antly at work; and still the
insatiable demands of the newsmen on certain occasions could not be
met. Thus the question was early forced upon his consideration,
whether he could not devise machinery for the purpose of expediting the
production of newspapers. Instead of 300 impressions an hour, he
wanted from 1500 to 2000. Although such a speed as this seemed quite
as chimerical as propelling a ship through the water against wind and
tide at fifteen miles an hour, or running a locomotive on a railway at
fifty, yet Mr. Walter was impressed with the conviction that a much
more rapid printing of newspapers was feasible than by the slow
hand-labour process; and he endeavoured to induce several ingenious
mechanical contrivers to take up and work out his idea.

The principle of producing impressions by means of a cylinder, and of
inking the types by means of a roller, was not new. We have seen, in
the preceding memoir, that as early as 1790 William Nicholson had
patented such a method, but his scheme had never been brought into
practical operation. Mr. Walter endeavoured to enlist Marc Isambard
Brunel--one of the cleverest inventors of the day--in his proposed
method of rapid printing by machinery; but after labouring over a
variety of plans for a considerable time, Brunel finally gave up the
printing machine, unable to make anything of it. Mr. Walter next tried
Thomas Martyn, an ingenious young compositor, who had a scheme for a
self-acting machine for working the printing press. He was supplied
with the necessary funds to enable him to prosecute his idea; but Mr.
Walter's father was opposed to the scheme, and when the funds became
exhausted, this scheme also fell to the ground.

As years passed on, and the circulation of the paper increased, the
necessity for some more expeditious method of printing became still
more urgent. Although Mr. Walter had declined to enter into an
arrangement with Bensley in 1809, before Koenig had completed his
invention of printing by cylinders, it was different five years later,
when Koenig's printing machine was actually at work. In the preceding
memoir, the circumstances connected with the adoption of the invention
by Mr. Walter are fully related; as well as the announcement made in
The Times on the 29th of November, 1814--the day on which the first
newspaper printed by steam was given to the world.

But Koenig's printing machine was but the beginning of a great new
branch of indus