Powering Up
Steam drove the Industrial Revolution in England, starting in the first decade of the 19th century. Initially, Newcomen engines pumped water out of mines, enabling the growth of coal mining and iron production, leading to the construction of large machines iconic to our contemporary view of the Industrial Revolution. But during the 18th century and much of the 19th century in Britain, many industries, including large textile mills, were powered by water, and some by horse.
Only in the early 19th century, when smaller Table Engine designs became available, did it become feasible for steam engines to power comparatively small machines like printing machines; papermills, which had been powered by water since their origin, continued to be powered by water. The first high speed printing machines were primarily sold to publishers of newspapers and magazines.
Constrained by the maximum output of hand press printers, publishers of daily newspapers generally could not print more than 4000 copies of a 4-page newspaper per day. Printers of books, who did not have to meet daily deadlines, were slower to introduce printing machines, and throughout the 19th century, smaller editions of books were often printed on hand presses.
Joseph Moxon. Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing. London, 1684.
Mechanick Exercises by the English master printer Joseph Moxon was the first comprehensive manual on the equipment and process of printing. Prior to Moxon, printing techniques were passed down secretively, through guild apprenticeship. From Moxon’s book one could learn how to set up a printing shop, how to set type and operate a hand press. His exposition was copied and adapted by later writers of printing manuals for centuries. Significantly, Moxon established in his book the limit of hourly production for two men operating a hand press. This limit, which Moxon called “the Token,” is 250 impressions per hour. This average hand press production limit remained for the next 130 years almost like a constant of nature—an unsurpassable limit until the invention of printing machines.
Courtesy of The Grolier Club
Hannah More. Black Giles the Poacher. London, 1795.
For 350 years after Gutenberg invented printing by movable type, available technologies in book production were able to meet demand with traditional methods, stymying need and interest in innovating book production. This is one example of the two million copies of More’s series of “Cheap Repository Tracts” (sixteen-page moral and religious pamphlets, printed on both sides of a single sheet of handmade paper) that were printed and sold in 1795. More intended to provide the newly literate poor with alternatives to the irreverent chapbooks circulating in the eighteenth century. These were circulated not only by booksellers and hawkers but by Sunday schools, charitable organizations, and donations. Printing two million copies using traditional methods like handmade paper and handpresses was challenging but achievable with enough time, effort, and hand labor.
Wilhelm Haas, the younger. Beschreibung einer neuen Buchdruckerpresse 1772. Basel, 1790.
Facsimile.
As the eighteenth century advanced, efforts were made to improve the functioning of handpresses. These drawings of Wilhelm Haas’s improved handpress are from the booklet describing the press published by Wilhelm Haas, the younger. The parts subjected to stress during the printing process were made of iron, but the remainder was made of wood. The iron parts were, unfortunately, subject to breakage, defeating their purpose.
An Iron Foundry, with Two Men Working the Metal with Long Poles. London, 1799.
This hand-colored mezzotint is from R. Ackermann’s illustrated periodical Repository of Arts. Working in an eighteenth-century iron forge would have been hot, dangerous, and unpleasant. This image, painted on both sides of the paper to resemble a transparency, presents an artist’s rather idealized view of the situation.
By the King. A Proclamation. London, 1789.
Luddite behavior, or machine breaking in resistance to technology, usually associated with the destruction of power looms, began early in the Industrial Revolution. This 1789 proclamation offers a huge fifty-pound bounty for the apprehension of coal miners who destroyed steam engines and other mining-company property. Steam engines pumping water out of previously unworkable mines did not improve the workers’ atrocious working conditions or address miners’ low pay. Instead, labor-saving mechanization disrupted the traditional socio-economic order, and workers enduring periodic economic downturns and excessive exploitation turned to such Luddite tactics as machine-breaking.
The First Printing Machines Constructed in London up to the Year 1818 by Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer. Leipzig: Druck von F. M. Brockhaus auf einer Schnellpresse von Koenig und Bauer, 1851.
Facsimile.
A native of Eisleben, Friedrich Koenig moved to England to obtain backing to development the first steam-powered printing machines because the Industrial Revolution had not yet reached Germany. Koenig was the first to actually call his inventions printing machines. Before his inventions, all handpresses were designated presses.
Thomas Clarkson. Memoirs of the Private and Public Life of William Penn, Vol. 1. London, 1813.
