Greeley who took up the cudgels for the printers and defended
their course to obtain a "fair day's pay for a fair day's work."
Newspapers which did not accept the established scale for the
employment of men were called "rat papers," a term that is still
applied to newspapers which have open shops.
PUTTING THE TYPE ON THE CYLINDER
The penny papers with their large editions demanded fast presses. To meet this increased requirement Robert M. Hoe, who followed his father as the head of the firm of R. Hoe & Company tried numerous schemes, but finally found that the way to print rapidly was to take the type from the flat bed and put it on the cylinder. This was done by making beds in the cylinder one for each page of type. The column rules, which held the type in place, were shaped like the letter V, and thus acted as a wedge when the thin edge was pushed toward the axis of the cylinder. "Projecting tongues sliding in rebated grooves cut in the cylinder" held the rules in place. The type did not fall out when the page forms were locked or fastened with usual care. Around the large type cylinder were grouped four impression cylinders at which sheets were supplied to the press usually by boys. The first press with type on its cylinder was made for The Philadelphia Ledger in 1846. Its capacity per hour was about eight thousand papers printed on one side only.
As newspapers increased their demands, Hoe simply added more impression cylinders until as many as ten were grouped about the type cylinder. The hourly output of the ten-cylinder rotary type-revolving press was in the neighborhood of twenty thousand copies half-printed. America had now taken the lead in the manufacture of fast presses a lead which it has never lost. To show how far England was behind, The London Times, two years after a rotary press had been in successful operation in Philadelphia, said, in an article in December, 1848, "no art of packing could make the type adhere to a cylinder revolving around a horizontal axis and thereby aggravating centrifugal impulse by the intrinsic weight of the metal." Nevertheless, Hoe had already accomplished this very thing. Subsequently The London Times ordered from Hoe two of his
