Buch lesen: «Inventions in the Century», Seite 17
The Hotchkiss revolving cannon is another celebrated American production named from its inventor, and constructed to throw heavier projectiles than the Gatling. It also has revolving barrels and great solidity in the breech mechanism. It has been found to be of great service in resisting the attacks of torpedo boats. It is adapted to fire long-range shells with great rapidity and powerful effect, and is exceedingly efficient in defence of ditches and entrenchments.
Explosives.– The desire to make the most effective explosives for gunnery led to their invention not only for that purpose but for the more peaceful pursuit of blasting. Gun Cotton, that mixture of nitric acid and cotton, made by Schönbein in 1846, and experimented with for a long time as a substitute for gunpowder in cannon and small arms and finally discarded for that purpose, is now being again revived, but used chiefly for blasting. This was followed by the discovery of nitro-glycerine, a still more powerful explosive agent – too powerful and uncontrollable for guns as originally made. They did not supersede gunpowder, but smokeless powders have come, containing nitro-cellulose, or nitro-glycerine rendered plastic, coherent and homogeneous, and converted into rods or grains of free running powder, to aid the breech-loaders and magazine guns, while the high explosives, gun-cotton, nitro-glycerine, dynamite, dualine, etc., have become the favorite agencies for those fearful offensive and defensive weapons, the Torpedoes. From about the time of the discovery of gunpowder, stationary and floating chambers and mines of powder, to be discharged in early times by fuses (later by percussion or electricity), have existed, but modern inventions have rendered them of more fearful importance than was ever dreamed of before this century. The latest invention in this class is the submarine torpedo boat, which, moving rapidly towards an enemy's vessel, suddenly disappears from sight beneath the water, and strikes the vessel at its lowest or most vulnerable point.
To the inquiry as to whether all this vast array of modern implements of destruction is to lessen the destruction of human life, shorten war, mitigate its horrors and tend toward peace, there can be but one answer. All these desirable results have been accomplished whenever the new inventions of importance have been used. "Warlike Tribes" have been put to flight so easily by civilised armies in modern times that such tribes have been doubted as possessing their boasted or even natural courage. Nations with a glorious past as to bravery but with a poor armament have gone down suddenly before smaller forces armed with modern ordnance. The results would have been reversed, and the derision would have proceeded from the other side, if the conditions had been reversed, and those tribes and brave peoples been armed with the best weapons and the knowledge of their use. The courage of the majority of men on the battle-field is begot of confidence and enthusiasm, but this confidence and enthusiasm, however great the cause, soon fail, and discretion becomes the better part of valour, if men find that their weapons are weak and useless against vastly superior arms of the enemy. The slaughter and destruction in a few hours with modern weapons may not be more terrible than could be inflicted with the old arms by far greater forces at close quarters in a greater length of time in the past, but the end comes sooner; and the prolongation of the struggle with renewed sacrifices of life, and the long continued and exhausting campaigns, giving rise to diseases more destructive than shot or shell, are thereby greatly lessened, if not altogether avoided.
CHAPTER XVII.
PAPER AND PRINTING
Paper-making.– "The art preservative of all arts" – itself must have means of preservation, and hence the art of paper-making precedes the art of printing.
It was Pliny who wrote, at the beginning of the Christian era, that "All the usages of civilised life depend in a remarkable degree upon the employment of paper. At all events the remembrance of past events."
Naturally to the Chinese, the Hindoo, and the Egyptian, we go with inquiries as to origin, and find that as to both arts they were making the most delicate paper from wood and vegetable fibres and printing with great nicety, long before Europeans had even learned to use papyrus or parchment, or had conceived the idea of type.
So far as we know the wasp alone preceded the ancient Orientals in the making of paper. Its gray shingled house made in layers, worked up into paper by a master hand from decayed wood, pulped, and glutinised, waterproofed, with internal tiers of chambers, a fortress, a home, and an airy habitation, is still beyond the power of human invention to reproduce.
