Printing Shop - $$3.00
Part of the Blists Hill Open Air Museum, Iron Bridge Gorge Museum, this print shop is great for any Industrial Model Rail Road Layout.
The Printshop
Part of the Blists Hill Open Air Museum, Iron Bridge Gorge Museum, this print shop is great for any Industrial Model Rail Road Layout. It would be a very good example of any sort of business that has to have a retail customer entrance off the factory part of the building. Again, it's not just another straightforward and normal building, yet easy to assemble in about 45 minutes.
Printing Throughout the Ages
Since man started putting pen to paper, someone was tasked with copying much of what had been written. Originally, copies were made by hand, which took a long time to do, and was very expensive; not only in materials, but also in employing a scribe to accomplish the tasks. This is why most scribes were employed either by nobility or the church.
Credit for the printing press goes to Bi Sheng, a Han Chinese printer circa 1040. His system used metal and ceramic tablets which made it very expensive, and required an enormous amount of labor. It would be another 400 years before Johannes Gutenburg would develop a matrix style movable type system that used individual type pieces from an alloy made up of lead, tin and antimony (the same component still used to this day). His creativity led to the first assembly line-style of mass production of books, where a single printing press could produce up to 240 pages per hour.
By the dawn of the 19th Century, the Industrial Revolution was fully under way, and had further improved on the capabilities of the printing press. Having moved to London, Friedrich Koenig with the assistance of Andreas Bauer, and receiving financial support from Thomas Bensley, developed a steam driven printer, which in 1814 they sold to The Times in London, and was capable of 1,100 impressions an hour. The first Times edition printed using this method was on November 28, 1814.
This building is modeled after the Print Shop located at Blists Hill, an open air museum operated by the Iron Bridge Gorge Museum Trust that recreates the sights and sounds of a Victorian Shropshire town in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The Printing Shop houses and uses a Victorian Era printer from Kington, Herefordshire.