Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.Knight, Charles
Philosophy
Knowledge is power : $b A view of the productive forces of modern society and the results of labor, capital and skill.
Knight, Charles
Industrial arts; Industries
But the printing machine would have worked feebly and imperfectly
without the paper machine. That most complete invention has not only
cheapened paper itself, but it has cheapened the subsequent operations
of printing, in a remarkable degree. It has enabled one revolution of
the cylinder of the printing machine to produce four sheets instead of
one, or a surface of print equal to four sheets. When paper was
altogether made by hand, the usual paper for books was called demy; and
a sheet of demy produced sixteen octavo pages of a book. The paper could
not have been economically made larger by hand. A sheet of paper equal
to four sheets of demy is now worked at the newspaper machine; and
sixty-four pages of an octavo book might be so worked, if it were
needful for cheapening production. Double demy is constantly worked for
books. Thus, one economical arrangement of science produces another
contrivance; and machines in one direction combine with machines having
a different object, to produce legitimate cheapness, injurious to no
one, but beneficial to all.
Let us attempt to convey a notion of the beautiful operations of the
paper-machine.
In the whole range of machinery, there is, perhaps, no series of
contrivances which so forcibly address themselves to the senses. There
is nothing mysterious in the operation; we at once see the beginning and
the end of it. At one extremity of the long range of wheels and
cylinders we are shown a stream of pulp, not thicker than milk and
water, flowing over a moving plane; at the other extremity the same
stream has not only become perfectly solid, but is wound upon a reel in
the form of hard and smooth paper. This is, at first sight, as
miraculous as any of the fancies of an Arabian tale. Aladdin's wonderful
lamp, by which a palace was built in a night, did not in truth produce
more extraordinary effects than science has done with the paper-machine.
[Illustration: Paper-making by Hand.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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