the most ingenious contrivances of the
invention--the cutting machinery, by means of which the paper is
divided by a quick knife into the 5500 sheets of which the entire web
consists. The tapes hurry the now completely printed newspaper up an
inclined plane, from which the divided sheets are showered down in a
continuous stream by an oscillating frame, where they are met by two
boys, who adjust the sheets as they fall. The reel of four miles long
is printed and divided into newspapers complete in about twenty-five
minutes.

The machine is almost entirely self-acting, from the pumping-up of the
ink into the ink-box out of the cistern below stairs, to the
registering of the numbers as they are printed in the manager's room
above. It is always difficult to describe a machine in words. Nothing
but a series of sections and diagrams could give the reader an idea of
the construction of this unrivalled instrument. The time to see it and
wonder at it is when the press is in full work. And even then you can
see but little of its construction, for the cylinders are wheeling
round with immense velocity. The rapidity with which the machine works
may be inferred from the fact that the printing cylinders (round which
the stereotyped plates are fixed), while making their impressions on
the paper, travel at the surprising speed of 200 revolutions a minute,
or at the rate of about nine miles an hour!

Contrast this speed with the former slowness. Go back to the beginning
of the century. Before the year 1814 the turn-out of newspapers was
only about 300 single impressions in an hour--that is, impressions
printed on only one side of the paper. Koenig by his invention
increased the issue to 1100 impressions. Applegath and Cowper by their
four-cylinder machine increased the issue to 4000, and by the
eight-cylinder machine to 10,000 an hour. But these were only
impressions printed on one side of the paper. The first perfecting
press--that is, printing simultaneously the paper on both sides--was
the Walter, the speed of which has been raised to 12,000, though, if
necessary, it can produce excellent work at the rate of 17,000 complete
copies of an eight-page paper per hour. Then, with the new method of
stereotyping--by means of which the plates can be infinitely multiplied
and by the aid of additional machines, the supply of additional
impressions is absolutely unlimited.

The Walter Press is not a monopoly. It is manufactured