How Did We Get Here?
Nine key events, starting with Gutenberg and ending with the invention of the World Wide Web, have defined the history of newspaper technology
by Clark Robinson
The biblical prophet Isaiah once said, "To see the future you must look backwards."
Based on this notion, TechNews decided to look at the history of newspaper technology in a bold attempt to divine its future. The result is our "Technology Timeline" poster and two features in this issue--one looking backwards at history and one peering into our technical future.
We immediately ran into a problem. Extrapolating the past into the future only works during times of evolutionary change, and we're smack in the middle of a revolution.
Obviously, old Isaiah never heard of the Internet. The prophet died hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, and the 'Net has only been around since 1989. If he were alive today, though, even Isaiah might have a hard time predicting where the Internet is taking us. We certainly did.
Despite that, looking at technical history can be rewarding in itself. At the very least, it lets us know how we got where we are today. Why do we shoot color photographs, scan them into a personal computer and print them on a lithographic press? History can tell us.
Besides, it's interesting to travel back in time and meet the people who contributed to the art and science of newspaper printing. Who were the major inventors? What were they like? Did they profit from their inventions?
In the pages, you will meet four Germans, four Americans, two Frenchmen and an Englishman who made major contributions to newspaper technology. Some got rich, some broke even, some went broke, and some even died young while pursuing their dreams. These are their stories--and our technical heritage.
1447: Gutenberg Invents Letterpress Printing
A quick quiz: What did Johann Gutenberg invent?
If you said relief printing, you're wrong-the craft emerged in eighth century China. Movable type? Wrong again-that was invented by Chinese printer Pi Sheng in the middle of the 11th century. The printing press? No, China and Korea were using presses before Gutenberg.
What, then, did he invent? By improving movable type, the printing press and printing ink, and uniting them into a sequential production process, Gutenberg invented letterpress printing-the first effective system for mass producing the printed word.
Gutenberg's letterpress dramatically improved the economics of printing books. In Germany in 1522, for example, a handwritten Bible cost between 60 and 100 guilders. Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament, printed on a Gutenberg press, cost only 1-1/2 guilders.
The press used by Gutenberg was much like an oversized, inverted rubber stamp. The printing plate, which faced upward, was inked by hand. The pressman placed a sheet of paper on the plate and tugged on a long bar, which moved a screw spindle. This in turn caused a flat surface called the platen to press down on the top of the paper, transferring the image on the printing plate to the bottom of the paper.
Despite his mechanical genius, Gutenberg does not appear to have been a very good businessman. He was involved in several lawsuits, one of which resulted in his forfeiting his equipment to his partner, Johann Fust. He never made much money on his invention.
Gutenberg's letterpress--and the free exchange of ideas it enabled--probably accelerated the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the rise of science in Western Europe. It also made possible the modern newspaper.
In his book The 100, author Michael Hart ranks Gutenberg as the eighth most influential person in all of history (trailing only the founders of the world's major religions, Isaac Newton and the Chinese inventor of paper). Life magazine, moreover, recently named his discovery the single most important event of this millennium.
1798: Alois Senefelder Invents Lithography
The legend goes that Alois Senefelder wrote a laundry list for his mother on a
freshly polished stone using a greasy crayon. Being curious, he experimented
with the stone and found that, when chemically treated and inked, impressions
could be pulled from it. Voila! Lithography was born.
Actually, the laundry-list story is a bit overblown. In his book The Invention of Lithography, Senefelder states that printing before his time had been "purely mechanical in its purpose," whereas lithography "may be called purely chemical." He also protests, "I did not invent stone printing through lucky accident but by industrious thought!"
Over the nearly two centuries since its discovery, commercial lithography has made extraordinary technical advances. The basic principle used by Senefelder, however, remains the same--the mutual repellence of water and greasy substances. While the image areas of the printing plate love the oil-based ink, the non-image areas are water-receptive and reject the ink. In modern offset lithography, the image is transferred (offset) from the plate to a rubberized blanket cylinder and then to the paper.
In 1799, the Prince-Elector Max Joseph of Bavaria gave Senefelder an exclusive license on his invention lasting 15 years. In 1809, Senefelder was appointed Royal Inspector of Lithography by the King of Bavaria. His salary of 1,500 gulden permitted a very comfortable living.
