A HISTORY OF SURREY 



Four to five hundred men and boys were 

 employed at these works.' 



The other important firm of Surrey prin- 

 ters in 1850 was that of Messrs. Max & Co. 

 of the Borough Road who carried on a differ- 

 ent department of the industry as lithographic 

 printers. Of their works at this date we 

 may quote the following account from Bray- 

 ley and Britton's History of Surrey^ : — 



Messrs. Max & Co. are the only printers from 

 stone or zinc we know, who employ a steam 

 engine. This adaptation allows the printers to 

 apply their undivided attention to the plate, and 

 with this mitigation of toil, intelligence can be 

 successfvil without the usual necessity for a strong 

 arm. They have at their establishment seventeen 

 presses, which from the above arrangement per- 

 form the ordinary work of twenty-four. The 

 number of persons, men and boys, is about forty. 

 This method of setting figures on stone or metallic 

 plates, discovered by Senefelder within the last 

 fifty years, is an interesting consequence of the 

 general diffusion of science. He began his at- 

 tempts without reference to chemical affinity or 

 knowledge of its principles, but circumstances led 

 him to its application, and the result is admirable. 



Within recent years a considerable change 

 has been introduced into the printing trade 

 by the removal of many of the larger London 

 establishments into the provinces. This has 

 been rendered necessary by the increased cost 

 of living in the metropolis and the cheaper 

 rates at which labour can be procured in the 

 country. In Surrey at the present day there 

 are three large printing businesses outside the 

 suburban area, namely Messrs. Billing & Sons 

 at Guildford, Messrs. Unwin Brothers at 

 Woking, and Kelly's Directories, Limited, 

 at Kingston-upon-Thames. The two former 

 of these carry out all descriptions of commer- 

 cial and book printing, and the last, besides 

 printing the large series of its well known 

 directories including the now colossal ones 

 for London and its suburbs, does a consider- 

 able amount of other book-work for the trade. 

 In addition to these there are a large number 

 of local printers who devote themselves chiefly 

 to jobbing and commercial work. 



The greatest change in the printing trade 

 during the latter half of the last century and 

 perhaps one of the most significant in our 

 social history has been the vast development 

 of the newspaper press. Most places of any 

 size have now their weekly or bi-weekly 

 local newspaper, and there are at the present 

 day more than fifty such newspapers issued 

 in the suburban and rural districts of Surrey. 



• Brayley and Britton, Hiji. o/Surr. v. App. 4.5. 

 ' Ibid. v. App. 45, 4,6. 



This number includes such important county 

 newspapers as the Surrey Times (established 

 1855) and the Surrey Advertiser both pub- 

 lished in Guildford, the Surrey Comet (estab- 

 lished 1854) published at Kingston-upon- 

 Thames, and the Surrey Mirror published at 

 Redhill. 



But it is in connection with printing 

 machinery, the great development of which 

 during the course of the past century has so 

 completely revolutionized the conditions of 

 the newspaper press, that the history of the 

 printing industry in Surrey may more par- 

 ticularly claim our attention. It is only by 

 means of such improved machinery as now 

 exists that the rapid printing and wide circu- 

 lation at their present low prices of the 

 leading London dailies are rendered possible. 

 Although we can do no more here than 

 touch the fringe of a great subject, it will be 

 found that in treating of the part Surrey en- 

 gineers have played in the evolution of modern 

 printing machines we shall have occasion to 

 point out the main lines in which improve- 

 ment has been sought and ultimately secured. 



The history of these improvements extends 

 throughout the whole of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, and briefly the development may be 

 said to have taken place in a three-fold direc- 

 tion : firstly, in the introduction of the use 

 of the steam engine which took place early in 

 the century ; secondly, in that of the rotary 

 web machines by which newspapers are 

 printed off from a continuous web of paper. 

 The latter is a comparatively recent innova- 

 tion and although the machines have now 

 reached such a degree of perfection as to be 

 able to perform within a very few minutes 

 every operation that a newspaper has to 

 undergo from the time when the unprinted 

 paper is in the roll until it is ready printed, 

 cut, and folded to be put into the newsven- 

 dors' hands, the account we shall have to 

 give of the present Southwark firm, which is 

 now the most important one of printing 

 machine makers in the world, will show that 

 not even yet have the efforts to secure further 

 improvements been relaxed. The third and 

 most recent of all the methods by which rapid 

 and cheap printing has been obtained has been 

 by the introduction of the linotype or com- 

 posing machine. With this we are not par- 

 ticularly concerned here. 



The earliest appearance of the cylindrical 

 mode of printing seems to be in a machine 

 patented by the Adkins, father and son, 

 Taylor and Walker in 1772.' This how- 

 ever would appear to have been primarily 



422 



' Pat. of Invention, No. 1 007. 



