Print history: the evolution of ideas and technologies (Part 1)
Printing is an integral part of modern life. In fact, mankind prints a breathtaking amount of information daily, putting it on paper and other media. However, before the results of today were achieved, people had to work for a long time to improve the technologies and principles of applying prints to various media.
When viewed from today's perspective, the principles of putting information on a carrier were not always perfect. For a long time, people knocked out images and symbols on stones, thereby creating indestructible, but not very capacious, records, and not very clear to modern man.
Part 1. The history of the press: the evolution of ideas and technologies
Part 2. Printing history: matrix, inkjet, laser and LED technologies
Media search
')
The first step in transferring information to a material carrier was papyrus, which was invented in Egypt, and some time later, in the city of Pergamum, they invented making leather so that it could be easily inked with ink — so it was parchment. However, the creation of both carriers was very time consuming, and no one even thought about printing books or other voluminous works.
The invention of paper in ancient China was a real revolution. It consisted of bamboo fibers and a silk tree. The advantage of this process was its simplicity: all the “ingredients” were boiled soft in hot water, then crumbled and paper sheets were formed from the resulting liquid mass. Note that we still use this technology! Glory to the Chinese!
Transfer idea or offset printing
Historians are still arguing over who first came up with the idea of ​​speeding up the process of creating manuscripts by transferring information from ready-made media to paper or other media (for example, foil or metal). Some believe that even the natives of the Polynesian islands, looking at how insects make holes in plants, came up with the idea of ​​transferring images from banana leaves to other surfaces - making holes in them and pouring dye into them. Well, perhaps modern fans of stencil colorings really come from Polynesia - a lot of time has passed.
However, a recognized breakthrough in the field of printing occurred in the 15th century, when the German jeweler Guttenberg invented the typewriter method. He invented that it was possible to cast stencils in a mirror image of lead, and then apply prints to paper. At first, cardboard was used as an enveloping material, and then rubber, which for a long time played an important role in printing. By the way, the first printed book - the Bible - was burned in the city of Cologne as “the work of Satan”, because it deprived the income of the census takers. However, Guttenberg was lucky - he remained intact and was able to continue his work.
Typewriters
However, after two hundred years, people had a desire to differentiate printed texts, without pouring out new stencils and pads each time ... then the stencil was reduced to one letter and a typewriter appeared. By the way, next year it will be three hundred years since the invention of the typewriter by Henry Mill in 1714. This fact is confirmed by a patent for an invention issued by the Queen of England. But only the image of this machine is not preserved.
The principle of operation of typewriters can be seen in some modern printers, which will be discussed in the next post. Machines also have a set of hammers with letters and numbers engraved on them. When you press the keys, the hammers hit the paper through the colored tape. Some types of typewriters used ribbons of different colors to create colored text, for example, highlighting paragraph capital letters with red. If you think about it, you can also see the prototype of color printers.
Inventions of the past centuries
The typewriter that became really popular was created almost a hundred years later. For the first time the Italian model Terry Pellegrino developed the serial model in 1808. He created a writing apparatus for one blind girlfriend, Countess Carolina Fantoni de Fivizono.
And only in 1863 appeared the ancestor of all modern printing machines. Americans Christopher Lechtem Scholes and Samuel Sule were already employees of the printing house and first came up with a device for fast page numbering, which inspired them to develop a workable, but not very convenient typewriter that prints words and letters.
They received a patent for an invention in 1868. The first variant of their invention was equipped with two rows of keys with an alphabetic arrangement of letters from A to Z only in the line version. The numbers on the machine was not. And indeed, with a quick successive clicking on the letters located nearby, the hammers with the letters got stuck, forcing to stop the work and to rake the mash by hand.
And it was then that Mr. Scholes developed the QWERTY keyboard that we were used to, which solved the issue of “locks” when typing. After analyzing the compatibility of letters in English, he proposed a variant in which the most frequently occurring letters are spaced as far as possible, thus avoiding sticking of hammers when printing.
However, the classic typewriter Underwood (Underwood) appeared in 1895 and became the most popular in the early XX century. As a result, many manufacturers of typewriters performed their models in the same style and also had basic elements.
As for the Cyrillic YZUKEN layout, it was also invented in America at the end of the 19th century. Then all firms produced Russian-language machines only with the YUUKEN layout, and YTsUKEN used today appeared on the keyboard only after the reform of the Russian language, as a result of which the letters "Yat" and "I" disappeared from the alphabet. And although the typewriters went down in history and became a museum property, they led to the further development of printing technologies.
The first printer is a chimera
The first printer, invented by Charles Bebidge (he also created the famous counting machine), was never created, but it was he who proves the close evolutionary connection between printers and typewriters. The Difference Engine was never created, and only according to the drawings of the designator 150 later, this unit was restored at the Museum of Sciences of London. The printer weighed 2.5 tons and consisted of 4000 parts. Such a printer was practically a sophisticated version of a typewriter. Its design was so complex that it took ten years to assemble the device.
Printers we are used to
However, all this - the prehistory and working models of printers appeared only in the fifties of the twentieth century, after the creation of the first computer. They were developed in the USA and in the USSR, but we will tell about the evolution of the printing technology of the 20th century in the next post.