Senefelder was married twice, seems to have been rather careless with his money, and was always thinking about new inventions. He died after a very full and active life at the age of 63.
Throughout most of their history, newspapers have been printed using the letterpress process, the same one employed by Gutenberg. With the introduction of photosetting in the mid-1960s, however, offset lithography made rapid inroads and is now the de-facto industry standard.
1812: Friedrich Koenig Invents the Steam-Powered Cylinder Press
In December 1812, Friedrich Koenig demonstrated a revolutionary new press to
John Walter, publisher of The Times of London. Walter was so impressed by the
press's output, print quality and smooth operation, he immediately ordered two
of them. Assembly began in the summer of 1814 in absolute secrecy, since Walter
feared that the new presses might cause his pressmen to riot.
On the night of November 28, 1814, Walter took his pressmen away from their hand presses with the excuse that he was expecting important news from the continent. He then used Koenig's presses to produce the entire print run of The Times--at an output of 1,100 sheets per hour. At about 6 a.m., Walter marched into the press hall with a copy of The Times in his hand and announced, "The Times is already printed--by steam!"
Friedrich Koenig is the inventor who started the transition from manual to mechanical printing, thus bringing newspapers into the Industrial Age. He was the first to use both cylinders and steam power. He also created the perfecting press, on which both sides of a sheet can be printed in one operation, and a two-revolution press.
In 1817, Koenig and Andreas Bauer signed a contract establishing the Koenig & Bauer company, the predecessor of today's KBA-Motter Corp. Their first factory was a converted monastery in Oberzell, Germany.
Koenig later set up a demonstration press in Paris, and by 1830, 29 machines had been exported to France. Then the Paris Revolution wiped out the market there completely. Panic sent sales plummeting in Germany as well, and within a few weeks the 120-person workforce in Oberzell had to be cut to 14.
Worn down by the reversal of fortune, Friedrich Koenig died in January 1833.
1837: Louis Daguerre Invents the First Practical Method of Photography
Just as Gutenberg did not invent printing, Louis Daguerre did not invent
photography. Joseph Niépce took the world's first photograph--a fuzzy
picture of a courtyard and a granary. However, Niépce's method of
photography was impractical, since it required about eight hours' exposure time
and resulted in a poor-quality picture.
Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre was the man who, in the late 1830s, succeeded in developing the first practical method of photography. In Daguerre's method, the image was recorded on a plate coated with silver iodide. Exposure originally took 15 to 30 minutes, but that time was later reduced. The silver image was developed with fumes of mercury.
Daguerre's early attempts to devise a workable camera were unsuccessful. In 1827, he met Niépce, who had likewise been trying (with greater success) to invent a camera. Two years later they became partners.
In 1833, Niépce died, but Daguerre persisted in his efforts. By 1837, he had succeeded in developing a practical system of photography, called the daguerreotype. In 1839, Daguerre made his process public without patenting it. In return, the French government granted lifetime pensions to both Niépce's son and to Daguerre, who soon retired.
The importance of photography to newspaper journalism is obvious-a picture is, after all, worth a thousand words. Less obvious has been its importance to the production process: Display ads are sent to newspapers on photographic negatives; page cameras shoot the composed page, and the resulting negative is used to make the printing plate. And although these processes are now being overtaken by digital advertising, pagination and computer-to-plate, respectively, the older photographic processes will continue to be used at many newspapers into the near future.
1869: Louis du Hauron Introduces Color
The
next time you're trying to keep Bill Clinton from looking sunburned in your
newspaper, think of Louis Ducos du Hauron--a key figure in the history of both
color photography and color printing.
In 1862, du Hauron outlined the basics of color photography: "The method which I propose is based on the principle that the simple colors are reduced to three--red, yellow and blue--the combinations of which in different proportions give us the infinite variety of shades we see in nature. Thus one might consider a picture which represents nature as composed of three pictures superimposed, the one red, the second yellow, and the third blue. The result of this would be that if one could obtain separately these three images by photography and then reunite them in one, one would obtain an image of nature with all the tints that it contains."
Also in 1862, du Hauron disclosed a design for a camera that would make three separate negatives with one exposure through the aid of angled mirrors. In 1869, he published his seminal work, Les Coleurs en Photographie; and in 1870, a lithographic reproduction in three colors was made from his designs.
