PRINTING OFF

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 32, 8 February 1915, Page 15

PRINTING OFF

the rollers is printed by the four plates of the first cylinder on one side, and then by the four plates of the second cylinder on the other side. The pages are assembled folded, cut, and turned out at the other end ready for the reader. GETTING OUT THE .EXTRA. But it is far more interesting to watch the press at work. In almost as few seconds as it would take minutes to write the description the last plates are clamped on, and the engineer, with a last _ quick, expert glance to see that all is right, looks up and nods to the man at the starting lever. With a movement of the handle the huge inert mechanism of the press suddenly becomes alive. . The wheels begin to revolve, the cylinders to turn, the rollers to move, and the wide white strip of paper to wind its devious way from the slowly rotating reels through the press, in and out, over and | under, in a miraculous passage until it comes out a printed newspaper. The speed increases, and the low rumble becomes a throbbing roar, and soon the big rotary is in full swing. The din is deafening, and only ears attuned to the noise can catch what is said. The reels are now spinning rapidly, and paper rushing like a triple river in parallel channels through the three decks until the three sheets meet at the top of the polished plate and pour over in a continuous cataract of printed paper. The black print appears to slur to grey in the great speed, and the folded papers come out in a sort of cage at the bottom of this last stage of the press at the rate of six a second. This is for one machine ; the other press is printing the same number at the same rate. The papers come out neatly folded and counted in two dozen lots, each lot being marked by a paper automatically pushed out further than the others. So the press roars on, a miracle of human genius, turning out nearly 24,000 copies an hour, all ready for the public to read. The public reads its Post, but does not realise the immense organisation and the wonderful machinery that are required to bring it out every day. The linotype and the rotary press are the commonplaces of a marvellous world. _ To run the hive of machinery that is needed to bring out The Post, there are two gas engines, each of about 50 horsepower, one working on town gas and the other on producer gas. They are really in duplicate in case of breakdown. The huge printing presses are driven by electric motors, > which are again in' duplicate as a similar precaution against emergency. One motor is driven off the tramway power circuit at 500 volts direct current and develops 66 horse-power, while the other is run off the alternating current of the electric lighting circuit and is of approximately 30 hoise-power. It will be seen that every effort throughout the process of bringing out a newspaper is directed against any possible stoppage. If one means of generating power fails there are three others to serve, so that the possibility of the public missing its Evening Post is very remote indeed — as remote as human foresight can devise.

AT THE ROTARY PRESSES The first edition ' has already been printed and' is out on the streets or away' to catch the trains. ' It is four o'clock, and the paper ' has "gone to press" for, the extra edition.' Those were the last plates • which went down the lift just now from the stereo room. While - they, are seized by the machinists and claftiped on' the last vacant cylinders of the towering presses, there is just time for a word of description. The printing of the paper is the last act in ,the drama of production, and the most spectacular of all. There are the monster presses, which seem -to share in the atmosphere of deliberate • haste, and almost palpably yearn , to be moving. One despairs of a, full description; the salient features alone can be picked out of the tremendous mass of machinery, set in a ponderous frame .of steel. One notices the three decks, or stories, in the presses, bringing their topmost part to twice the height of the men who work them. Each deck has its series of cylinders geared together by big cog-wheels and a series of smaller rollers round them. At one end of the press are huge 1 rolls of paper, which stretched out would extend over three miles — a roll to each deck. The paper itself runs through a maze of rollers, in and out, until it plunges at the other end over a polished steel triangular slanting face. It is easy to note while the machine is standing still, that some of the larger cylinders are covered with the stereotyped curved plates which were seen in the making, _ from the "forme" to the finished article in the stereo-room up above. Close against them are similar-sized cylinders, or rollers, covered with a material that looks like felt. This, composed of two layers, is the "blanket," and the papei runs between, this and the cylinders carrying the stereotyped plates. The smaller, shiny, black glistening rollers are for distributing the printing ink over the plates on the cylinders. FROM PAPER TO PRINT. As the paper, therefore, passes between the, inked stereotype cylinder and the "blanket" cylinder it receives an impression of all the projecting type matter 1 on the plates, and— in a wordprints a page of The Post. To be more exact, it prints two pages each half revolution, as the stereotype cylinder is two-page wide, and the main reels of paper the same width. Each complete revolution it can either print two pages twice or four separate pages. As there are two sets of plate-carrying cylindois to each deck of the press, and as each cylinder carries four plates, it is clear that the press can print eight pages of The Post in one deck, or twice as many four-page portions of the paper in the same time. ' Each deck prints both bides of the continuous strip of paper as it comes from' the reel. Thus it is possible with the three decks to print at one time either an eight-page paper, tenpage, twelve-page, sixteen, twenty, or twenty-four-page papers. The speed at which _ the papers are produced varies according to the number of pages each I""" "ontnins Thp thing to understand is that each deck has its spool, or reel of paper, and its two printing cylindeis, leacn containing tour plates, and the strip of paper in its passage through