Papyrus – the paper of the Egyptians: Not only their paper, but its pith one of their articles of food, and its outer portions material for paper, boxes, baskets, boats, mats, medicines, cloths and other articles of merchandise.
Once one of the fruits of the Nile, now no longer growing there. On its fragile leaves were recorded and preserved the ancient literatures – the records of dynasties – the songs of the Hebrew prophets – the early annals of Greece and Rome – the vast, lost tomes of Alexandria. Those which were fortunately preserved and transferred to more enduring forms now constitute the greater part of all we have of the writings of those departed ages.
In making paper from papyrus, the inner portion next to the pith was separated into thin leaves; these were laid in two or more layers, moistened and pressed together to form a leaf; two or more leaves united at their edges if desired, or end to end, beaten smooth with a mallet, polished with a piece of iron or shell, the ends, or sides, or both, of the sheet sometimes neatly ornamented, and then rolled on a wooden cylinder. The Romans and other ancient nations imported most of their papyrus from Egypt, although raising it to considerable extent in their own swamps.
In the seventh century, the Saracens conquered Egypt and carried back therefrom, papyrus, and the knowledge of how to make paper from it to Europe.
Parchment manufactured from the skins of young calves, kids, lambs, sheep, and goats, was an early rival of papyrus, and was known and used in Europe before papyrus was there introduced.
The softening of vegetable and woody fibre of various kinds, flax and raw cotton and rags, and reducing it into pulp, drying, beating, and rolling it into paper, seem to have been suggested to Europe by the introduction of papyrus, for we learn of the first appearance of such paper by the Arabians, Saracens, Spaniards and the French along through the eighth, ninth, and tenth and eleventh centuries. Papyrus does not, however, appear to have been superseded until the twelfth century.
Public documents are still extant written in the twelfth century on paper made from flax and rags; and paper mills began to put in an appearance in Germany in the fourteenth century, in which the fibre was reduced to pulp by stampers. England began to make paper in the next century. Pulping the fibre by softening it in water and beating the same had then been practised for four centuries. Rollers in the mills for rolling the pulp into sheets were introduced in the fifteenth century, and paper makers began to distinguish their goods from those made by others by water marks impressed in the pulp sheets. The jug and the pot was one favourite water mark in that century, succeeded by a fool's cap, which name has since adhered to paper of a certain size, with or without the cap. So far was the making of paper advanced in Europe that about 1640 wall paper began to be made as a substitute for tapestry; although as to this fashion the Chinese were still ahead some indefinite number of centuries.
Holland was far advanced in paper-making in the seventeenth century. The revolution of 1688 having seriously interrupted the art in England, that country imported paper from Holland during that period amounting to £100,000. It was a native of Holland, Rittenhouse, who introduced paper-making in America and erected a mill near Philadelphia in the early years of the eighteenth century, and there made paper from linen rags.
The Dutch also had substituted cylinders armed with blades in place of stampers and used their windmills to run them. The Germans and French experimented with wood and straw.
In the latter part of the eighteenth century some manufacturers in Europe had learned to make white paper from white rags, and as good in quality, and some think better, than is made at the present day. The essentials of paper making by hand from rags and raw vegetable fibres, the soaking of fibres in water and boiling them in lyes, the beating, rolling, smoothing, sizing and polishing of the paper, were then known and practised. But the best paper was then a dear commodity. The art of bleaching coloured stock was unknown, and white paper was made alone from stock that came white into the mill. The processes were nearly all hand operations. "Beating" was pounding in a mortar. The pulp was laid by hand upon moulds made of parallel strands of coarse brass wire; and the making of the pulp by grinding wood and treating it chemically to soften it was experimental.
The nineteenth century produced a revolution. It introduced the use of modern machinery, and modern chemical processes, by which all known varieties and sizes of paper, of all colours, as well as paper vessels, are made daily in immense quantities in all civilised countries, from all sorts of fibrous materials.
