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foia Centennial Section The Acton Free Press July 100 years of From hand set type picked laboriously letter by letter out of cases by apprentices perched on inky stools to clean swift computers operated by women weve come a long way The Press produced the weekly issues of the Free Press for many years Printers often had to provide the power to make it work and the handle on the side fly wheel was put to good use Up until the Free Press was set all by hand Then Dills like his tor him excitedly tried out something new a linotype It was the first in Hal ton County and it was a marvel On it an operator could set a column of newspaper type in a single hour compared with the hand set quota of two or three columns for 10 hours Now the latest two computers which zip out columns of type at two speeds one of them at lines a minute and the other GO In 1950 A Dills recalled his early days in printing The old steam engine that was used to power the printing press is only a story handed down to us from our predecessors On press days Saturday and Wednesdays it related the printer devil spent some hours cutting slabs to tire the upright boiler which was located directly back of the press feeder In cold weather the press feeder was quite comfortable but in early spring and summer none envied the one who was press feeder and perspired co piously Wt remember well the single cylinder gas engine which followed the steam en Gas engines of t as de pendable as they are today Some days it did and some it t and on the days it l two of the lads seized the old hopper arms on the cylinder of the press and sup plied the motive power to gel off the edition Usually the speed exceeded that of the gas engine I the boys became winded For the platen or Job press foot power was usual Those were the days when you stood on one foot and pedalled the press with the other foot and used both hands for feeding the sheets and a constant eye for supply ng the ink which was put on by hand as required It squite different from the tomatically operated machines of today with electricity replacing the foot power Delicately regulated supply of ink uniform ly fed and incorporated into the machine mechanism that replaces the hands of the feeder and produces three to four times the quantity of better printed matter Starting wage was 50 a week In IBM when the present editor started his p the starting wage was per week The work week was from seven to six five days a week with paper day often running until after midnight Saturday was until four pages of the paper were printed and rarely was finished at noon Today the plant operates on a forty fivt hour week with all day Saturday off every The capital invested is forty times that red 75 years ago city today supplies all the power and heat for melting the metal used in the plant and operates the stoker used for heating In 1009 the staff included four boys in various stages of apprenticeship and the editor From the old press the transition came In to a large press that made it possible to print four pages at one time rather than two With planning the press was removed after it had printed the week edition and the new press was moved in to take its place ready for succeeding week Typically the interrelationship of the paper and the become predominant That was the week that George Dills died as Bob recalls That press was to continue in service til 1957 when two brothers were left to make the dec to purchase the high capacity Cox press while their father was attend a summer convention in the west The life span of that press was a mere ten years before it was shouldered out of the road by the newer technology of in 1966 Offset method began in 1966 Which was another milestone In Free Press history Previously printing was done applying ink to raised tjpe cast from molten lead The type was locked into a 100pound page form and placed on a flat bed press Hollers applied the ink to the pages and eight pages were printed at once Offset printing is completely different The news pictures and ads are pasted on a full page sheet of paper and then the assembled page is photographed The full size negative is developed and after drying is placed against a chemically treat aluminum plate Inches by inches and exposed to a special mercury light The plate is developed with chemicals and the image to be printed is formed on the plate The port of the plate that will print black or color smooth and hard The area that will remain is filled with millions of microscopic size holes The plate is placed around a cylinder and a series of rollers applies chemically treated water to the plate The water will not stay on the hard smooth of the plate but is absorbed into the tiny porous holes Working on the theory that water and oil do not mix another series of rollers ap plies a special Ink to the plate The ink is re pelled on the water area but sticks to the smooth hard image area The image then prints directly onto a rubber blanket on a cylinder the same size as the plate cylinder The blanket then transfers the Image from the blanket cylinder to a web of paper This transfer from the directly printed blanket to the paper Is called offset Offset printing was not an entirely new concept in our plant For a number of years commercial printing had been done by off set but this change to production of the newspaper with the necessarily larger equipment was a major step The capacity of the press permitted the production for other organ of more weekly newspapers advertising circulars and similar material Four tons paper per hour The huge offset newspaper Dress is now feet six and a half inches long and weighs 30 tons following extensions to the nal four units by a further two units In 1974 powered by one motor and one h motor The press capacity is newspaper pages an hour that four tons of paper or miles of paper every 60 minutes The regular black ink comes pound tanks and is pumped to press unit There are over two miles of electrical wiring in the complex control system A newspaper of 24 pages can be completely folded at the rate of an hour News stories are set at keyboards pro ducing perforated tape The perforated tape is then processed through two Compu graphic phototypesetters These phototype- setters arc comprised of two major units The computer which contains the logic circuits required to perform specific la ions such as justifying copy word hyphenation etc and the photo unit which projects the type characters onto photosensitive paper The model will produce three inches of news type one column wide per minute or over 700 individual letters and spaces lines per minute The model 2961 will produce nine and a half inches of news copy one column wide per minute or over 1 600 individual letters and spaces 1 per minute The Optimus press was installed in 1930 printing four pages at a time and continued in use until The heavy duty press rumbled through many weeks and was also used for com printing fwumwivmiM i Erecting the Goss Cox0 Type press in its original location at Mill St building are Albert Schupp erector Ben and Wilfred Duval Dora Ryder and Hartley Coles are shown in the Tree Press plant on Mill St before any expansion took place Dora is at one of the hand fed pres and Hartley feeding the large newspaper press Type cases are in the foreground ACTON Pressman Wilf is shown at the Cox0 Type press after it was moved to the new location in the former Baxter building in ft had been installed at Mill St in 1957 Arlof Dills was a competent linotype operator He had tak en training on the equipment in New York and returned to Acton for the installation of the first linotype in Halton County at the Free Press in SYSTEM SUPPLY Technology has changed and photo typesetting is in use replacing the once innovative linotype A model of one or the units in use to produce the Free Press is shown here The Community press was installed in 1966 and expanded 1974 The press is the cur rcntly in use for the production of the Free Press and a number of other publications It signalled the conversion to offset printing of the The addition in 1974 included two addition al printing units and a folder to increase the ef fective capacity of the press almost per cent through increased speed and printing capacity The press is also capable of printing and folding two publications at the same time in its present configuration at 12 copies on one and copies on the second folder each hour