production was given by the invention of photography. In 1839, the Frenchman L.Zh.M. Daguerre proposed a method for obtaining photographic images, which he called daguerreotype. This method was improved by Zh.N. Niépce and was called photozincography. Photography played a special role in the development of color printing. Beginning with the time of the pioneer German printer A. Pfister (1460), prints of engravings set into types were colored by hand. Lithography (chromolithography) made it possible to create separate color-separated cliches of one image, which, as a result of their sequential embossing, give a color print.
Significant progress has also been made in typesetting technology. The first patent for a typesetting machine was received by the Englishman W. Church back in 1822. Inventions took place in the field of mechanized type foundry production, and typesetting mechanisms were improved in different countries.
In 1897, the American inventor T. Latsen proposed a more advanced monotype typesetting machine, which is now used in conjunction with computer technology.
IN last years In the 19th century, offset rotary printing was invented. “Offset is a word of English origin, it means “transfer” and literally translates as “transfer printing” or “indirect printing.” Offset rotary printing transfers ink through intermediate rollers, which prevents abrasion of the printing plates.
The main result of the technical revolution in book printing was that the beginning of printing was laid as a special type of human activity in the process of creating books.