And finally, another picture of a very strange typewriter:
When viewed from today's perspective, the principles of putting information on a carrier were not always perfect. For a long time, people knocked out images and symbols on stones, thereby creating indestructible, but not very capacious, records, and not very clear to modern man.
Part 1. The history of the press: the evolution of ideas and technologies
Part 2. Printing history: matrix, inkjet, laser and LED technologies
Media search
')
The first step in transferring information to a material carrier was papyrus, which was invented in Egypt, and some time later, in the city of Pergamum, they invented making leather so that it could be easily inked with ink — so it was parchment. However, the creation of both carriers was very time consuming, and no one even thought about printing books or other voluminous works.
The invention of paper in ancient China was a real revolution. It consisted of bamboo fibers and a silk tree. The advantage of this process was its simplicity: all the “ingredients” were boiled soft in hot water, then crumbled and paper sheets were formed from the resulting liquid mass. Note that we still use this technology! Glory to the Chinese!
That's how the Chinese make paper
Transfer idea or offset printing
Historians are still arguing over who first came up with the idea of ​​speeding up the process of creating manuscripts by transferring information from ready-made media to paper or other media (for example, foil or metal). Some believe that even the natives of the Polynesian islands, looking at how insects make holes in plants, came up with the idea of ​​transferring images from banana leaves to other surfaces - making holes in them and pouring dye into them. Well, perhaps modern fans of stencil colorings really come from Polynesia - a lot of time has passed.
However, a recognized breakthrough in the field of printing occurred in the 15th century, when the German jeweler Guttenberg invented the typewriter method. He invented that it was possible to cast stencils in a mirror image of lead, and then apply prints to paper. At first, cardboard was used as an enveloping material, and then rubber, which for a long time played an important role in printing. By the way, the first printed book - the Bible - was burned in the city of Cologne as “the work of Satan”, because it deprived the income of the census takers. However, Guttenberg was lucky - he remained intact and was able to continue his work.
Typewriters
However, after two hundred years, people had a desire to differentiate printed texts, without pouring out new stencils and pads each time ... then the stencil was reduced to one letter and a typewriter appeared. By the way, next year it will be three hundred years since the invention of the typewriter by Henry Mill in 1714. This fact is confirmed by a patent for an invention issued by the Queen of England. But only the image of this machine is not preserved.
The principle of operation of typewriters can be seen in some modern printers, which will be discussed in the next post. Machines also have a set of hammers with letters and numbers engraved on them. When you press the keys, the hammers hit the paper through the colored tape. Some types of typewriters used ribbons of different colors to create colored text, for example, highlighting paragraph capital letters with red. If you think about it, you can also see the prototype of color printers.
Inventions of the past centuries
The typewriter that became really popular was created almost a hundred years later. For the first time the Italian model Terry Pellegrino developed the serial model in 1808. He created a writing apparatus for one blind girlfriend, Countess Carolina Fantoni de Fivizono.
And only in 1863 appeared the ancestor of all modern printing machines. Americans Christopher Lechtem Scholes and Samuel Sule were already employees of the printing house and first came up with a device for fast page numbering, which inspired them to develop a workable, but not very convenient typewriter that prints words and letters.
They received a patent for an invention in 1868. The first variant of their invention was equipped with two rows of keys with an alphabetic arrangement of letters from A to Z only in the line version. The numbers on the machine was not. And indeed, with a quick successive clicking on the letters located nearby, the hammers with the letters got stuck, forcing to stop the work and to rake the mash by hand.
And it was then that Mr. Scholes developed the QWERTY keyboard that we were used to, which solved the issue of “locks” when typing. After analyzing the compatibility of letters in English, he proposed a variant in which the most frequently occurring letters are spaced as far as possible, thus avoiding sticking of hammers when printing.
However, the classic typewriter Underwood (Underwood) appeared in 1895 and became the most popular in the early XX century. As a result, many manufacturers of typewriters performed their models in the same style and also had basic elements.
As for the Cyrillic YZUKEN layout, it was also invented in America at the end of the 19th century. Then all firms produced Russian-language machines only with the YUUKEN layout, and YTsUKEN used today appeared on the keyboard only after the reform of the Russian language, as a result of which the letters "Yat" and "I" disappeared from the alphabet. And although the typewriters went down in history and became a museum property, they led to the further development of printing technologies.
The first printer is a chimera
The first printer, invented by Charles Bebidge (he also created the famous counting machine), was never created, but it was he who proves the close evolutionary connection between printers and typewriters. The Difference Engine was never created, and only according to the drawings of the designator 150 later, this unit was restored at the Museum of Sciences of London. The printer weighed 2.5 tons and consisted of 4000 parts. Such a printer was practically a sophisticated version of a typewriter. Its design was so complex that it took ten years to assemble the device.
Printers we are used to
However, all this - the prehistory and working models of printers appeared only in the fifties of the twentieth century, after the creation of the first computer. They were developed in the USA and in the USSR, but we will tell about the evolution of the printing technology of the 20th century in the next post.
And finally, another picture of a very strange typewriter:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/182474/
All Articles