Source 2 – The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmarking

Douglas McMurtrie’s, “The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking”, provides an extensive history of both printing and books. The book goes over many topics concerning printing and bookmaking including: early book decoration, the dissemination of printing, the spread of printing in America, paper and its origins, and the history of Johannes Gutenberg. The author’s argument was that the printer along with the production of books was very impactful on the entire world. This argument is supported the vast amount of examples of printing across the world, the images provided, and the history of printing as a whole that the author goes over. Figure 1 below is a picture of the cover Douglas McMurtrie’s book.

Douglas C. McMurtrie, The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmarking, 1989. The cover of Douglas McMurtrie’s book.

 

It is difficult to give a full analysis of this author’s argument given that I did not get the opportunity to read the entire book. I was only able to see little snippets of the author’s argument on select pages throughout the book. On the other hand, it was easy to observe that there was a very clear progression of ideas from chapter to chapter so the argument seemed very well developed. This book would be perfect to build upon the timeline by Laurens Leurs on Prepresure.com.

Reading a more comprehensive history of printing, especially in multiple countries builds upon Laurens Leurs timeline even more by using the printers rich history to support an argument. One important/interesting point is that is actually just the best guess of histories that Johannes Gutenberg is the inventor of the printing press. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact point it was created and many parts of Johannes Gutenberg’s life were not recorded but from what has been discovered, it is safe to say that the credit is due to Johannes. This was very interesting because standard history textbooks used by schools present Johannes Gutenberg as the indisputable inventor of the printing press.

 

Citation:

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Book: the story of printing and bookmaking. Bracken Books, 1989.

Source 1 – Prepressure

The article, “The history of printing” on Prepressure.com by Laurens Leurs is composed of a timeline starting at “3000 B.C. and earlier” and going all the way up to the Twenty-first century. This does not represent an argument but is rather serves as a visual representation to a more vivid description of the history of printing. The link to said vivid description is provided right above the timeline. The timeline is furnished with images to provide a visual aid to the progression of printing. Some of the images on the timeline are shown below. Figure 1 shows a Korean Buddhist document from the 13^th century, called Selected Teachings of Buddhist Sages and Seon Masters. This is the oldest known book to use metal type. Figure 2 depicts an image of a typo in a reprint of the King James Bible. This version of the bible became known as “The Wicked Bible” because of the typo stating, “Thou shalt commit adultery”. The two printers responsible with this, were fined and had their printing licenses revoked.

Figure 1: Laurens Leurs, Prepressure, 2017. A Korean Buddhist document from the 13^th century.

Figure 2: Laurens Leurs, Prepressure, 2017. A reprint of the King James Bible that contained a typo in the 17^th century.

 

The strengths of the timeline is that it is very informative and it could be easily used as support for an argument about the development of printing. The only weakness of this article is that it could have even more meaning if it provided some kind of argument or claim to further add to the information in the timeline so the reader has a clearer idea of what the timeline should be impressing upon them. The timeline raises the question of what ultimate idea should be drawn from it from the author’s point of the view.

The timeline is useful to an audience in the capacity that it provides a clear idea of the evolution of printing. The most relevant parts for the purpose of my research is to look from the fifteenth century (when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press) to the twenty-first century. Everything before the fifteenth century were not formal printers but rather different ways to create items like books and scrolls. This article cannot be used to present a new argument but rather to support one.

 

Citation:

Leurs, Laurens. “The history of printing.” Prepressure, 2017, http://www.prepressure.com/about?utm_campaign=InternalLink&utm_medium=Navigation&utm_source=About.

Stage 2 – Technological Materiality

Three main components related to the printer that can be focused on for their environmental impacts are paper, plastic, and ink cartridges. It is very easy to look up the impacts that these three things have on the environment and how society can help. Society is bombarded with messages about the impact of paper production and the importance of recycling paper. It is easy to see how important it is to recycle paper given the sheer number of trees cut down every year for society’s love of paper products.

WWF (World Wildlife Fund) has published an article dedicated to giving information on the production of paper as well as how to dispose of it responsibly to reduce the current effects on the environment. Figure 1 below is the picture featured on WWF’s article titled, “Pulp and paper” and shows a bundle of cut down trees for the production of paper. According to WWF, “Paper products are crucial to society, as they have enabled to literacy and cultural development.” After conceding that paper is integral to society, the WWF goes on to say that to take pressure off of Earth’s remaining forests and endangered animals, practices in the production and consumption of paper must be changed. To truly help the earth, practices in the harvesting, production, and disposal of paper must be worked on. Japan, Canada, the United States, and China are the largest producers of paper and collectively produce around 400 million tons of paper annually. Businesses in the paper industry that have unsustainable logging practices contribute to the degradation of forests, wildlife loss, and the acceleration of climate change. The WWF works with stakeholders to bring about sustainable forestry and to promote responsible paper consumption.

