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Brian Lawler

Cumulative Engineering
April 16, 2008

This will come as no surprise to you: we’ve come a long way since letterpress printing. This thought occurred to me yesterday when I was lying on top of the ink distribution plate of an 1890 broadsheet size Campbell cylinder letterpress. I was fixing some typographical errors in a poster. The type is a combination of wood and metal, and the locked-up chase weighs about 50 lbs., so I was making the changes in the press rather than making them on an imposing stone across the room.

Cal Poly's 1890 Campbell hand cylider press. This historic treasure is maintained in good working order, and is used occasionally to print broadsheet posters and large posters.

I had ink on my left elbow, my left forearm, my hands and my nose. I was lifting small type out with tweezers, replacing a crushed lower-case m to get the poster ready to print for Cal Poly’s annual Open House this weekend.

Cumulative Engineering is a term I use in some of my classes to describe all of the work done by all of the engineers and scientists and inventors to make all of modern technologies possible. For example, I have not run out of lower-case e’s yet in this blog. That’s unlikely to happen with the blogging technology, but it happened to me twelve times on Monday as I set the type for the poster. I kept looking for large fonts with enough letters to make my message, and it was difficult. There is no source of new wood type, as the company that made has been gone for more than a century.

The type and the press belong to the Shakespeare Press Museum, operated by students of the Graphic Communication Department at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. I was the student Curator of the museum back in 1971, and now I am its Faculty Advisor. It’s fun to practice the arts of Johannes Gensfleisch (the man we call “Gutenberg”). Setting type is fun, but time-consuming. It took most of a day for me to get the whole poster set and locked-up, another two hours to make the corrections and adjustments, and this morning I will ink it up and run a few hundred sheets in black ink. Tomorrow I will print the second color.

The press is a treasure – it’s an 1890 Campbell Country Press, built in New York City and shipped around the Horn to California, where it was used to print the San Francisco Call from 1891 until the San Francisco Earthquake in April, 1906. After that, the press was moved to the tiny town of Soledad in the Salinas Valley, where it was used to print a weekly newspaper until about 1951. The hand crank on the main shaft was replaced with a pulley and an electric motor for that period.

In 1955, students of the School for Country Printers – Cal Poly – drove a flat-bed truck to Soledad and picked up the press. The owner said, according to a man who was there, “I think I still have the hand crank for that press. Do you want it?”

And so the press was relocated to Cal Poly where it was reconditioned. It still runs well, and I will be running it today, 118 years after its manufacture.

And, as I clean the ink off my elbows, brush the ink from under my nails, and scrub the ink off my nose, I will be ever-grateful for the cumulative engineering that has made electronic typography possible. I will also be grateful that I have access to 19th century presses and type to help keep the art of printing alive.

Posted by Brian Lawler on April 16, 2008 | Comments (3)

Industries: New Products, Premedia

April 16, 2008
In response to: Cumulative Engineering
Erik Nikkanen commented:

It is amazing how clever some of the old press design were and how well they performed. As an example W. Bullock in 1863 patented (US Patent# 38200)a web fed perfecting press that cut sheets and printed at a speed of 10,000 sheets per minute, when it was built some years later. It was single colour of course but still very impressive.----------- If one looks at the patent drawing carefully, one can see a very familiar ink fountain, ink fountain roller and ductor roller. This basic concept, although refined greatly, is still used in modern presses.------------ So much progress has been made in the engineering of presses but unfortunately some design features have stayed the same. The ductor roller method of transferring ink from the ink fountain roller to the press roller train is inconsistent and is the fundamental cause of ink/water balance and density variation in offset presses. This technology was good 150 years ago but it just can not meet the consistency and predictability needs for the future.------- The ductor technology has been around so long that experts in the field have basically never seen any other method, and have concluded that ink/water balance and variability of print density are inherent in the process. This is not the case.--------------------- It is time that this fundamental problem is engineered out of the process. I think waiting 150 years or more is enough time wasted. It is time to get positive control of the ink feed into presses.

April 25, 2008
In response to: Cumulative Engineering
Brian Lawler commented:

Thank you Nick, for that observation. Not to nit-pick, but the number should be impressions per HOUR... 10,000 per minute is still not possible.

New presses being announced by Heidelberg this year have ink form rollers that are the same diameter as the plate, and the inking system is much improved over the 19th century designs we use now. Heidelberg's competitors will likely have similar breakthroughs.

Perhaps this will be the year that we break from the long-standing (and wasteful) technology.

April 25, 2008
In response to: Cumulative Engineering
Erik Nikkanen commented:

Wow, I did make a fast typo mistake. HOUR it is. But I was pretty impressed with the figure of 10,000 per hour when I first read that several years ago. To think that the press was web fed, sheets cut and printed both side at that rate was quite something. As far as the Heidelberg presses you speak about. If you mean the Anicolor press concept, it is cleaver but it is not a Heidelberg innovation. KBA's Karat, Genius and Rapida 74G are basically the same concept and even Heidelberg's development manager has said that. There have been lithographic newspaper presses running for over twenty years that have a single form roller the same size as the plate cylinder. But if you are referring to some even newer concept coming from Heidelberg, that will be very interesting to see. I know they have patents on positive ink feed but nothing commercial yet. It is always interesting to see what new concept come out. Not to nit-pick but who is Nick. :-)