Bradford Industrial
Museum
Ground floor Galleries
First floor Galleries
Outdoors
PRINTING GALLERY
The printing gallery holds different types of old machines in working condition; plus printing equipment.
Retired printers also get back into their role by operating the hot metal presses at the Industrial Museum to show visitors how newspapers were published and advertisements were printed before new technology came. Demonstrations of the working machines on Wednesdays: contact the museum for current times.
This gallery holds machinery from the last of the hot metal typesetting print shops as used in the newspaper industry.
All the machines are authentic and have been carefully restored to full working order by a team of dedicated volunteer
There is a display of lead glyphs for typesetting.
Tolbert Lanston,
Monotype Machine.
The mono type was invented by Tolbert Lanston in 1887 and used to produce books . It consisted of a keyboard consisting of 276 keys, the amount needed to cover all font variants such as bold or italic and a metal type caster to produce the type.
It differed from any previous machines because it produced separate letters of type making mistakes easy to rectify.
Two years after Lanston introduced the Monotype Machine, he abandoned the concept of stamping letters into cold metal and introduced casting techniques. Within a year, he developed the so-called “Hot-Metal Machine” for which he took out a US patent that was granted in 1896
Linotype Model 78
The linotype is regarded as one of the three key inventions in printing technology since Guttenberg four hundred and fifty years previously.
The linotype machine was developed by the German clock maker Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884.
An operator using a keyboard types an instruction that drops a letter matrice from a magazine. The matrices form a line, are moved to a mould, where lead is injected called a slug. The line is ejected from the mould and the matrices are taken back and distributed automatically into the magazine, ready for use again.
In July, 1886, the first commercially used Linotype was installed in the printing office of the New York Tribune. Here it was immediately used on the daily paper and a large book. The book, the first ever composed with the new Linotype method, was titled, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports.
The Phoenix
The Phoenix press series was produced by Schelter & Giesecke based in Leipzig.
The Leipzig-based foundry started in 1819 by punchcutter Johann Schelter and typefounder Christian Friedrich Giesecke (1793-1850). It was Nationalised in 1946 by the new East German government, forming Typoart, Dresden.
Also known as the Universal machine when built for the American market it was mostly used to print forms and business letters.
Meteor Automatic Stop-Cylinder Printing Press
Manufactured around 1930 by Dawson, Payne and Elliot part of Vickers Printing Machinery Group. The Meteor represents the most compact and advanced of the wharfdale stop cylinder press.
The first Wharfedale was built in 1855 with a collaboration between David Payne of Otley and Mr Stephen Soulby the inventor which they called the Ulverstonian. These presses were the first to use a stationary cylinder and a moving bed, that is, the printing bed moves under the cylinder instead of the cylinder moving across the bed.
Shortly after Payne conceived the stop-cylinder principle that, within the next few years was to have such a shattering impact on the industry.
Heidelberg Printing Press
The Original Heidelberg Platen Press was a letterpress printing press manufactured by the Heidelberger Druckmaschinen company in Germany. It was often referred to as the "Windmill", after the shape and movement of its paper feed system. When introduced, it was also called the "Super Heidelberg" or the "Super Speed
The printing press is most famous for its windmill-like automatic paper feed mechanism.
There are two blades that rotate from the paper feed, where it picks up a sheet of paper; to the platen, where the printing impression is made; to the paper receiver, where the paper is released; followed by the blade pointing straight up ready to start the next cycle.
There are two blades mounted on opposite sides of the rotor (when one blade is picking up the next sheet, the other blade is releasing the previously printed sheet)
Gem ( no1 ) printing press.
Manufactured by T. C. THOMPSON & Son, Limited Manchester about 1890
Treadle operated hand fed.
Wharfedale printing press.
This Wharfedale printing press was made by Payne & Sons of Otley, Yorkshire in the 1890s. The Wharfedale is one of several mid-19th century designs that uses a cylinder to print rather than a flat plate. It was invented by William Dawson and David Payne in 1858 and could print over 1000 sheets an hour.
Columbian printing press. Iron lever press
Clymer & Dixon, London
The use of cast iron instead of wood in printing press manufacture makes book printing more efficient. In the era of revolutions, the demand for printed products rises. The eagle is required as a counter-weight.
Towards the end of the 18th century, it becomes customary to build printing presses with higher contact pressure in order to enhance printing quality. In around 1800, George Clymer constructs the cast-iron Columbian Press in Philadelphia. Instead of a screw spindle, this press uses a manoeuvrable, mechanic leverage system with a counterweight for pressing the paper onto the setting copy. This more efficient method of force transmission significantly facilitates and speeds up the work of the printer