for the type-bed to return without touching it. The board from which
the sheets were "fed" was near the centre of the press, and at the top
adjoining the feed board was an endless belt made of cloth as wide as
the board and running with an intermittent motion over two rollers.

The sheet of paper was laid upon this belt, which then moved forward,
carrying the sheet between the tapes and leading it to the top of,
down and around, the first cylinder where it received the first
impression. Thence the sheet was conveyed by the tapes to the top of
and around the second impression cylinder and was printed on the
reverse side, that is "perfected," and it was then taken from the
lower side of the second cylinder by hand and laid upon a board in the
centre of the press, between the two impression cylinders and
underneath the feed board. This press printed both sides of a sheet
21 x 34-1/2 inches at a speed of nine hundred to one thousand an hour.

Shortly afterward a single-cylinder press was constructed upon the
same principle, the forerunner of what is now known as the single
large or drum cylinder press.

Within the next few years, Applegath and Cowper greatly simplified the
presses in the _Times_ and in Bensley's office by removing many of the
gear wheels. They also invented the first inking-table, a flat, iron
plate attached to the type-bed which enabled the rollers to distribute
the ink more evenly than before. They placed rollers at an angle
across the ink-table and introduced the revolving roller and the
scraping blade in the ink-fountain.

More important, however, were Napier's inventions about 1824, of
"grippers" which seized the sheet of paper at its front edge and drew
it from the feed board, while the cylinder was in motion, and of a
method of alternately depressing and raising the impression cylinders
on the forward and backward stroke of the type-bed, making it
unnecessary to have a part of the cylinders of smaller diameter than
the rest to allow the type to pass under it as the bed returned. This
made it possible to use cylinders of a smaller diameter. These
improvements were first embodied in a perfecting press made for
Hansard, a London printer.

Although a number of presses were already being operated by steam
power, Hansard, in his description of the Napier bed and platen press
(the "Nay-Peer," he called it) finds a peculiar advantage in that "it
supersedes the necessity of steam power, as the motion of