History of the Printing Industry
Printing in the West began with Johannes Gutenberg and has undergone heavy technological change since then, with methods becoming cheaper and more efficient. These developments led to widespread literacy, with newspapers, books and magazines becoming available to the masses.
The industry is changing rapidly even today; digital information (such as the Internet) has widely reduced the importance of printed-on-paper material.
Ancient Times to Gutenberg
The very earliest forms of printing go back to early Mesopotamia, around 3000 B.C., in the form of round cylinder seals for stamping signs or images onto clay tablets. Woodblock printing was used in China for more complex information, such as writing, from before 220 A.D.
This technique began to appear in Europe around the 1300s, mostly for putting images on cloth. In 1436, a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg invented the first Western printing press.
Unlike the Chinese alphabet, which has thousands of characters, the 26-letter Roman alphabet was much better suited to movable type. This meant that new printing plates could be made a lot more easily.
Gutenberg to the Industrial Revolution
The first newspaper, Relation aller Furnemmen und gedenckwurdigen Historien (Collection of all distinguished and commemorable news) was published in 1605 by Johann Carolus in Strasbourg, then in Germany.
Academic journals with limited circulation (mostly between universities, to share scientific knowledge) had been circulating since the 1500s. The first general-interest magazine (and the first use of the term) was The Gentlemen's Magazine, first published in London in 1731.
Industrial Advances
The Gutenberg press was far more efficient than manual copying, but books were still relatively expensive. In 1810, Friedrich Koenig patented a steam-powered printing press. Koenig's company, Koenig and Bauer, is still a major printing-press manufacturer.
The steam press was far than the older, manually powered presses, but in 1843 a New York inventor called Richard Hoe made another leap forward with the first rotary press. The rotary press fed a continuous stream of paper through drum-shaped cylinders and was much cheaper to operate than any of its predecessors.
Mass Circulation
The rotary press allowed newspapers and books to be produced at a price that even working-class people could afford. In the mid-to-late 1800s, publishers such as Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst competed fiercely for these readers with sensationalist reporting (with a lot of emphasis on crime and vice) that became known as yellow journalism.
Another result of cheaper printing was the dime novel, cheap stories (mostly for teenagers and young adults) that led directly to the low-priced fiction magazines that (due to the quality of the paper they used) are now known as pulp magazines.
In the mid-19th century, cheap smaller presses called jobbing presses appeared. These were low-priced and intended for smaller print runs. They made it possible to create advertising circulars, flyers and mass mail.
The Modern Era
Electronic technology in the mid-20th century led to the photocopier, which was developed in the late 1930s by Chester Carlson and first produced in 1959 by the Xerox Corp.
In 1975, IBM came out with the first high-speed laser printer, the Model 3800, for the business market. The first mass-market household model was the HP LaserJet, which was released in 1984.
With the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, the printing industry faces major changes. It's now possible to distribute information electronically at a much lower cost than on paper, and most newspaper publishers now produce online editions.
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