Intaglio

Intaglio engraving, as a method of making prints, was invented in Germany by the 1430s, after the woodcut print. Engraving had been used by goldsmiths to decorate metalwork, including armour, musical instruments and religious objects since ancient times, and the niello technique, which involved rubbing an alloy into the lines to give a contrasting colour, also goes back to late antiquity. It has been suggested that goldsmiths began to print impressions of their work to record the design, and that printmaking developed from that.

The golden age of artists engraving was 1450-1550, after which the technique lost ground to etching as a medium for artists, although engravings continued to be produced in huge numbers until after the invention of photography. Today intaglio engraving is largely used for currency, banknotes, passports and occasionally for high-value postage stamps. The appearance of engraving is sometimes mimicked for items such as wedding invitations by producing an embossment around lettering printed by another process (such as lithography or offset) to suggest the edges of an engraving plate.

Lithography

Lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder - Czech - in Bohemia in 1796. In the early days of lithography, a smooth piece of limestone was used (hence the name "lithography"—"lithos" (λιθος) is the ancient Greek word for stone). After the oil-based image was put on the surface gum arabic, a water soluble solution, was then applied, sticking only to the non-oily surface and sealing it. During printing, water adhered to the gum arabic surfaces and avoided the oily parts, while the oily ink used for printing did the opposite.

Chromolithography was the first method for making true multi-color prints. Earlier attempts at polychromed printing relied on hand-coloring. The type of color printing stemmed from the process of lithography, and it includes all types of lithography that are printed in color. It replaced coloring prints by hand, and eventually served as a replica of a real painting. Lithographers sought to find a way to print on flat surfaces with the use of chemicals instead of relief or intaglio printing. Depending on the amount of colors present, a chromolithograph could take months to produce. To make what was once referred to as a “’chromo’”, a lithographer, with a finished painting in front of him, gradually built and corrected the print to look as much as possible like the painting in front of him, sometimes using dozens of layers.The process can be very time consuming and cumbersome contingent upon the skill of the lithographer.

Offset press was invented in 1870s. Offset printing is the major lithographic technology. It is an indirect lithographic technology, in which the ink is first transferred from the printing plate onto a flexible intermediate carrier – the blanket – and then onto the substrate. Offset printing has spread markedly since approximately 1970 and has, to a great extent, ousted the letterpress printing technology which prevailed until that time. The offset printing technology is now the major printing technology.

The Age of the iron printing presses

Rotary printing press

In 1843, Richard March Hoe invented the rotary printing press, a design much faster than the old flat-bed printing press. In rotary printing press the impressions are curved around a cylinder so that the printing can be done on long continuous rolls of paper, cardboard, plastic, or a large number of other substrates.

In 1890, the first patented press was built in England by “Bibby, Baron and Sons”. The water-based ink smeared easily, leading the device to be known as “Bibby’s Folly”. In the early 1900’s, other European presses were developed using rubber printing plates. But by the 1920s, most presses were made in Germany, where the process was called “gummidruck”.

Screen printing

The modern screen printing process originated from patents taken out by Samuel Simon in 1907 in England. This idea was then adopted in San Francisco, California, by John Pilsworth in 1914 who used screen printing to form multicolor prints in a subtractive mode, differing from screen printing as it is done today.

Xerography

Xerographic office photocopying was introduced by Xerox in the 1960s, and over the following 20 years it gradually replaced copies made by Verifax, Photostat, carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and other duplicating machines. The prevalence of its use is one of the factors that prevented the development of the paperless office heralded early in the digital revolution.

The laser printer, based on a modified xerographic copier, was invented at Xerox in 1969 by researcher Gary Starkweather, who had a fully functional networked printer system working by 1971.Laser printing eventually became a multibillion-dollar business for Xerox.

The first commercial implementation of a laser printer was the IBM model 3800 in 1976, used for high-volume printing of documents such as invoices and mailing labels. It is often cited as "taking up a whole room," implying that it was a primitive version of the later familiar device used with a personal computer. While large, it was designed for an entirely different purpose. Many 3800s are still in use.

The first laser printer designed for use with an individual computer was released with the Xerox Star 8010 in 1981. Although it was innovative, the Star was an expensive ($17,000) system that was only purchased by a small number of laboratories and institutions. After personal computers became more widespread, the first laser printer intended for a mass market was the HP LaserJet 8ppm, released in 1984, using a Canon engine controlled by HP software. The HP LaserJet printer was quickly followed by other laser printers from Brother Industries, IBM, and others.

Most noteworthy was the role the laser printer played in popularizing desktop publishing with the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter for the Apple Macintosh, along with Aldus PageMaker software, in 1985. With these products, users could create documents that would previously have required professional typesetting.

In 1970 the first dot matrix printer (or impact printer) LA 30 was introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts. It printed 80 columns of uppercase-only 5x7 dot matrix characters across a unique-sized paper. The printhead was driven by a stepper motor and the paper was advanced by a somewhat-unreliable and definitely noisy solenoid ratchet drive. The LA30 was available with both a parallel interface and a serial interface; however, the serial LA30 required the use of fill characters during the carriage-return operation.