This edition of Clarkson’s work was printed with a combination of handpress and cylinder press. Sheets G and H were the first sheets ever printed with a cylinder press.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Institutions of Physiology. Trans. John Elliotson. London: Bensley & Son, 1817
Because books, unlike newspapers, did not have daily deadlines and were typically printed in smaller editions, there was initially far less incentive to increase their printing speed. Blumenbach’s The Institutions of Physiology, printed in London by the publisher Bensley & Son, was the first complete book printed on the perfecting press Friedrich Koenig designed for book production. It did not appear until 1817, three years after John Walter introduced steam-powered printing to newspaper production. A postscript to John Elliotson’s translator’s preface shows the printers regarded the book as a “typographical curiosity.”
Courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Virgil. Opera. London, 1822.
This 1822 Latin edition of Virgil’s works was printed by Thomas Bensley’s son, Benjamin, on Bensley’s perfecting machine. Built for Bensley by Friedrich Koenig, it was the first printing machine intended specifically for printing books. This was also the first book to state explicitly that it was printed on a press driven by steam power, though the statement was in Latin on the verso of the title page: “Vaporante machinâ excudebat.” The machine was designated a perfecting machine because it was designed to print on both sides of a sheet of paper.
The Times. London, 29 November 1814.
This issue is the first printed on Friedrich Koenig’s steam-powered printing machine. In the detail from an interior page, John Walter II, the owner of The Times, stated that the 29 November issue was “the practical result of the greatest improvement connected with printing, since the discovery of the art itself.” Its publication opened the door to new possibilities for printing and publishing. Walter explicitly addressed the benefits of machine printing, likely to stave off criticisms of displacing print workers.
Steam-Engines. 25th Congress. 3rd Session. House of Representatives. Treasury Dept., Doc. no. 21, 1838.
By the late eighteenth century, England led the world with about 2,000 steam engines, while the United States had few. Robert Fulton’s 1807 invention of the first commercially successful steamboat, the Clermont, was one of the first applications of steam power in America. The covers of this copy of the first US government survey of the growing American steam engine industry are embellished with pen-and-ink drawings, seemingly by S. Lincoln as a gift to his friend David Thomas. The ribbon carries the names of Robert Fulton, inventor of the first steamboat, and entrepreneur Robert Livingston, Fulton’s financial backer.
Modern Model of a James Coombes Colliery Engine. 1840.
This small modern-scale model of a James Coombes colliery engine, built in 1840, is a version of the original Henry Maudslay table engine, patented in 1807. Maudslay’s table engine was the first steam engine small enough to power relatively small printing machines like the ones used by Friedrich Koenig, for which the standard Boulton & Watt engines were too large. Maudslay table engines typically stood inside a room connected to a boiler that operated outside to reduce smoke and fire risk. They were connected to printing machines by flat-belt drives.
Fire in London. Drawn by Augustus Charles Pugin, with figures by Thomas Rowlandson, Plate No. 35. The Microcosm of London. London, 1808.
On 2 March 1791, fire destroyed Albion Mills, which was powered by two huge Watt & Boulton steam engines. Arson was suspected. London's independent millers celebrated its destruction. Opponents, who referred to the factory as satanic, had accused its owners of adulterating flour and using cheap imports at the expense of British producers. Albion Mills was a short distance from the home of the poet and artist William Blake, and it is believed the shell of the Albion Mills building inspired the phrase “dark satanic mills” in his poem "And did those feet in ancient time.”
The Microcosm of London was printed by Thomas Bensley, who a few years later became the primary financier of the first steam-powered printing machine, invented by Friedrich Koenig.
Jean-Charles Develly. Maquette for a ceramic plate. September 1831.
This watercolor drawing by the French ceramics artist Jean-Charles Develly, dated on the back of the drawing, may be the earliest original dated image of a printing shop running a steam-powered printing machine. The machine is a reasonably accurate artist’s rendition of a double-cylinder perfecting press based on the Applegath & Cowper design. Clouds of steam from the steam engine on the left are visible. Whether the plate for which this maquette was created was ever completed is unknown. Develly did complete a plate depicting a handpress printing shop operating a Stanhope press that is preserved at the Sèvres– Cité de la Céramique, the French national ceramics museum.