Digital Extra: The Journal's 175th Anniversary

07.21.2004

Pressing details: Journal technology through the years

July 21, 1829: First issue of The Providence Daily Journal, and General Advertiser (a slightly reduced reproduction of this issue appears on the next four pages). This four-page newspaper was typeset by hand and pressed one linen page at a time on an iron hand press capable of 240 impressions per hour. New discoveries in technology over the next 175 years would improve this primitive means of production.

1836: Journal buys a new press capable of 800 impressions an hour.

1846: Distant news begins arriving, at least partway, by telegraph.

1848: Providence ties into New York-Boston telegraph line.

1856: A Hoe single-cylinder press, the first driven by steam power, comes into operation. The press worked by rolling a cylinder over paper on a plate of inked type.

1871: New four-cylinder press gives capacity of 10,000 impressions an hour. Paper passed between cylinders that had type on their surfaces.

1875: Six-cylinder press installed; capacity is 12,000 impressions an hour.

1881: First web-perfecting press installed; it printed from a continuous roll of paper.

1885: Journal office lighted by incandescent lamps powered from Narragansett Electric Lighting Co.

1886: Automatic folders added to presses; also, first hand-drawn illustration to accompany a news story, about sailing. Early drawings were done by the chalk-plate process, which involved scratching the drawing into a chalk-covered plate and pouring hot lead into the grooves to make a printing plate.

1889: First typesetting machines in New England are installed, called the Mergenthaler Linotype. Machines allowed printers to create lines of type by punching a keyboard, rather than picking individual letters by hand.

1892: New presses installed; capacity, 24,000 papers per hour.

1894: Presses powered for the first time by electricity from Narragansett Electric Lighting Co.

1898: First half-tone photograph -- a picture of U.S. Sen. Nelson W. Aldrich, of Rhode Island.

1903: Journal establishes wireless station at Point Judith; prints the Block Island Wireless, a daily paper published by The Journal on island.

1916: Five Fords and three Vim trucks go into service with circulation department.

1925: First color comic section appears in The Sunday Journal.

1934: Journal moves into the present Journal Building erected at Fountain, Mathewson and Sabin Streets. New octuple presses installed; possible total printing capacity of 100,000 papers per hour.

1936: First use of AP Wirephoto, which transmitted photographs from distant news events over telephone lines.

1950: Journal licensed to use two-way radio for reporters and photographers. Later, circulation department vehicles are brought into network.

1951: Telephones throughout Journal Building converted to dial system.

1961: Spot color appears regularly in the news pages.

1964: Printers begin creating perforated typesetting tape; the tape would be read by a device that operated the line casting machines and created the type.

1968: First use of computers in composing room.

1971: Manual typewriters in the newsroom replaced by electric typewriters that produced a typeface readable by an optical scanner, which automatically produced perforated typesetting tape.

1975: The end of the "hot lead" era. Newspaper produced entirely by "cold type" method. Computers created columns of type on paper that were pasted up onto pages. The pages were photographed and the negatives used to create the plate that went on the press.

1976: Installation of electronic writing and editing equipment in newsroom.

1985: After saving text electronically for three years, Journal launches J/TEXT, a searchable electronic archive of its stories to help reporters in their research.

1987: New $60-million Journal production and distribution facility opens with new "flexographic" presses, which print vibrant full-color pictures. The Journal was the first newspaper in America to go "all-flexo." Flexography uses flexible plates and water-based inks that don't rub off on a reader's hands.

1996: Journal launches projo.com, the paper's Web site.

1997: After saving photographs electronically for several years, The Journal begins formally storing its photographs in an electronic archive and experimenting with digital cameras.

2000: Journal begins a phase-in of digital photography.

2001: Photographers go all-digital.

2003: Journal correspondent in Iraq sends stories from the battlefield to Providence via satellite telephone.