Fig. 1.  wwf.panda.org, Pulp and Paper, 2017.

    EnergyCollective.com, a forum dedicated to publishing articles on subjects including energy policy and energy technologies has an article titled, “Ink Waste: The Environmental Impact of Printer Cartridges” by Bob Gorman, looks at the adverse effects of simply throwing away empty ink cartridges. The ink used for printer cartridges is made up of several chemicals that hold potential danger to both people and the environment, including butyl urea, cyclohexanone, EDTA, and ethylene glycol. By simply throwing an ink cartridge, the VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and heavy metals that make up the cartridge, pollute the soil and water once they reach the landfill. It takes roughly 1,000 years for an ink cartridge to fully decompose in a landfill site. One other effect of not properly disposing of ink cartridges is that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified toner as a potential carcinogen. One positive thing about the production of ink cartridges is that according to Made in a Free World, there is a very low purchasing risk. Reading the facts provided by Gorman, should influence readers to properly dispose of their ink cartridges. Since most of the materials in cartridges are recyclable, society can save millions of gallons of oil by recycling their ink cartridges.

The issues of plastic are not black and white when considering that there are different kinds of plastics so production and disposal vary depending on what the plastic is composed of. In chapter three of “Life Cycle Engineering of Plastics: Technology, Economy, and the Environment” by Lars Lundquist looks at how to minimize environmental impact by recycling plastic products. Lundquist agrees that with the recycling of plastics, “The strategy to apply depends on the type of material and product and on consumption patterns.”. In 1994, 17.5 million tons of plastic was produced in Western Europe. The lack of recycling was due to the high cost of setting up recycling plants. Consumers must pay attention to what their product is made up of to determine how to properly dispose of it.

Works Cited

“Pulp and paper.” WWF, 2017,

wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/deforestation/forest_sector_transformation/pulp_and_paper/.

Gorman, Bob. “Ink Waste: The Environmental Impact of Printer Cartridges.” The Energy Collective, 30

Mar. 2017, http://www.theenergycollective.com/bobbyg/2401395/ink-waste-environmental-impact-printer-cartridges.

Lundquist, Lars. Life cycle engineering of plastics: technology, economy, and the environment. Elsevier, 2000.

“Purchase Risk.” Made In A Free World, madeinafreeworld.com/dashboard/purchases/Xdlk1NutuJjSefnr1bUH.

 

 

Stage 1 – Technology in Practice

The printer has evolved the dissemination of knowledge. Once the printing press was invented, books and other paper goods such as pamphlets and newspapers no longer had to be handwritten. The printing press allowed a wide distribution of books which lead to vast societal changes. One of the most prominent changes to society is that literacy rates increased as more and more people were given access to printed materials. Even though in modern times it has become steadily more popular to use e-books, printers are still widely used and continue to be improved to produce new models such as the 3D printer. The printer has very clearly affected society in a positive way when one considers how it has enabled people to widely distribute their ideas and creativity whether it be in the form of pictures or words.

There is a timeline created by Laurens Leurs depicting how knowledge was put onto paper long before the printing press was ever invented. The timeline starts from 3000 B.C., all the way to the twenty-first century. Just one glance at the timeline reveals that the printer has a very rich history and the distribution of knowledge has been prized for a very long time. Even though the timeline does not include this, one should remember that knowledge has often been used as a weapon and one way governments have controlled their people is by limiting the types of things they can read and write. Looking back at the timeline, it provides a good amount of information on how society recorded and distributed information. The very first portion of the timeline, “3000 BC and earlier”, states that, “The Mesopotamians use round cylinder seals for rolling an impress of images onto clay tablets. In other early societies in China and Egypt, small stamps are used to print on cloth.” From this first point on the timeline, it can be seen that when the printing press was invented, it was by no means a new concept to create impressions upon paper or some other material in order to distribute knowledge. The printing press just added and improved to a process that steadily changed in each society as years passed. Figure 1, below is of the oldest known book from Europe in existence, called The Cuthbert Gospel. This picture is on the timeline by Leurs and is used to represent printing in the 7^th century. There are many pictures along the timeline that give it a nice visual and allow the observer to see the gradual change in printed materials.

