The journal continued to appear with regularity, though the printers employed at the office lived in a state of daily peril. The conspirators, finding themselves baffled, resolved upon trying another game. They contrived to have two of the men employed by Walter as compositors apprehended as deserters from the Royal Navy. The men were taken before the magistrate; but the charge was only sustained by the testimony of clumsy, perjured witnesses, and fell to the ground. The turn-outs next proceeded to assault the new hands, when Mr. Walter resolved to throw around them the protection of the law. By the advice of counsel, he had twenty-one of the conspirators apprehended and tried, and nineteen of them were found guilty and condemned to various periods of imprisonment. From that moment combination was at an end in Printing House Square. Mr. Walter's greatest achievement was his successful application of steam power to newspaper printing. Although he had greatly improved the mechanical arrangements after he took command of the paper, the rate at which the copies could be printed off remained almost stationary. It took a very long time indeed to throw off, by the hand-labour of pressmen, the three or four thousand copies which then constituted the ordinary circulation of The Times. On the occasion of any event of great public interest being reported in the paper, it was found almost impossible to meet the demand for copies. Only about 300 copies could be printed in the hour, with one man to ink the types and another to work the press, while the labour was very severe. Thus it took a long time to get out the daily impression, and very often the evening papers were out before The Times had half supplied the demand. Mr. Walter could not brook the tedium of this irksome and laborious process. To increase the number of impressions, he resorted to various expedients. The type was set up in duplicate, and even in triplicate; several Stanhope presses were kept constantly at work; and still the insatiable demands of the newsmen on certain occasions could not be met. Thus the question was early forced upon his consideration, whether he could not devise machinery for the purpose of expediting the production of newspapers. Instead of 300 impressions an hour, he wanted from 1500 to 2000. Although such a speed as this seemed quite as chimerical as propelling a ship through the water against wind and tide at fifteen miles an hour, or running a locomotive on a railway at fifty, yet Mr. Walter was impressed with the conviction that a much more rapid printing of newspapers was feasible than by the slow hand-labour process; and he endeavoured to induce several ingenious mechanical contrivers to take up and work out his idea.