Feb 25 History of GD chapter 9

During the Industrial Revolution, between 1760 through 1840, energy was the main cause for the change from an agricultural society to the industrial society. During this time, machines, demand, and rapid growth were the basis of change. Typography was constantly changing while casting letters became faster and new type styles were constantly being discovered such as Tuscan style letters, as well as new serifs. During the casting process, many developers were having a hard time printing with the heavy metal types. Wells created a wooden type and began the stages of the wood type printing that saved money and energy in creating posters and other designs. Printing was altered and new machinery was utilized. The objective changed from the quality of the print to how fast and how many could be printed in a short amount of time. Newer presses, created by historical figures such as John Walter II and Friedrich Koenig made it possible to make prints at night and have them dispersed by morning.
The discovery of photography forever changed the way images were presented on displays and other posters. Photography was founded and altered by many people throughout the process of perfecting it. Using light rays, lithographs, some oils and light-sensitive paper, Joseph Niepce was able to create the first image using photography. Louis Daguerre followed Niepce and continued his process of photography by using mercury and silver compounds to increate the exposure onto the plate. William Henry Fox Talbot came along finding a process to have photography and photographic printing plates merge. Using different chemicals, Talbot was able to create positive and negative images as well as discover the new process of calotype.
When it came to printing these photos onto paper, Horgan was involved in the process of breaking the image into a series of minute dots that varied in tone from pure white to solid black. As photography continued growing, it played a major role in capturing major events like the Civil War. Eadweard Muybridge even went as far as to placing a wager over a horse that he used photography to capture the results through. During the Victorian era, lithography was invented by Senefelder who discovered a cheap way to print drawings on stone and metal reliefs. He discovered a way to create a relief printing without etching any stone away using chemicals, crayons and water. Christmas cards, Valentine’s Day cards, birthday and New Year’s Day cards, invented by Prang were internationally influenced. Not long after that, labels and packaging were created using chromolithography. Children’s books with pictures were developed near the end of the nineteenth century to entertain children. As the era came to an end, it was easy to look back and see that it was dominated through illustrations.

One thing that I find very interesting throughout this whole reading is the method that Eadweard Muybridge used when dealing with a wager on whether or not a trotting horse lifts all four feet off the ground. The discovery consisted of 24 cameras placed along a line that had a rubber band and threads attached to them so when the horse trotted through the threads, they would break causing a ‘shot’ to be taken. The method is very interesting and simply amazing that they would go through this whole process. I look at the photos of the horse and it makes me think about a reel of film. Unfortunately that was not discovered until years later.

One thing that I would like to know more about is how the printing press worked. The reading sometimes makes it hard to understand the process of how an image or type gets printed onto the sheet. How does a steam powered cylinder press work?