On the Economy of Machinery and ManufacturesBabbage, Charles
ReligionComparative
On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures
Babbage, Charles
Machinery; Manufactures
101. There is one application of lithographic printing which
does not appear to have received sufficient attention, and
perhaps further experiments are necessary to bring it to
perfection. It is the reprinting of works which have just arrived
from other countries. A few years ago one of the Paris newspapers
was reprinted at Brussels as soon as it arrived by means of
lithography. Whilst the ink is yet fresh, this may easily be
accomplished: it is only necessary to place one copy of the
newspaper on a lithographic stone; and by means of great pressure
applied to it in a rolling press, a sufficient quantity of the
printing ink will be transferred to the stone. By similar means,
the other side of the newspaper may be copied on another stone,
and these stones will then furnish impressions in the usual way.
If printing from stone could be reduced to the same price per
thousand as that from moveable types, this process might be
adopted with great advantage for the supply of works for the use
of distant countries possessing the same language. For a single
copy might be printed off with transfer ink, and thus an English
work, for example, might be published in America from stone,
whilst the original, printed from moveable types, made its
appearance on the same day in England.
102. It is much to be wished that such a method were
applicable to the reprinting of facsimiles of old and scarce
books. This, however, would require the sacrifice of two copies,
since a leaf must be destroyed for each page. Such a method of
reproducing a small impression of an old work, is peculiarly
applicable to mathematical tables, the setting up of which in
type is always expensive and liable to error, but how long ink
will continue to be transferable to stone, from paper on which it
has been printed, must be determined by experiment. The
destruction of the greasy or oily portion of the ink in the
character of old books, seems to present the greatest impediment;
if one constituent only of the ink were removed by time, it might
perhaps be hoped, that chemical means would ultimately be
discovered for restoring it: but if this be unsuccessful, an
attempt might be made to discover some substance having a strong
affinity for the carbon of the ink which remains on the paper,
and very little for the paper itself.(2*)
103. Lithographic prints have occasionally been executed in
colours. In such instances a separate stone seems to have been
required for each colour, and considerable care, or very good
mechanism, must have been employed to adjust the paper to each
stone. If any two kinds of ink should be discovered mutually
inadhesive, one stone might be employed for two inks; or if the
inking-roller for the second and subsequent colours had portions
cut away corresponding to those parts of the stone inked by the
previous ones, then several colours might be printed from the
same stone: but these principles do not appear to promise much,
except for coarse subjects.
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