                  Figure 1: Laurens Leurs, Prepressure.com, 2017. The Cuthbert Gospel

 

Douglas McMurtrie in his work, The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmarking, takes a particular look into the history of the printer that concerns itself with the book. While Leurs timeline is useful for seeing how printing progressed, McMurtrie’s is a better resource in order to see both a comprehensive history plus the impacts the printer had on different cultures. Figure 2 is a picture of the cover of McMurtrie’s book from the MASC. It is most common to read about the effects that the printing press had on European society when Johannes Gutenberg invented it in the 15^th century (McMurtrie points out that it is not clear when the printing press was exactly invented, but this is the accepted time frame). However, McMurtrie describes the affects that the printing press had on multiple cultures including Europeans. The author describes how in the Old World, the development and spreading of printing occurred in communities that had centuries of background in their culture. However, this was not the case for the Americas, as McMurtrie points out, “printing became one of the implements of implanting and fostering the cultural heritage of European civilization…”. From this statement it can be inferred that not only did printing evolve the dissemination of knowledge, but it made it much easier for one culture to influence other cultures no matter what the distance was. It probably would have been much harder to influence the Americas through implements such as books and pamphlets if everything was still written by hand. It can be very clearly seen through both Leurs and McMurtrie’s work that the printing press had a huge impact on the society. It is hard to say how cultures would have been affected if the printing press had not been invented in the time that it was, especially considering the Americas were discovered just a few decades after the printing press was invented.

 

Figure 2, Douglas C. McMurtie, The Book: The Story of Printing and Bookmaking, 1989.

Works Cited

Leurs, Laurens. “The history of printing.” Prepressure, 2017, http://www.prepressure.com/about?utm_campaign=InternalLink&utm_medium=Navigation&utm_source=About.

McMurtrie, Douglas C. The Book: the story of printing and bookmaking. Bracken Books, 1989.

 

A Range of Printers

There is a decent variety of printers, some being more well-known than others. The first thing to look at is whether the printer is an impact or a non-impact printer. As the names imply, impact printers make contact with the paper, while non-impact printers do not. Examples of impact printers include daisy-wheel and dot matrix printers. Common non-impact printers include thermal printers, laser printers, and inkjet printers.

     

Fig. 1. Dot Matrix Printer; Amazon.com     Fig. 2. Daisy Wheel Printer; Wikipedia.com

While dot matrix have been around since 1970, it is still used. Dot matrix printers use pins that strike against a ribbon coated with ink onto a piece of paper. They are most commonly used by businesses who utilize multi-part stationery such as banks. The daisy wheel printer is not as widely used and was found in electronic typewriters and computers around 1972. The use of the daisy wheel printer greatly declined after the laser printer came around and is now only found in electronic typewriters.

                                

Fig. 3. Thermal Printer; Amazon.com                  Fig. 4. Inkjet Printer; Amazon.com

Thermal printers produce images by selectively heating paper as it passes through. Thermal printing technology is sometimes used to create custom images on items such as mugs and t-shirts. Lots of cash registers and label machines have built in thermal printers so they are still in use today. Figure 3 above shows a thermal printer from Amazon. Among the printers mentioned in this post, inkjet printers are among the most commonly used by the general public. Inkjet printers are composed of nozzles that spray ink in the form of minuscule dots onto the paper to form shapes. Figure 4 above shows an inkjet printer that can be found on Amazon for about $40. Laser printers are also very commonly used but much more expensive than inkjet printers. Laser printers produce high quality text and images so they are reliable for when one wants a nice looking document. A laser printer that is on Amazon for around $70 is shown in figure 5 below. This printer was among one of the cheapest while one of the most expensive ones was nearly $190. While these five figures show a range of printers, these are merely the ones that typically pop up first in a google search. Another common printer besides these is the 3D printer. The 3D printer goes above and beyond putting text and images on paper and instead creates 3D objects out of paper. Figure 6 below shows a 3D printer presented on Best Buy. Out of all of these printers, the 3D printer is truly the most interesting when one considers its technology and the products it can create.

                                            

Fig.5. Laser Printer; Amazon.com                                    Fig.6. 3D Printer; Best Buy

Sensory Description of the Printer

It is very rare that much thought is put into the process between one presses the “print” button and the wanted document slides smoothly out of the printer. There are a variety of printers meaning there is more than one way to bring an electronic document into the real world. The first thing to consider is whether it is an impact or a non-impact printer. An example of an impact printer would be a dot matrix printer while a non-impact example would be the well-known inkjet.

This is a picture of a dot matrix shown on Amazon

Impact printers can be compared to typewriters because as their name suggests, they actually make contact with the paper in the process of printing. In the case of a dot matrix printer, it contains a myriad of small pins that strike against a ribbon coated with ink in order to make an impression on the paper. Unlike modern printers, each character of the document is put on individually. In order for the pins to make an impression, they are driven by an electromagnetic force. Once the “print” button is pressed, the printer’s logic board interprets the data and utilizes an electromagnet which converts the signal into physical movement through the pins. The pins strike against the ink-coated ribbon so each pin creates one dot on the paper through the ribbon. Each tiny dot created by one pin combine with other dots to take the form of letters.