Knight, in his Mechanical Dictionary, gives a list of nearly 400 different materials for paper making that had been used or suggested, for the most part within the century and up to twenty years ago, and the number has since increased.
The modern revolution commenced in 1799, when Louis Robert, an employee of François Didot of Essones, France, invented and patented the first machine for making paper in a long, wide, continuous web. The French government in 1800 granted him a reward of 8,000 francs. The machine was then exhibited in England and there tested with success. It was there that Messrs. Fourdrinier, a wealthy stationery firm, purchased the patents, expended £60,000 for improvements on the machine, and first gave to the world its practical benefits. This expenditure bankrupted them, as the machines were not at once remunerative, and parliament refused to grant them pecuniary assistance. Gamble, Donkin, Koops, the Fourdriniers, Dickenson, and Wilkes, were the first inventors to improve the Robert machine, and to give it that form which in many essential features remains to-day. They, together with later inventors, gave to the world a new system of paper making.
By 1872 two hundred and ninety-nine Fourdrinier machines were running in the United States alone. In the improved Fourdrinier machine or system, rags, or wood, or straw are ground or otherwise reduced to pulp, and then the pulp, when properly soaked and drained, is dumped into a regulating box, passing under a copper gate to regulate the amount and depth of feed, then carried along through strainers, screeners or dressers, to free the mass from clots and reduce it to the proper fineness, over an endless wire apron, spread evenly over this apron by a shaking motion, subjected to the action of a suction box by which the water is drawn off by air-suction pumps, carried between cloth-covered rollers which press and cohere it, carried on to a moving long felt blanket to further free it from moisture, and which continues to hold the sheet of pulp in form; then with the blanket through press rolls adjustable to a desired pressure and provided with means to remove therefrom adhering pulp and to arrest the progress of the paper if necessary; then through another set of compression rollers, when the condensed and matted pulp, now paper, is carried on to a second blanket, passed through a series of steam cylinders, where the web is partially dried, and again compressed, thence through another series of rollers and drying cylinders, which still further dry and stretch it, and now, finally completed, the sheet is wound on a receiving cylinder. The number of rollers and cylinders and the position and the length of the process to fully dry, compact, stretch and finish the sheet, may be, and are, varied greatly. If it is desired to impress on or into the paper water marks, letters, words, or ornamental matter, the paper in its moist stage, after it passes through the suction boxes, is passed under a "dandy" or fancy scrolled roll provided on its surface with the desired design. When it is desired to give it a smooth, glossy surface, the paper, after its completion, is passed through animal sizing material, and then between drying and smoothing rollers. Or this sizing may be applied to the pulp at the outset of the operation. Colouring material, when desired, is applied to the pulp, before pressing. By the use of machines under this system, a vast amount of material, cast-off rags, etc., before regarded as waste, was utilised for paper making.
The modern discoveries of the chemists of the century as to the nature of fibres, best modes and materials for reducing them to pulp, and bleaching processes, have brought the art of paper making from wood and other fibrous materials to its present high and prosperous condition.
What are known as the soda-pulp and the sulphite processes are examples of this. The latter and other acid processes were not successful until cement-lined digesters were invented to withstand their corroding action. But now it is only necessary to have a convenient forest of almost any kind of wood to justify the establishment of a paper mill.
It was the scarcity of rags, especially of linen rags, that forced inventors to find other paper-producing materials.
It would be impossible and uninteresting in a work of this character to enumerate the mechanical details constituting the improvements of the century in paper-making machinery of all kinds. Thousands of patents have been granted for such inventions. With one modern Fourdrinier machine, and a few beating engines, a small paper mill will now turn out daily as much paper as could be made by twelve mills a hundred years ago.
In moulding pulp into articles of manufacture, satisfactory machines have been invented, not only for the mere forming them into shape, but for water-proofing and indurating the same. From the making of a ponderous paper car wheel to a lady's delicate work basket, success has been attained.
