This type of wood and metal hybrid with a weighted pull bar was the type of press u sed by Benjamin Franklin to print the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanac. Along with weighted pull bars to add momentum to the pull, ingenious technical improvements to the design of the screw allowed for an increase in power without an increase in the speed or momentum of the pull. These metal parts allowed smoother operation and, most importantly, allowed for increased stress on the press which in turn led to the developments toward a single press print, as the force behind the press was increased. The easiest solution to this problem, coming about in the late eighteenth century, was to slowly replace as many parts as possible with metal ones. When it gets stuck, it takes even more force for the pressman to press the page onto the inked chase. Wood splinters under stress, and it is quick to expand in heat and humidity. So, the first step taken to ease the printing process was to make the actual pressing a smoother operation.Ī wooden screw press must have been a chore to maintain and hard to use. Between inking (and repairing the inking blotters), setting the pages each time, pressing both sets of columns sufficiently to create a clean print, and setting the chase for each new set of pages, there was plenty of work to be done. The printing process was hard work, and to produce a reasonable amount of pages per day, the printer and his apprentices had to work quickly. Still, there were improvements to be made. Initial Improvements to the Gutenberg Model For the quality of these productions to have come out of the first public version of the press seems almost unnatural. In this same vein, we see that the letters are crisp and consistent, even the capital letters in the Mainz Psalter and the illuminated letters, a remarkable accomplishment when one considers that these letters were printed in the same manner as the rest of the text. This was a feat it took more than one press to adequately transfer the ink to the page with the early wooden press. First, the text is perfectly square with the page, and the columns line up perfectly on both sides of the pages. The care that Gutenberg and company took to make the press work so perfectly is phenomenal, and watching a video of replications of the press at work is fascinating.Ī quick glance at the pages of the first two publications, the Gutenberg Bible and the Mainz Psalter, reveals two clear perfections that are a result of the thoughtfulness that went into the press. Pulling the lever rotated the screw and lowered the platten which was threaded onto the screw. Imagine the short stem of the allen wrench as the lever, and the long arm as the screw. An allen wrench provides a good visualization. Gutenberg's genius was in his casting movable letters out of a matrix, or hand mold, arranging these letters into a chase, which holds the type together, and attaching the chase onto a screw press. Screw presses worked by rotating a screw that in turn lowered the platten. What is not often considered, though, is the initial genius the invention was and the ingenuity required to improve on his design. High school history told us of the invention of the printing press: when Johannes Gutenberg, in the Holy Roman Empire, launched the world into a new age, defined by the mass producibility of literature.

Guytenberg printpress