[Music] hey everybody um today we're filming at the printing museum in groningen we're talking about the rise of the mass press and this is an ideal location to do so i'm here with frank osof the director of hit the printing museum and she'll tell a bit more of what you can see here and what they do okay thank you well here in kritz we have a collection of presses old presses and other graphic materials all these materials and presses were brought in in the 80s of the former century because printing changed a lot from printing with letterpress to digital printing and first of course offset printing and most of these machines became useless but in this museum we still let them work so that we can show how printing was done in former days i'm standing here in a sort of symbolic spot because on the one hand i've got a manual uh printing press and on the other hand i have a industrial mechanic automated printing press and today we're talking about the transition from small-scale to large-scale newspaper production to give you a bit of context in the 18th and 19th early 19th century the newspapers were very modest in scale catering to a small societal elite and because of that they left out the majority of the population majority of the population didn't have a newspaper available and affordable to them from sort of approximately 1850 onwards you see a transition to newspapers being produced on a larger scale and for that to happen um was a complex and multifaceted process and also a gradual change it's important to keep in mind that these changes didn't occur overnight but that this was a gradual process so that relates back to the idea that when we're talking about media history it's rather an evolution than a river revolution and there were a couple of prerequisites for the rise of the mass press to actually happen first things like press freedom needed to occur at the same time you needed of course a literate and affluent audience that was actually interested in the news could read the news and was actually rich enough to afford a newspaper so these things i will address in the following video today we focus on technology because technological innovation also played a crucial role in for the mass press to arise there were several new technological inventions necessary and again it's an interplay of different technological innovations that together made it possible for mass press to arise so an interplay of technological progress technological factors made the rise of a mass press possible and all these factors basically had an impact on the speed and scale with which newspapers could be produced so apart from the printing presses that we're going to showcase today there were other technological factors that played a role that i want to discuss with you firstly the development of telegraph technology and intercontinental telegraph cables made it possible for journalists to cover the news in one country and then quickly much quicker than before it could take up to several weeks for news to arrive from the one country to the other country could now be patched through in a couple of hours in addition to that you had improved infrastructure so better railway system and quicker boats between countries which made it firstly possible for journalists to get to every place in the country they needed to go and also internationally but at the same time these improved infrastructure played a very important role in the distribution of newspapers making it possible to actually reach all the different parts of a country finally another element in this whole rise of the naspress was the transition or the change in the way new uh paper was produced initially paper was manually produced from old rags an expensive and time consuming process but in the 19th century they came up with a new process of producing paper a mechanized industrialized process in which new paper was made from wood pulp making it possible to produce it in much larger quantities and also making it way less expensive so apart from the improvements in printing technology that we'll discuss now these other technological factors also played an important part in the rise of the mass press okay i'm gonna demonstrate this manually operated press to you to give you an idea of how long it takes to make a print if you do it manually so first we'll open the window i'll take this piece of paper off now we'll get a little inked on and i wouldn't recommend to do this with a white shirt but i'm going to be very careful put the ink on the printing plates cut a clean sheet of paper and try to position it as straight as possible [Music] then we'll close the window [Music] and i'm going to maneuver it under with the press and it's good to know that these presses from the invention of the printing press didn't change that much apart from the fact that in the 19th century they made them out of cast iron rather than wood but the whole technique didn't change that much so now it's underneath the press i'm going to pull the press and you can see that it's cast iron because it's taking me a little effort to do so release it again and get it out under open the window and let's see if i did a good job and there we go and then you see how long it takes to for me to print only one page so i'm standing here next to the steam propelled a printing press and it's for our generation it's almost impossible to imagine the impact that this invention had on the printing process we're so used to having a printer at home having a printer at the university and even nowadays you could even say that these printer printer printing devices are not necessary anymore with our ipads with our tablets etc etc but in this day and age the invention of a mechanic automated printing press was huge the impact of being able to print on a much higher pace than before because of the use of a steam engine which was arguably the biggest invention of the 18th century and basically started the industrial revolution um made it possible to print amount of newspapers on a much larger scale than before you have to think about the manual press that could print approximately 250 to 500 pages in an hour to this press that was automatically propelled by a steam engine not the electricity version that we have here and would go up to 6000 pages an hour and that made a huge difference if you think in terms of how many newspapers how big the newspapers would be that you could print so this was an enormous step forward in printing technology another step forward was the rotary press and you can see the innovation lying in front of me here where they moved from a flatbed [Music] printing plate to curved printing plates that you could put on a cylinder and that would increase the capacity of almost 40 to 60 000 pages an hour which really drove home the idea of a mass-produced press so keep in mind that this is isn't just the technological uh innovation but it had a huge social impact because for the first time it was possible to actually cater to a mass audience to print newspapers on a scale that would made it possible for a much larger part of society to actually read the newspaper so it's hard to underestimate the impact of the invention of these steam propelled printing presses we're standing here at a steam propelled printing press made in 1906 um uh from cloning out of bakla it's discovered after the second world war um it was hidden behind the wall because it didn't want the germans to discover it um and now it's here um fully functional again i operated the manual printing press but this one is too complicated for me so i have bert with me who knows the ins and the outs of these machines and he'll talk us through how this machine works for the information machine is [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] be foreign [Applause] [Music] you