Paper bag machines, machines for making paper boxes, applying and staying corners of such boxes, for making cell cases used in packing eggs and fruit, and for wrapping fruit; machines for affixing various forms of labels and addresses, are among the wonders of modern inventions relating to paper. It is wonderful how art and ingenuity united about thirty years ago to produce attractive wall papers. Previous to that time they were dull and conventional in appearance. Now beautiful designs are rolled out from machines.
Printing.– We have already seen how paper making and printing grew up together an indefinite number of centuries ago in the Far East. Both block printing and movable types were the production of the Chinese, with which on their little pages of many-coloured paper they printed myriads of volumes of their strange literature in stranger characters during centuries when Europeans were painfully inscribing their thoughts with the stylus and crude pens upon papyrus and the dried skins of animals.
But the European and his descendants delight to honour most the early inventors of their own countries. Italy refers with pride to the printing from blocks practised by the Venetians, and at Ravenna, from 1280 to 1300; from type at Subiaco in the Roman territory in 1465, and to the first Roman book printed in 1470; the Dutch to Laurens Coster, whom they allege invented movable type in 1423. Some of the Dutch have doubted this, and pin their faith on Jacob Bellaert, as the first printer, and Gerard Leeu, his workman, who made the types at Haarlem, in 1483. The Germans rely with confidence on John Guttenberg, who at Strasburg, as early as 1436, had wooden blocks, and wooden movable types, and who, two or three years after, printed several works; on the partnership of Faust and Guttenberg in 1450 at Mentz, and their Bible in Latin printed in 1456 on vellum with types imitating manuscript in form, and illustrated by hand; and, finally, on Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, who then made matrices in which were cast the letters singly, and who thereby so pleased his master, Faust, that the latter gave him his daughter, Christina, in marriage.
From Germany the art spread to Paris and thence to England. About 1474 Caxton was printing his black-letter books in England. Spain followed, and it is stated that in 1500 there were two hundred printing offices in Europe. The religious and political turmoils in Germany in the sixteenth century gave an immense impetus to printing there. The printing press was the handmaid of the Reformation. In America the first printing press was set up in Mexico in 1536, and in Lima, Brazil, in 1586. In 1639, nineteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims on the bleak rock at Plymouth, they set up a printing press at Cambridge, Mass.
The art of printing soon resolved itself into two classes: first, composition, the arranging of the type in the proper order into words and pages; and second, press work; the taking of impressions from the types, or from casts of types in plates – being a facsimile of a type bed. This was stereotyping– the invention of William Ged, of Edinburgh, in 1731.
Types soon came to be made everywhere of uniform height; that of England and America being 92-100 of an inch, and became universally classified by names according to their sizes, as pica, small pica, long primer, minion, nonpareil, etc.
After movable types came the invention of Presses. The earliest were composed of a wooden frame on which were placed the simple screw and a lever to force a plate down upon a sheet of paper placed on the bed of type which had been set in the press, with a spring to automatically raise the screw and plate after the delivery of the impression. This was invented by Blaew of Amsterdam in 1620. Such, also, was the Ramage press, and on such a one Benjamin Franklin worked at his trade as a printer, both in America and in London. His London press, on which he worked in 1725, was carried to the United States, and is now on exhibition in Washington. This was substantially the state of the art at the beginning of the century.
Then Earl Stanhope in England invented a press entirely of iron, and the power consisted of the combination of a toggle joint and lever. The first American improvement was invented by George Clymer, of Philadelphia, in 1817, the power being an improved lever consisting of three simple levers of the second order. This was superseded by the "Washington" press invented by Samuel Rust in 1829. It has as essential parts the toggle joint and lever, and in the frame work, as in the Stanhope, type bed, rails on which the bed was moved in and out, means to move the bed, the platen, the tympan on which the sheet is placed, the frisket, a perforated sheet of paper, to preserve the printed sheet, an inking roller and frame. In this was subsequently introduced an automatic device for inking the roller, as it was moved back from over the bed of type on to an inking table. This, substantially, has been the hand press ever since.
