From Inkwells to Toners – Printed Copy Through Time

The modern home and office printer is the culmination of thousands of years development of writing technology, all the way from crude etchings on stones to the printed colour page of the present day. It is only really in the last twenty to thirty years or that the computer and printer has usurped the place of the last two great bastions of the printing industry, the typewriter and the printing press but today’s multifunction laser and inkjet printers offer features far beyond the wildest dreams of people from bygone times.





Writing is arguably humanity’s greatest invention. The discovery that sounds, words and complex ideas could be recorded so that they could be remembered and shared or used to teach and instruct is one of the most significant developments in our history, so much so that we can only speak of "history" from the invention of writing onwards. For many years, writing was only possible if it was done by hand, meaning that large volumes had to be painstakingly written one word at a time. It wasn’t until the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around the year 1440 that printing entire pages at once became possible.

Gutenberg’s original press, built in Mainz in Germany, used revolutionary moveable type rather than a pre-etched plate and soon spread all over Europe and was the catalyst to a number of sweeping changes that altered the face of European history forever, including the Reformation and later the Enlightenment. The printing press allowed entire books to be mass produced, making it easier than ever for new ideas to spread across the continent.





The basic design of the printing press remained more or less unaltered for several hundred years until the industrial revolution of the 19th century where steam power led to machines that could print on a truly industrial scale. With the cost of printing falling dramatically, newspapers and books became readily available at affordable prices, leading many millions of people to discover reading for the first time. Most of Britain’s biggest newspapers date to this period, as do some of its most loved authors, including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte and Mary Shelley.





While the printing press enabled printing on a mass scale, homes and businesses had to wait for the invention of the typewriter in the nineteenth century to get the chance to produce printed pages. There is some confusion on who invented the first typewriter but by the latter part of the century it was becoming commonplace in many offices. It was around this period that many conventions that still appear on modern keyboards, such as the QWERTY key layout, became commonplace.





The typewriter remained at the forefront of small scale printing technology for the best part of a hundred years until it began to be challenged by word processors and computers at the end of the 1970s. It wasn’t long before the standalone word processor too had fallen by the wayside, leaving the computer and printer – typically the dot matrix printer at the time – to triumph.





Today’s printers are, of course, far more advanced than these noisy, ink-ribbon based early models. Modern multifunction printers can print in black and white or in colour using replaceable printer ink cartridges. They are also available as multifunction printers which incorporate the functions of standalone devices such as scanners, photocopiers and fax machines.





Isla Campbell writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.