Roller Printing Machine

A roller printing machine prints a repeating pattern onto cloth by passing the fabric between a large central cylinder and one or more engraved copper rollers, each roller carrying one color of a pattern etched into its surface, so that a design that once took a skilled worker a full day to block print by hand could instead be printed continuously at high speed. The Scottish calico printer Thomas Bell patented roller printing in 1783, having already worked with engraved copperplates for printing textiles from 1770, and his original design for a six-color roller machine suffered at first from the rollers falling out of register with one another; the Manchester engineer Adam Parkinson corrected this registration problem in 1785, after which the firm of Livesey, Hargreaves and Company put Bell's improved machine into successful commercial use printing calico in up to six colors in a single pass. A single roller printing machine and one operator could print ten to twelve thousand yards of cloth in a ten-hour day, an output no hand block printer could approach, and roller printing remained the dominant method of textile printing for well over a century afterward.