Newspapers were slow to adopt color, but by the early 1980s their inability to accept color ads had become a strategic problem. By then most monthly magazines ran color ads, and the weekly news magazines were also moving to color. These factors led USA Today to use full color on deadline when it was launched in 1982, and the march to achieve high-quality color in newspapers has been proceeding ever since.
1886: Ottmar Mergenthaler Invents the Linotype Machine
For 400 years
after Gutenberg, printers had assembled words, paragraphs and columns of type
from individual letters lifted one-by-one from cases of type. Once the assembled
type had served its purpose of printing on paper, it had to be cleaned and
returned to the cases.
As a young man, Ottmar Mergenthaler observed this slow, laborious process and began to work on various designs for type-composition machines. While on a train bound for Washington, D.C., Mergenthaler realized that the solution was to combine the type-casting and -positioning processes into one machine.
On July 3, 1886, he showed the new machine to his chief financial backer, Whitelaw Reid. As Reid picked up a hot slug from the machine, he exclaimed, "Ottmar, you've done it! You've cast a line of type!" Thus Mergenthaler's breakthrough became known as the Linotype.
Mergenthaler's Linotype used a system in which matrices (individual character molds), rather than type, were assembled a line at a time. Hot lead was poured into the line of type, and the matrices were then recirculated.
Thomas Edison described the Linotype machine as "the Eighth Wonder of the World." It is generally considered the greatest advance in typesetting in the 400 years after Gutenberg. Quickly adopted by major newspapers the world over, the Linotype machine ushered in an era of high-speed, low-cost and high-quality composition. The company founded by Mergenthaler is the ancestor of today's Linopress Publishing System Division of the Heidelberg Group.
Since Mergenthaler's Linotype, we have progressed through several generations of typesetting technology, including phototypesetting, digital typesetting and laser imagesetting. All these sophisticated technologies owe much to the foundation provided by Mergenthaler in 1886.
Mergenthaler's life did not end happily. Misunderstandings between the brilliant inventor and his financial backers grew to become overwhelming. Mergenthaler died of tuberculosis in 1899, still young and an embittered man.
1947: Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain Invent the Transistor
After a few words of explanation to a group of executives at Bell Labs, Walter
Brattain powered up his equipment. The brass watched a luminous dot jump and
fall as it raced across the oscilloscope screen.
Then Brattain asked one of the executives to put on a pair of headphones. Borrowing a page from the Bell history books, Brattain spoke a few words into a microphone. Everyone watched the sudden look of surprise on the executive's face--the first transistor had amplified Brattain's voice almost 100 times!
That transistor--a tiny slab of germanium, some bits of gold foil, a paper clip and some pieces of plastic--marked the birth of an era. It led to the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 and the minicomputer in 1960. By the mid-60s, Intel founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors that could be put on a chip was doubling every 12 months.
Like nearly every other industry, newspapers have been profoundly affected by transistors. They can be found in not only our desktop computers, but also our digital cameras, scanners, imagesetters, film processors, plate processors, presses and inserting machines. In fact, they saturate virtually every part of our operations.
Soft-spoken and cerebral, John Bardeen came up with the key ideas behind the transistor. They were implemented by the genial Brattain, an outgoing, silver-haired man who liked to tinker with equipment. After Bardeen and Brattain invented the new device, their boss, William Shockley, made it more rugged and suitable for manufacturing. The three men shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for Physics.
In 1955, Shockley left Bell Labs for Northern California, founding the first semiconductor company in what has since become known as Silicon Valley.
1984: Steve Jobs Introduces the Macintosh
The Palo Alto Research Center was built by Xerox Corp. as a place where young,
bright engineers could develop grand new ideas.
In 1973, PARC built its first desktop computer, called the Alto. Its crisp, clear images were made possible by a process known as bit-mapping. The computer controlled each tiny dot, or pixel, on the screen. Other desktop computers of the period merely controlled small grids formed by the combination of dots and lines. The Alto also used a mouse, eliminating the need for typewritten commands.