This is a picture of the print head of an inkjet from an article on Inkjet printers on HowStuffWorks

Inkjet printers go a step further by using a more efficient process and creating less noise than impact printers such as the dot matrix. Inkjets have a component called the print head that is similar to the logic board of a dot matrix printer except instead of controlling pins, it is in command of a collection of nozzles which it uses to spray drops of ink. For some inkjets, the print head is inside the ink cartridges. There are multiple kinds of cartridges. For example, some printers have separate cartridges for black and color, others have color and black in a single cartridge, and some even have a cartridge for each individual color. The print head is able to make marks across the entirety of a paper with the help of a print head stepper motor which moves the print head back and forth across the paper. The print head is secured to the print head stepper by the belt and a stabilizer bar ensures that that the movement of the print head is in control and precise. The dot matrix and inkjet printers are just a few examples of impact and non-impact printers. There are also laser, 3D, thermal, and daisy wheel printers.

Citations:

Evans, Keith. “How Do Impact Printers Work?” Techwalla, 2017, http://www.techwalla.com/articles/how-do-impact-printers-work.

Jeff Tyson “How Inkjet Printers Work” 26 March 2001.
HowStuffWorks.com. <https://computer.howstuffworks.com/inkjet-printer.htm&gt; 30 October 2017

 

 

Technology Proposal

The first technology I am considering writing about is the camera. Cameras have come a long way from when they were first invented in 1816 to now where they have a presence in phones and are even used for surveillance. One article titled, “Capturing their best side? Did the advent of the camera influence the orientation artists chose to paint and draw in their self-portraits?” uses statistics to illustrate that the way people posed for self-portraits before cameras (they are referring to self-portrait paintings) slowly changed after the introduction of the camera. While it doesn’t sound very intriguing, I found it interesting that the camera changed something that seems of so little importance. Another article titled, “America’s First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views: 1839-1862” described a very early form of photograph called a daguerreotype. The author of this article talks about how photographers took pictures of well-known figures such as Abraham Lincoln to get the general public over their fear of the way photographs could appear lifelike. There seemed to be quite a few resources on the history of the camera and the main field interested with the camera seems to be the art field specifically photography. So when it comes to research areas, the camera obviously relates to art but I think it also relates to criminal investigations. As soon as the camera came around, it was possible to show the public what a criminal looked like and made it more possible for a criminal to be tracked down. I would like to look more into the hopes and fears that came along with the invention of the camera. What fears are there currently about cameras? How different are they from the fears coming from the time when cameras were first invented? What other research areas are interested in cameras?

Another technology I am considering writing about is Wi-Fi. It was not very hard to find both the positives and negatives of Wi-Fi. One significant concern is that because Wi-Fi has caused the number of hot spots (an area providing internet access) to steadily increase leading to an enlarged concern for privacy risks. An increased usage of the internet (the article I read focused specifically on Americans) has opened up the general public to more risks of their private information being stolen. Another fear that has stemmed from Wi-Fi is that there could be significant health risks from the radiation waves it produces but there has been no evidence to fully support this fear yet. One very interesting thing about the history of Wi-Fi is that an actress called Hedy Lamarr first came up with the idea of “frequency hopping” during World war II. Lamarr wanted to use this concept for a secret communications system that would guide a torpedo so the signal could not be intercepted. Sadly, she did not receive credit until later in her life and people who built upon her idea received much of the credit. I never had any idea that the concept of Wi-Fi was first brought up as a solution to a war and that that proposal was given by a very famous actress of the time. Wi-Fi involves research that includes the internet and also medicine because of the health risks that people fear. I’m interested in looking more into the health risks. Does the convenience that Wi-Fi brings outweigh the consequences? How has Wi-Fi evolved over time? What other risks come with Wi-Fi?

The last technology I am considering writing about is the printer. I am considering the printer because it has a rich history that stretches all the way back to the fifteenth century when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. If I write about the printer I can easily talk about the different methods that different cultures created books before Gutenberg’s printing press. I found a timeline of printing that stretches all the way back to 3000 BC and earlier. One culture mentioned in this segment are the Mesopotamians who used round cylinder seals for rolling an impress of images onto clay tablets. The creation of the printing press allowed for the mass production of books leading to greater access to information for the general public and increased the amount of people who were literate. One fear that appeared right after the invention of the printing press is that it would jeopardize the souls of monks. It was believed that idleness was a danger to the soul so the printing press would take work away from the monks. The printer relates to the research of religion and it would be interesting to look further into that relationship. How do the original fears of the printing press relate to fears of the modern printer? How long was the printing press in a negative light for religion and what affects did that have on society? The number one question I would like to address is: would it be better for society to go completely digital and quit using the printer to save trees and to not waste ink?

First blog post

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog and what you plan to do with it.