ABSTRACT
By the start of the 19th century, there had been little change in printmaking technology since Gutenberg’s press. Printing houses employed a large workforce using what were called common presses, Gutenberg-style flat-bed and platen presses with hand-set type. Then print technology would go in an entirely different direction, shifting to lithography, which allowed for flat printing plates without the need for type slugs at all. Lithography also made color printing more practical. At the start of the 19th century there were several inventors in pursuit of a machine to manufacture paper. The first one to succeed in building a working machine was Nicolas-Louis Robert, who received a patent for it in France in 1799. The earliest devices that used a keyboard date to the early 18th century, starting with a 1714 patent taken out by the Englishman Henry Mill for a ‘machine for transcribing letters’.
