Printing

Abstract Most modern newspaper historians rely on histories of powered newspaper printing based on debunked theories of technology that were developed in the 1930s or even earlier. This chapter, the first major reexamination of British newspaper printing in over fifty years, shows that few of those histories are fully true. The newspaper printing machine did not have a single inventor, as we have long believed, but rather a complex collaborative origin. Printing machines were not innovated at intervals over the century, but instead changed constantly, and their development was not focused on speed, but on variations intended to serve all sectors of a complex British printing market. Most Victorian printing machines and machine designs never became obsolete, but instead continued to be used well into the twentieth century.