THE INVENTION OF ENGRAVING PICTURES
There is another invention which comes into Samuel Gilbert's story - how they printed pictures in books in the early days. The same method was used in making Bank notes, in which you are certain to be interested when I tell you about his experiences with them.
William Caxton brought the printing of books
to England in about 1485, but there were no pictures in them.
Before printing with moveable type was invented, such books were often the works
of monks in the monasteries, who painted portraits or writings in them, but they
all had to done by hand, each time, in each copy.
But people wanted more than that. Then someone found out that, if you made a scratch on a sheet of copper or lead with a knife or a needle, you could smear it with ink, and then wipe it all off, leaving some ink in the scratch. And then, if you placed a sheet of paper over that sheet of copper or lead, you would get a print of the scratch.
So, if you drew a couple of circles by scratching them on that sheet of copper to make a pussy cat, with two ears, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, a couple of front legs and a tail and, in your case, you smeared your engraving with soy sauce or vegemite, instead of ink, and then wiped off all the surplus, you could get a print, for yourself, of the pussy cat from the sauce or the vegemite still left in the scratches. You have become an engraver and have made an engraving.
So all of the pictures in books two hundred years ago were engravings. And when you think that they all had to be made from scratchings with a sharp knife or a needle on a sheet of copper or something which then had to be inked and then wiped when set up for printing in a frame, you will be surprised just how skilful engravers became. And remember too, that all engravings had to be made back to front so that, when a picture was made, it had to print correctly, with all the letters the right way around.
So now you know all about the invention of the loom, and then, the Spinning Jenny, and how engraving was done to make pictures for printing, and how engraved plates could be placed in a a frame with type letters, then inked and turned out as a page for a book or a newspaper. I will tell you why engraving comes into your Gilbert story.