The idea of printing from plates or forms carried upon a flat bed beneath a cylinder was not a new one, having been employed by printers of copper-plate engravings in the fifteenth century. Their machines, however, were rude in form, and made of wood, the roller revolving in stationary bearings, while the bed, with the plate upon it and carrying the paper, covered by a blanket, on its surface, moved backward and forward under the roller. The inking was done by hand with balls. With the inauguration of this system of printing from type or forms placed upon a flat bed moved forwards and backwards under a revolving cylinder, commenced an entirely new era in the history of the printing press. It should be understood, however, that the vast number of patents granted for printing machines in which the cylinder is connected with the bed, or by the operation of two cylinders together, one holding the form and the other giving the impression, are almost all for improvements and devices of detail, the radical principles upon which these are founded remaining the same. Thus, Sir Rowland Hill, in the early part of the nineteenth century, projected a machine for printing from an endless roll, or “web” of paper; and in 1790 an Englishman named William Nicholson (author, inventor, patent agent, editor and school teacher) took out a patent covering the idea of cylinder presses in which the forms should be placed upon either a flat bed or cylinder at will and receive the impression from a cylinder covered with cloth or some similar material. Between the bed and cylinder, or between the two cylinders, the sheet was to be fed in and printed. The ink was to be put on by a roller built up of cloth and covered with leather. There is, however, a great difference between an actual invention and a scheme. If the simple proposition advanced to make a machine upon this principle, without its consummation, or without any press being produced, can be considered an invention, then Nicholson may (as a writer on the subject states) have been “so far ahead of his time as to leap over three generations” by his invention. As a matter of fact, however, his patents were mostly schemes, and little more, as a moment’s reflection will convince. He did not know how to curve the plates to be put upon the cylinders, nor how to secure them properly for good work--in fact, he did not know how to make the plates in any practicable manner. All these questions remained to be solved in order that the printing press might be an invention. On this account, therefore, I do not give descriptions of proposals to make machines, but of presses that have been actually made, and used sufficiently to entitle them to recognition as practical improvements exemplifying the progressive evolution of the printing press.