"This copy, or model, is used for a mold into which we pour liquid metal. When this cools we have, you see, another copy of the type and in this the letters are all raised. The mold is curved to fit the cylinders before the molten metal is poured in, so that the stereotype plate, as the page of fixed type is called, can be clamped tight on the big cylinder. It is these big plates that you have seen used for type on the press cylinders."
"Jingles! but it is some work to print a newspaper!" exclaimed Jimmie.
"Yes, it is, and it is a very wonderful process, too, more wonderful every year. You and your mother will be interested in this paragraph in to-day's paper," said his uncle, passing Mrs. Granger one of the freshly printed papers. "In that article about the new press are some striking comparisons you will enjoy."
"What a change in printing!" said Mrs. Granger. "Just listen, Jimmie! 'The old flat screw press of the colonial period could print fifty small papers on one side in an hour; the Washington compound lever hand press in 1829--the best hand press ever made--brought the number up to 250; the revolving cylinder press made it possible to print about 1000 an hour; then in 1847 the Hoe lightning press printed 30,000; and now the Hoe rotary perfecting press prints on both sides,--not a little four-page paper, but a large-sized eight-page paper--at the rate of 24,000 an hour!'"
"Jingles!" said Jimmie again, for what can a boy say to such figures as those.
When Jimmie reached home that night he announced to his father that he was going to be a newspaper man.
"I'm willing," replied his father. "The printing press has done more for the progress of civilization than anything else, and the modern newspaper is one of the greatest factors in the world's advancement. Go ahead. You'll live to see the printing press reach even more people than it does now."
[Illustration: SEXTUPLE PERFECTING PRESS]
Mr. Granger was right. When Jimmie was no older than his uncle had been on the day that Jimmie first saw a big press, Jimmie did indeed see another wonder. It was a Hoe Double Octuple Press--the biggest press in the world in 1912--which, with others built on the same principle even if they were smaller, made newspaper printing cheap enough so that a sixteen-page paper could be sold for one cent.