THE LATEST IMPROVEMENT IN NEWSPAPER MACHINERY.
IF any of the children of this world are justified of their works, the Mechanicians are. Their "wisdom," such as it is, seems to know no limit, and they discover and invent and apply their knowledge with a success which every now and then astounds the majority of mankind, and compels even those who, like ourselves, cannot believe that the world is much the better for its rapid material progress, and utterly disbelieve in the gospel of hurry to reconsider their own conclusions, to doubt whether it is possible, in the Providence of the Almighty, that such wealth of intellectual effort should all be thrown away. It is but the other day that we described an invention which may, when perfected, transmit human utterance over half the world, conveying even the inflections of the voice ; and another which records and, as it were embalms, uttered sounds for the in- struction of posterity. We have read only this week of. a. machine which, if all that is said of it be true, will convey articulate orders over many square miles, allow an Admiral to give verbal orders to a whole fleet, or enable a General to convey a General Order by his own lips to an entire corps aT'arme-e, so that every man shall hear every word at the same indi- visible point of time ; and now we have to record a more practical invention than either. Either the conductors of the New York Tribune are lying without motive, and against their own interest, or they have put up a printing machine which realises the dreams of the most advanced newspaper proprietors, and gives to the passiomfor hurry the greatest gratification it has ever yet received. They assert that Messrs. Hoe have put np on their premises a press, 5 ft. high, 6 ft. wide, and 24 ft. long, which can turn out 30,000 copies of their paper an hour ready folded for delivery by post. " The entire process is absolutely automatic.. A roll of paper half-a-ton in weight, and four and a half miles long, and in width just double the length of one of the Tribune's pages, is hung on a horizontal axis over the press, the end of the big ribbon is pushed into the machine, a lever starts the revolutions, and, as the roll unwinds, complete copies of the Tribune, neatly folded and ready for the mail, issue in two streams at the end of the machine, no hand touching them from the time the half-ton roll is swung into its place till the boys gather up the folded papers and deliver them to pur- chasers, or turn them over to the mail clerks." Papers so folded have been forwarded to us, and the folding is neater than when done by hand—though different, the automatic folder folding in longer strips than human folders do—and they have this further advantage, that they are ready cut for reading. As the Tribune, like most other cheap papers, is printed on woolly paper, which can hardly be cut with a paper-knife, and cannot be cut by nature's paper-knife, the forefinger, this is an immense advan- tage to the reader ; while it offers this temptation to the adver- tiser, that all advertisements are placed on the same level. All advertisements, in fact, can be read without cutting, a definite advantage to which, especially in America, where men read half a dozen newspapers in a morning, advertisers are sensitively alive. It is stated, moreover, that the new machine is far simpler than any old one, that " a whole labyrinth of wheels and tapes and ponderous cylinders have been abolished by a sweep of the hand," and that the process is now nearly as cheap as that which prevailed forty years ago. Of course any number of machines required can be set up, and the types being once stereotyped, any number required within the hour can be printed off. The mechanician has, in Sect, in this particular application of his art, nearly attained the ideal. It is still necessary to discover a method —quite conceivable—of taking any number of stereotype plates, with the loss, say, of thirty seconds per copy, but the work of print- ing them off has been almost perfected. Messrs. Hoe have created an automatic machinery which, supposing all the world to be athirst for copies of the Tribune, will turn them out, cut and folded and ready for the carts, in any number purchasers may choose, and within the time allowed by the distributing section of the trade for the production of a newspaper. The whole of man- kind, if willing to pay twopence a day for them, might have Tribunes to read, and each copy would start to its destination be- fore six a.m. The art of multiplying newspapers is in fact carried as far as it will go. Swifter, simpler, and cheaper processes may be invented, and probably will be, but Messrs. Hoe, or rather, per- haps, the mechanician who invents for them, and whom nobody individualises, has provided the means of gratifying any probable or even any conceivable demand.
