Text 1d

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In the course of the 19^th century several important innovations laid the foundation for a number of printing techniques that were not directly related to Gutenberg’s invention.

Reproduction of illustrations.

The first process for reproducing illustrations was xylography, using wood cuts that printed in relief and that therefore could be combined with letterpress, the picture blocks and the pieces of type for texts being locked into the same form. As early as the second half of the 15^th century, xylography faced competition from engraving on metal that printed by intaglio; the metal plate (cooper, sometimes brass, zink and even steel after 1806), engraved with a tool or etched with acid, was inked and carefully wiped so that ink remained only in incisions and was transferred to paper under pressure in a cylinder press. Since the intaglio method of printing was not compatible with woodcut printing, sheets of texts and of illustration for the same book had to be printed separately.

Presses for printing curved intaglio engraved plates were perfected during the 19^th century with mechanized inking with the use of rollers and wiping with the use of reflowing cloth bands or rotating disks covered with calico.

Lithography.

The third printing process that had undergone significant development was lithography. In 1796 Aloys Senefelder of Prague investigated the properties of a stone with a calcium carbonate base and a fine, homogeneous, porous surface. A design drawn on its surface with greesy ink, wetted with water and then brushed with ordinary ink, retained the ink only on the design. The latter could be reproduced on a sheet of paper pressed against the stone. Senefelder further established that a metal such as zink had the same properties.

By 1850 the first mechanized lithographic press with a cylinder, flannel – covered rollers for wetting, and rollers for inking was perfected. The fact that it was possible to replace the stone by a zink plate that could be curved made it possible to build rotary presses (the first in 1868) in which the paper passed between the plate-bearing cylinder and the impression cylinder.

Photosensitivity, Gravure and Rotogravure.

In the 1820s Joseph-Nicephore Niepce established that certain chemical compounds are sensitive to light. This marked the origins of photogravure and led to both the invention of photography (between 1829 and 1838) and the use of photographic processes for the printed reproduction of photographs.

In 1852 William Henry Fox Talbot, a. British scientist and inventor invented the screen and also opened the way for a new development in intaglio printing: rotogravure.

The screen was perfected in 1880s, by substituting for the cloth two sheets of glass with uniform parallel lines that crossed perpendicularly. The screen made possible letterpress and lithographic reproduction of the full range of tones by using the effect of the diffusion of light through the mesh of its grid.

In 1862-64 G.W. Swan of Britain invented carbon tissue, paper coated with gelatin that can be rendered photosensitive and exposed to light before being applied to a metal surface of any shape.

In 1878 a Czech, Karl Klietsch, thought of copying a grid screen directly onto carbon tissue, which could be used to transfer the cells necessary for intaglio printing to a cylinder at the same time as the image to be reproduced. In 1895 Klietsch, with English colleagues, founded the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company, which published reproductions of pictures on paper by rotogravure. They kept their process a secret.

In a parallel way patents for a slightly different process, in which the image to be reproduced was screened before making the impression on the carbon tissue, were taken out in Germany and the United States. But a workman from the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company emigrated to the United States in 1903 and there revealed their secret, and rotogravure became widespread.

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Задание 3. Ответьте на вопросы к тексту 1D.

1. What was the first process for reproducing illustrations?

2. When were presses for printing intaglio-engraved plates perfected?

3. Who investigated the properties of a stone?

4. What other achievement belongs to this scientist and inventor?

5. What innovations were made in the lithographic press in the 19^th century?

6. Who found new properties in certain chemical compounds?

7. What enabled photography to appear?

8. Who invented the screen?

9. What did the invention of the screen result in?

10. What was the essential of Klietsch’s invention?

11. What new printing process appeared owing to Klietrch’s investigations?