Printing Essay Research Paper PrintingThe printing industry

Printing Essay, Research Paper

PrintingThe printing industry is a very important and useful industry. The industry has gone through a lot of changes. My report will discuss the history, changes, and present of the printing business. The first printing was actually in China and was called yin (meaning to authenticate by the impression of a seal on clay). Seals were followed by taking ink rubbings from stone inscriptions, which has directly led the way to the making of books by inked impressions from wood. Ink rubbings were made by taking a moistened paper and laying it on the stone inscription. With a stiff brush the paper was then forced into every depression and crevice of the stone. As soon as the paper was dry, a stuffed pad of cotton or silk is dipped in sized ink and passed lightly, and evenly over it, When the paper is peeled off it is imprinted with a perfect and durable impression of the inscription, which comes out in white on a black back ground. This is a process similar to block printing. China was the first country to print with paper, ink, and carved wooden blocks, a process called xylography. In this process, a single carved wooden block of text was used to print impressions on whole pages!. By the 11th century, the Chinese had cut the blocks into individual characters, creating the world’s first movable type.The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans printed from movable type well before the Western world discovered the art in the 15th century. Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, is generally credited with the invention of printing from movable type between 1440 and 1450. Historians believe that his invention consisted of the combination of a number of existing processes. His major contribution probably was the making of adjustable metal molds for casting types of different sizes accurately and in large quantities. By the end of the year 1500, printing presses had been set up in more than 250 cities throughout Europe. Books printed before the end of 1500 were called incunabula, meaning “cradle books”.Gutenberg’s process spread quickly to other European nations. Among the printers of the period incunabula the names of Gutenberg, Johann Fust, and Peter Schoffer are outstanding. Anton Koberger of Nuremberg, a publisher and printer, printed many important volumes. Among them were editions of the Bible in Latin and German. The copies of the 42-line Bible that remain–about 40 in all–are among the world’s most valuable books. It is known as the 42-line Bible because most of its pages are 42 lines long. It was printed in three volumes. The Library of Congress and the national libraries of Britain and France have complete and perfect sets. His most famous book is probably the `Nuremberg Chronicle’, printed in 1493. It is illustrated with hundreds of woodcuts. The portraits are all imaginary, and the same block is often repeated as the picture of different persons. Gutenberg’s process spread quickly to other European nations. Over time, the literacy rate gradually rose among the population of Europe. Literature and scientific and religio!us texts, once read only by scholars, nobility, and the educated priesthood, were now available to an ever-widening audience. William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476. His books were mainly in English instead of Latin. They included Chaucer’s `Canterbury Tales’ and Thomas Malory’s `Morte d’Arthur’. Few have survived because they were read to shreds. Not all advances in printing technology came from printers or designers and manufacturers. In 1796 German author Aloysius Senefelder, in his search for an inexpensive means of publishing his own plays, developed the techniques of lithography. Lithography is a printing process in use throughout the world. It involves a thin metal plate that carries the image area and the non-image area on the same plane; that is, the image and non-image areas are neither raised nor depressed. They are kept separate chemically by the use of the well-known principle that water and oil do not mix.Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, a French landowner and inventor, discovered in the 1820s that certain chemical compounds were sensitive to light. His work marked the origins of photogravure and eventually led to the invention of photography and the use of photographic processes to reproduce images. Beginning with the invention of the offset technique in the United States, a series of 20th-century innovations made mass production, high speed, and economy in printing possible. Automated composition, first developed after the 1920s, gave way to programmed composition in the 1950s. Many of today’s computerized typesetting machines can set 1,000 characters (individual letters or symbols) per second. Phototypesetting equipment of the future could conceivably reach speeds of nearly 3,000 characters per second, or about 10,000,000 characters per hour.1Inventors also created pressureless printing, which eliminated the need for a printing press. In 1948, two Americans conceived of a type of electrostatic printing in which the coloring agent is not ink but a powder that is sensitive to the pull of an electric charge induced on a plate. This technique gave birth to xerography and the now-familiar copying machines. The various processes developed to duplicate and reproduce documents have been grouped under the name reprography. Knowing the history of printing is very important because it helps show its significance. Before printi