With one of these hand-presses and the aid of two men about two hundred and fifty sheets an hour could be printed on one side. The increase in the circulation of newspapers before the opening of the 19th century demanded greater rapidity of production and turned the attention of inventors to the construction of power or machine presses. Like the paper-making machine, the power press was conceived in the last decade of the eighteenth century, and like that art was also not developed until the nineteenth century. William Nicholson of England is believed to have been the first inventor of a machine printing press. He obtained an English patent for it in 1720. The type were to be placed on the face of one cylinder, which was designed to be in gear, revolved with, and press upon another cylinder covered with soft leather, the type cylinder to be inked by a third cylinder to which the inking apparatus, was applied, and the paper to be printed by being passed between the type and the impression cylinder. These ideas were incorporated into the best printing machines that have since been made. But the first successful machine printing press was the invention of two Saxons, König and Bauer, in 1813, who introduced their ideas from Germany, constructed the machine in London, and on which on the 28th of November, 1814, an issue of the London Times was printed. The Times announced to its readers that day that they were for the first time perusing a paper printed upon a machine driven by steam power. What a union of mighty forces was heralded in this simple announcement! The union of the steam engine, the printing press, and a great and powerful journal! An Archimedean lever had been found at last with which to move the world.
The production of printed sheets per hour over the hand-press was at once quadrupled, and very shortly 1800 sheets per hour were printed. This machine was of that class known as cylinder presses. In this machine ordinary type was used, and the type-form was flat and passed beneath a large impression cylinder on which the paper was held by tapes. The type-form was reciprocated beneath an inking apparatus and the paper cylinder alternately. The inking apparatus consisted of a series of rollers, to the first of which the ink was ejected from a trough and distributed to the others. In 1815 Cowper patented in England electrotype plates to be affixed to a cylinder. Applegath and Cowper improved the König machine in the matter of the ink distributing rollers, and in the adaptation of four printing cylinders to the reciprocating type bed, whereby, with some other minor changes, 5000 impressions on one side were produced per hour. Again Applegath greatly changed the arrangement of cylinders and multiplied their number, and the number of the other parts, so that in 1848 the sheets printed on one side were first 8000 and then 12,000 an hour.
In the United States, Daniel Treadwell of Boston invented the first power printing machine in 1822. Two of these machines were at that time set up in New York city. It was a flat bed press and was long used in Washington in printing for the government. David Bruce of New York, in 1838, invented the first successful type-casting machine, which, when shortly afterward it was perfected, became the model for type-casting machines for Europe and America. Previous to that time type were generally made by casting them in hand-moulds – the metal being poured in with a spoon.
Robert Hoe, an English inventor, went to New York in 1803, and turned his attention to the making of printing presses. His son, Richard March Hoe, inherited his father's inventive genius. While in England in 1837-1840, obtaining a patent on and introducing a circular saw, he became interested in the printing presses of the London Times. Returning home, he invented and perfected a rotary machine which received the name of the "Lightning Press." It first had four and then ten cylinders arranged in a circle. As finally completed, it printed from a continuous roll of paper several miles in length, and on both sides at the same time, cutting off and folding ready for delivery, 15,000 to 20,000 newspapers an hour, the paper being drawn through the press at the rate of 1,000 feet in a minute. Before it was in this final, completed shape, it was adopted by the London Times. John Walter of London in the meantime invented a machine of a similar class. He also used a sheet of paper miles long. It was first damped, passed through blotting rolls, and then to the printing cylinders. It gave out 11,000 perfected sheets, or 22,000 impressions an hour, and as each sheet was printed, it was cut by a knife on the cylinder, and the sheets piled on the paper boards. It was adopted by the London Times and the New York Times.
