Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The honor of inventing the first entirely dry mat and making a new product which constituted the basis of all later dry mats, belongs to GEORGE EASTWOOD, of Kingston, England. There has been some controversy as to whether the Englishman Eastwood or the German Schimansky was the original inventor of the dry mat cold process […]

The next step towards the invention of printing was the impressing of plates made out of one single block of wood upon which was engraved in relief the matter one proposed to print. In our days this would be designated as a wood-cut. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, the wood of the linden […]

In 1863 the idea of using dry pulp appeared for the first time. This method of manufacture was not practicable, too difficult and these mats could not be made on a commercial scale. The first attempt to use a dry cold process and to mold by rolling a mat only once was made by GEORGE […]

Just as the deficiencies and shortcomings of the plaster of Paris process led to the invention of the papier-mache process of stereotyping, thus in due time the drawbacks of the latter made the invention of a better method a necessity. The quality of the work done by means of the wet mat method could hardly […]

WILLARD S. WHITMORE, of Washington, D. C., in 1881, in his invention relating to paper molds or martices for casting stereotype plates, proceeded as follows: Instead of making his mat up of alternate layers of unsized paper and sheets of tissue paper pasted together and in order to remedy the drawbacks of pulling in wet […]

The first printing in America was done in the year 1540 by the Jesuits in Mexico, the first book being a religious work entitled “A Manual for Adults.” The first printing press in the United States was erected and operated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1638, under the charge of STEPHEN DAYE, and the first book […]

An improvement on the wet mat stereotyping process embodying an idea of using dry material was made in 1863 by ALFRED VINCENT NEWTON, an English mechanical draughtsman. He was granted a patent for “an improved mode of and apparatus for producing stereotype plates.” His application first describes the prevailing process as consisting of several sheets […]

A man who was prominent in the development of the papier-mache or wet mat method of stereotyping for newspapers was a Swiss printer, JAMES DELLAGANA. He learned stereotyping according to Genoux’s patented process in Paris, and set up a stereotyping shop in London. In the year 1855 he was granted a patent for casting plates […]

Before continuing our compilation of the different steps in the art of stereotyping, a few remarks pertaining to the history of the newspaper will be of interest. A newspaper in its modern acceptation can only be properly dated from the time when in Western Europe the invention of printing made a multiplication of copies a […]

Thus, in the period between 1828 and 1829 the papier mache or wet mat process of stereotyping was invented. This invention represented a tremendous advance in the art of stereoptyping and up to this present day paper mats have dominated the art. CLAUDE GENOUX, a French printer, is the inventor of the so-called “papier mache” […]