The reel of four miles long is printed and
divided into newspapers complete in about twenty-five minutes.
The machine is almost entirely self-acting, from the pumping-up
of the ink into the ink-box out of the cistern below stairs, to
the registering of the numbers as they are printed in the
manager's room above. It is always difficult to describe a
machine in words. Nothing but a series of sections and diagrams
could give the reader an idea of the construction of this
unrivalled instrument. The time to see it and wonder at it is
when the press is in full work. And even then you can see but
little of its construction, for the cylinders are wheeling round
with immense velocity. The rapidity with which the machine works
may be inferred from the fact that the printing cylinders (round
which the stereotyped plates are fixed), while making their
impressions on the paper, travel at the surprising speed of 200
revolutions a minute, or at the rate of about nine miles an hour!
Contrast this speed with the former slowness. Go back to the
beginning of the century. Before the year 1814 the turn-out of
newspapers was only about 300 single impressions in an hour--that
is, impressions printed on only one side of the paper. Koenig by
his invention increased the issue to 1100 impressions. Applegath
and Cowper by their four-cylinder machine increased the issue to
4000, and by the eight-cylinder machine to 10,000 an hour.
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