Wood Type Letterpress

Wood Type Letterpress

Printing refers to the process of reproducing text and/or images as desired. The process also lends itself to mass production of the same without much effort.

The history of printing starts from around 3000 BC, in early Mesopotamia, where rounded cylindrical seals were used to impress their contents on tablets made up of clay. In India, China, Europe and Egypt cloth printing was the first to be developed; later the same techniques were used for printing on papyrus/paper or any other writing material.

Later wood-block printing techniques, invented in East Asia, were discovered. The earliest forms date back to around 220 AD. The wooden blocks were cut and then the letter/symbol of choice is then embossed upon the block through delicate carving techniques. Of course, the image of the symbol/letter so carved had to be a mirror image of the original. These can them simply be used as stamps to print the desired letters/symbols. These techniques spread to the Middle Eastern regions of Asia in the 9th - 10th centuries, whereas in Europe they began to be adopted by around 1300 AD.

Movable type printing techniques, which consist of printing using components that could be physically moved and grouped together to form a small part or whole of the document to be printed, originated in China in around 1040 AD. Later Johannes Gutenberg independently developed his own system and techniques of movable type printing in Europe in the year 1450 AD. These were found to be more durable and less labor-intensive. This is considered an important breakthrough in printing as it was due to these developments that printing presses began to spread all around Europe.

The next development in printing too place in the form of a technique known as Lithography. Lithography, invented in 1796 by Aloys Senefelder, is a process which uses certain types of chemical reactions to produce an image on a smooth surface. Later, in the 19th century Chromolithography was developed, which was used to print color images on paper.

The most recent revolutionary modern development, in the field of printing, was the advent of laser printers. Invented in the year 1969 at Xerox by Gary Starkweather, its immediate implications were that office documents could now be printed at the office itself. There was no need to hire professional typesetters to do the same. The advent of Personal Computers later only further fueled the need of laser printers. It was also during this time that Photocopiers began to gain popularity commercially. Creating copies of important documents became easy thanks to their introduction in the office and in various local stationary stores.

The most recently developed technique of printing is printing in 3D. In this technique layers of printing material are deposited over each other to form a 3D model of the subject. This process is usually computer controlled. This technique lends itself to applications in modeling like CAD/CAM, in medical uses for studying tissues, replication of real life objects without using the traditional molding techniques etc.

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