Lesson 5

Exercise 1. Read and translate the text.

History

Although printing has been used in Western countries for more than 500 years, the creation of reproductions by mechanical means has a much longer history. Relief printing using stamps to impress designs into soft clay or wax has been known for thousands of years in the Middle East and in other parts of Asia. Designs or inscriptions were also carved into stone or cast into metal to make seals.

China was the fist country to print with paper, ink, and carved wooden blocks, a process called xylography. The invention of paper in China in the 8^th century AD provided a smooth, flexible surface on which to reproduce an image. In this process, a single carved wooden block of text was used to print impressions on whole pages. By the 11^th century, the Chinese had cut the blocks into individual characters, creating the word’s fist movable type.

Xylography was also the fist printing method used in Europe in the early 1400s. By 1450, Gutenberg’s combination of movable metal type and the printing press had produced Europe’s fist typeset book – the Gutenberg Bible. Gutenberg’s process spread quickly to other European nations. Over time, the literacy rate gradually rose among the population of Europe. Literature and scientific and religious texts, once read only by scholars, nobility, and the educated priesthood, were now available to an ever-widening audience.

As the demand for printed books steadily increased, printers had to improve their methods and equipment. They developed sturdy metal presses to replace the common wooden press, created stereotype and electrotype plates to make greater numbers of copies, and designed mechanically driven and automatically inked presses to increase printing speed and quality.

Not all advances in printing technology came from printers or designers and manufacturers. In 1796 German author Aloysius Senefelder, in his search for an inexpensive means of publishing his own plays, developed the techniques of lithography. Joseph-Nicephore Niepce, a French landowner and inventor, discovered in the 1820s that certain chemical compounds were sensitive to light. His work marked the origins of photogravure and eventually led to the invention of photography and the use of photographic processes to reproduce images.

Beginning with the invention of the offset technique in the United States, a series of 20th-century innovations made mass production, high speed, and economy in printing possible. Automated composition, first developed after the 1920s, gave way to programmed composition in the 1950s. Many of today's computerized typesetting machines can set 1,000 characters (individual letters or symbols) per second. Phototypesetting equipment of the future could conceivably reach speeds of nearly 3,000 characters per second, or about 10,000,000 characters per hour.

Inventors also created pressureless printing, which eliminated the need for a printing press. In 1948, two Americans conceived of a type of electrostatic printing in which the colouring agent is not ink but a powder that is sensitive to the pull of an electric charge induced on a plate. This technique gave birth to xerography and the now-familiar copying machines. The various processes developed to duplicate and reproduce documents have been grouped under the name reprography.