When Steve Jobs, then chairman of Apple Computer Inc., visited Xerox PARC in 1979, he was intrigued. Within a few weeks, Jobs managed to get hold of a mouse, and Apple programmers started to delve into bit-map graphics. Apple soon released the Lisa, a computer based on the PARC technology, but it was expensive and had limited capability. These problems were solved by 1984, when Apple released its Macintosh.
The Mac had an immediate effect, which continues to this day, on the way newspapers are produced. Artists create graphics in programs like Adobe's Illustrator and Macromedia's Freehand, photo editors correct color in Adobe's Photoshop, and paginators lay out pages in QuarkXPress and Adobe's PageMaker--all on the Mac.
Today, newspapers debate whether to retire their Macs in favor of better-selling PCs based on Microsoft Windows. Despite this, the importance of Steve Jobs to the history of newspaper operations is indisputable. If it weren't for him, Xerox PARC technology might never have spread beyond Palo Alto, and Bill Gates might not have felt the competitive need to develop Windows.
Some people who have worked for Jobs find him difficult to tolerate. He has been accused of regularly missing appointments, not giving credit where due and playing favorites. He does, however, have a sharp instinct for engineering and design, and a phenomenal ability to motivate people.
According to Forbes magazine, his current net worth is $710 million.
1989: Tim Berners-Lee Invents the World Wide Web
You might say that Tim Berners-Lee was genetically qualified to invent the
World Wide Web. His parents, both mathematicians, met while working on the
Ferranti Mark I, the first computer sold commercially. Young Tim grew up playing
with five-hole paper tape and building computers out of cardboard boxes.
His invention, the World Wide Web, is not the same thing as the Internet. The Web is a communications architecture that sits on top of the network of computers that is the Internet.
Over 30 years ago, the U.S. government gave a think tank called the Rand Corp. a strategic problem: How could U.S. authorities successfully communicate after a nuclear war? Rand proposed a communications network with no central authority, designed to operate while in tatters.
The Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency decided to fund the network, called the ARPANET. Throughout the '70s, ARPA's network grew-its decentralized structure made expansion easy. As the '70s and '80s advanced, many very different groups linked their computers to the growing network of networks, which came to be known as the Internet. ARPANET formally expired in 1989, a happy victim of its own overwhelming success.
That same year, Berners-Lee was working at CERN, the European Particle
Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He proposed a global project designed
to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a "web"
of hypertext documents. He defined the now-familiar hypertext markup language
(HTML), hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and universal resource locators
(URLs). The program "WorldWideWeb" was first made available within
CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
The newspaper industry flew into the Web starting in 1994, and has been stuck there ever since. Today more than 3,600 newspapers publish on the Web, of which 2,059 are based in the United States. The Web promises to be even more important in the future.
Although Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo! and a number of other companies are getting rich off his invention, Tim Berners-Lee is not. He gave the software away for free and has watched the Web's uninterrupted exponential growth ever since.
In 1994, Berners-Lee joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as director of the W3 Consortium, which coordinates Web development worldwide.
Clark Robinson is the editor of TechNews. E-mail, robic@naa.org; phone, (703) 902-1686; fax, (703) 902-1690.
Bibliography
175 Years: Koenig & Bauer. Koenig & Bauer-Albert Group, 1992.
Blair, Raymond N. The Lithographers Manual. The Graphic Arts Technical Foundation Inc., 1983.
Byrnes, Garrett D. and Spilman, Charles H. The Providence Journal: 150 Years. The Providence Journal Company, 1980.
Hart, Michael H. The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. Carol Publishing Group, 1993.
Life Special Double Issue: The Millennium. Fall 1997.
Moritz, Michael. The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer. William Morrow and Company Inc., 1984.
Prichard, Peter. The Making of McPaper: The Inside Story of USA Today.Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1987.
Riordan, Michael and Hoddeson, Lillian. "Birth of an Era," Scientific American Special Issue: The Solid-State Century, Jan. 1998.
Schlesigner, Carl. The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler. Oak Knoll Books, 1989.
Sipley, Louis Walton. A Half Century of Color. The Macmillan Company, 1951.
Zorpette, Glenn. "Fifty Years of Heroes and Epiphanies," Scientific American Special Issue: The Solid-State Century, Jan. 1998.
Wetterau, Bruce. The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies.Prentice Hall Press, 1990.
The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 1994. World Almanac, 1994.