Printing Press

A printing press is a machine that applies pressure to transfer ink onto a surface of paper, cloth or a similar material, improving on the earlier method of rubbing the paper by hand against the inked printing surface. It was invented by the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, and its spread across Europe fed the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution by lowering the cost of printed texts, raising adult literacy, and encouraging books in national languages rather than Latin. The basic wooden handpress design changed little for three centuries until the Industrial Revolution, when Lord Stanhope built an iron press by 1800, The Times adopted a steam powered rotary press developed by Friedrich Koenig in 1814, and a rotary printing press introduced by Richard Hoe in 1843 allowed millions of impressions a day. During the twentieth century, the letterpress was largely displaced in commercial work by offset printing, phototypesetting and digital printing.