A German press at Augsburg, and the Campbell presses of the United States, have also become celebrated as web perfecting presses, in which the web is printed, the sheets cut, associated, folded, and delivered at high speed. One of the latest quadruple stereotype perfecting presses made by Hoe & Co. of New York has a running capacity of 48,000 papers per hour. On another, a New York paper has turned off nearly six hundred thousand copies in a single day, requiring for their printing ninety-four tons of paper. Among other celebrated inventors of printing presses in the United States were Isaac Adams, Taylor, Gordon, Potter, Hawkins, Bullock, Cottrell, Campbell, Babcock, and Firm.
Mail-marking Machines, in which provision is made for holding the printing mechanism out of operative position in case a letter is not in position to be stamped; address-printing machines, including machines for printing addresses by means of a stencil; machines for automatically setting and distributing the type, including those in which the individual types are caused to enter the proper receptacle by means of nicks in the type, which engage corresponding projections on a stationary guard plate, and automatic type justifying machines. All such have been invented, developed, and perfected in the last half century.
Another invention which has added wonderfully to push the century along, is the Typewriter. It has long been said that "The pen is mightier than the sword," but from present indications, it is proper to add that the typewriter is mightier than the pen.
A machine in which movable types are caused to yield impressions on paper to form letters by means of key levers operated by hand, has been one of slow growth from its conception to its present practical and successful form.
Some one suggested the idea in England in a patent in 1714. The idea rested until 1840, when a French inventor revived it in a patent. At the same time patents began to come out in England and the United States; and about forty patents in each of these two countries were granted from that time until 1875. Since that date about 1400 patents more have been issued in the United States, and a large number in other countries. It was, however, only that year and before 1880, that the first popular commercially successful machines were made and introduced.
The leading generic idea of all subsequent successful devices of this kind was clearly set forth in the patent of S. W. Francis of the United States in 1857. This feature is the arranging of a row of hammers in a circle so that when put in motion they will all strike the same place, which is the centre of that circle. The arrangement of a row of pivoted hammers or type levers, each operated by a separate key lever to strike an inked ribbon in front of a sheet of paper, means to automatically move the carriage carrying the paper roll from right to left as the letters are successfully printed, leaving a space between each letter and word, and sounding a signal when the end of a line is reached, so that the carriage may be returned to its former position – all these and some other minor but necessary operations may seem simple enough when stated, but their accomplishment required the careful study of many inventors for years.
One of the most modern of typewriters has a single electro-magnet to actuate all the type bars of a set, and to throw each type from its normal position to the printing centre. By an extremely light touch given to each key lever the circuit is closed and causes the lever to strike without the necessity of pressing the key down its whole extent and releasing it before the next key strikes. By this device, the operator is relieved of fatigue, as his fingers may glide quickly from one key to another, the printing is made uniform, and far greater speed attained by reason of the quick and delicate action. Mr. Thaddeus Cahill of Washington appears to be the first to have invented the most successful of this type of machines.
Book-binding Machinery is another new production of the century. It may be that the old hand methods would give to a book a stronger binding than is found on most books to-day, but the modern public demands and has obtained machinery that will take the loose sheets and bind them ready for delivery, at the rate of ten or fifteen thousand volumes a day.
The "quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore," the Latin folios in oak or ivory boards with brass clasps, or bound in velvet, or in crimson satin, ornamented with finest needlework or precious stones, or the more humble beech boards, and calf and sheep skins with metal edges and iron clasps, in all of which the sheets were stoutly sewed together and glued, when glue was known, to the covers, are now but relics of the past. Machinery came to the front quite rapidly after 1825, at which time cloth had been introduced as cheaper than leather, and as cheap and a more enduring binder than paper. The processes in book-binding are enumerated as follows; and for each process a machine has been invented within the last sixty years to do the work:
Folding the sheets;
Gathering the consecutive sheets;
Rolling the backs of folded sheets;
Saw cutting the backs for the combs;
Sewing;
Rounding the back of the sewed sheets.
Edge cutting;
Binding, securing the books to the sides, covering with muslin, leather or paper. Tooling and lettering.
Edge gilting.
One of the best modern illustrations of human thought and complicated manual operations contained in automatic machinery is the Linotype.
