What is Printing?

Printing began to emerge and first developed in China. The early wood-block printing techniques began to be popular in the sixth century. The oldest printed books to this day employ sophisticated block printing techniques dating from AD 868 (Diamond Diamond). By the 12th and 13th centuries, libraries in Arabia and China had tens of thousands of books.

The development of printing was a breakthrough in the dissemination of knowledge: the printer was erected in Venice in 1469 and by 1500 the city had 417 printers. In 1470, Johann Heynlin established a printing house in Paris. In 1476, a printing press was established in England by William Caxton; In 1539, an Italian named Juan Pablos installed a imported printer in Mexico City, Mexico. Stephen Day built North America's first printing house in Massachusetts Bay in 1628, and was instrumental in establishing the Cambridge publishing house.

The first offset and lithographic printer was born in England around 1875 and was designed to be printed on metal. Offset made of cardboard photo paper to print from lithography to metal surface. About 5 years later, cardboard was replaced with rubber.

The first person to apply offset printing for paper printing could be Ira Washington Rubel in 1903. He stumbled across each time a sheet of paper was not fed to his lithograph machine in a rhythmic manner. The lithography is printed on a rubber-coated drum, and the next sheet of paper is stuck with two photos: a lithographic print on the top and a print on the bottom of the printed page. Rubel also noticed that the prints from the rubber stamps were more sharp and clean because the soft rubber pads were on paper rather than hard rock prints. He decided to print through the rubber plates. Independently of Rubel, brothers Charles Harris and Albert Harris also discovered this and created offset printers for Harris Auto Printing.

Harris's designs, developed from rotogravure printers, are very similar to those shown in the article. It consists of a print drum imprinted with ink and water rolls. A rubber drum exposed just below the drum. The print drum underneath is responsible for pressing the paper into the rubber drum to transmit the image. Today, this basic mechanism is still being used, but many improvements have been made, such as adding double sided printing or paper rolls (instead of paper sheets).

In the 1950s, offset printing became the most common printing technique for commercial printing, after many improvements were made to the lettering, ink and paper, optimizing print speed and longevity. lettering. Today, most printing, including printing press, uses this technique.