And what is the use of it all ? It is quite possible that although the machine will never save us or bring us a sixpence, an unconscious feeling of trade pride induces us to admire this particular feat of the mechanicians more than we otherwise should, but even under that impulse we cannot resist the inquiry,—To what good does all this tend ? A number of men who must have been men of very unusual, though, it may be, of very limited capacity, have given through more than a generation the highest powers of their minds to create a machine which can print quickly. They have mastered difficulties which seemed insuperable—for instance, the production of rolls of paper miles long, which would not tear when unwound, was at first pronounced impossible, and wonderful machinery had to be devised to meet that single obstacle—and have, in pursuit of their object, conquered alike time and matter, and so to speak, compelled iron to do the work of the human brain ; have, that is, exhibited successfully some of the highest of human quali- ties, energy, ingenuity, perseverance, and it may well be insight—for the mechanician has flashes of inspiration, like the poet,—and all for what? In order that more people may be able to buy papers, which may be bad or good,—and which have a tendency to become bad when they address the whole world, be- cause men so diverse in their virtues are all alike in their vices,— a few minutes sooner that they otherwise would obtain them. That is literally all the gain. Suppose the Tribune the best paper in the world, and as papers go it is far from a bad one, and still the machinery it previously possessed would supply to everybody who would wait a few hours all the intelligence and wisdom and instruction its conductors have to bestow upon their readers. Nothing is gained by the extra quantity of brain - power recently expended except the gratification of the desire for hurry, which is little else and little better than a new and vulgar lust. People want their gossip early, and so men whom Archi- medes would have respected and Euclid would have classed among good calculators waste the best of themselves for a quarter of a century to gratify that taste ; and when they are successful in excelsis, the age admires itself, as clearly in advance of all pre- ceding ages. So it is, as far as applied mechanics are concerned, but in advance towards what ? Who is the better, or the nobler, or the stronger, or the less afraid of death, or the more inclined to be pitiful towards the suffering, or the less inclined to exact his extreme right, because he can, through a marvellous expenditure of intelligence, industry, and money, be sure of getting his newspaper a few minutes earlier ? Suppose he learned patience and self-denial and the habit of reflection by waiting for the paper a little, instead of dissipating his brains in its perusal. Would not the slight modicum of addition which he might so make to his stock of those qualities, be directly more beneficial to him than the earlier receipt of a sheet which is not one whit, be it remembered, more certain to be more intelligent, or more moderate, or more Christian, for the mechanical rapidity with which it can be produced ? The suggestion will seem to half our readers ridiculous, but we hold the old-world belief that patience is one of the elements of that kind of fortitude which is essential, if not to the highest character, at least to its highest developments.
But the invention does good to the world, by enriching the Press ? Alas, we have begun, in the light of the last twelve months, to doubt the accuracy of that proposition ! The old idea of all publicists, repeatedly maintained by ourselves, was that a journal could hardly grow too rich. The richer it became, the more ready would its proprietors become to pay for accurate news, for careful thinkers, for good writing, for the best of all the things which make the difference between one paper and another. The richer it became, too, the more would its proprietors ftd1 under the influence of cultivated opinion, and of that earthly, but still beneficial code which is em- bodied in the word " respectability." The argument seemed unanswerable, but many points were overlooked in presenting it. The richer a journal becomes, the greater is the temptation of its proprietors to pander to the political passions of the mass, for the greater seems to be the loss consequent on not doing so. Every swerve, however momentary, in the popular regard costs it £10,000 a year, and seems, therefore, a calamity to be avoided at any cost. Most men are influenced by the positive as well as the comparative bigness of anything, and though the man who makes £100,000 ought to bear the loss of £10,000 more easily than the man with £1,000 bears the loss of £100, still in practice it is not so, the actual volume of the loss rather than its proportion to the whole being the measure of its impact on the mind. if the Tribune, with its new machine, can sell half a million of copies a day, a decrease in the demand by ten per cent. will seem to its proprietors something appalling. They will be more enslaved by the multitude, aud less prepared to go their own way when the multitude is wrong, than they are now, and their riches pro lento will decrease instead of increasing their good qualities. Then the success of a newspaper increases its power, and decreases its actual—we do not mean its moral—responsibility ; and power of that kind developes very speedily the usual attendants of power, —caprice, weariness, and the desire for large and spasmodic ex- citement. But above all, the success of a newspaper, and espe- cially of the kind of newspaper to which a new and rapid machine is a fortune, makes of it a political force, and exposes its owners to all the temptations to which the political forces of the country are exposed. They are liable to seductions, to terrors, to influences such as press upon kings, and they constantly yield to them as the Kings do. They sink, as most kings have sunk, below the average of character ; and gain, as all kings gain, the most demoralising of convictions,—that their interests and the interests of those they represent are identical, that for them a cynical selfishness is right. We doubt greatly if the world will find that in the enormous papers now rising in every country it has gained an advantage, while we are certain that in the gratifi- cation of its hurry to get such papers it has gained none. Messrs. Hoe, with all their acuteness, do but delay the competition among newspapers for want of which the air of the newspaper world in America, in England, and in France grows thick and oppressive to all who breathe it.
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