answer of the potter
to his query as to what that composition was.

And what was it? "Glue and treacle,"--two of the simplest of articles,
and the easiest to obtain. The printer experimented with them, and
although he was the first to put to practical use in the art of
printing the thing that revolutionized it and advanced it to its
present state of wonderful perfection, yet so far as the printed
chronicle of him goes, we do not know what his Christian name was, or
whether his surname was Foster or Forster; and one chronicler states
that it was in 1813, and another that it was in 1815, that he
discovered roller composition to his fellow-printers.

The collateral evidence, however, is to the effect that it was in
1813. Forster (admitting that to have been his name), proved the
availability of glue and molasses as an inking surface, not by using
it in the form of a roller, but by coating a canvas with it, and using
the canvas thus prepared in place of the sheep pelt on inking balls.
From this the press inventors got the idea of coating a wooden
cylinder with the composition. Applegath & Cowper, inventors of the
Applegath cylinder press, were the first to adapt it in roller form,
and for a time held a patent on the use of it; but the courts of
England decided that there could be no patent on the composition, and
substitutes for the manufacture of rollers having been devised which
were no infringement on Applegath & Cowper's moulds, the compound came
into open use, and Koenig, who had so improved and perfected
Nicholson's ideas and plans for a power cylinder press, was able, in
1814, by the adaptation of the glue and molasses roller, to print the
first edition of a newspaper that was ever run from a cylinder
press--the historic edition of _The London Times_. The problem of the
inking apparatus solved, there was no longer any limit to the exercise
of inventive genius in the advancement of the printing art; and it
is, therefore, to the printer's roller, more than to any one thing,
that that art owes its wonderful preeminence to-day.

There is no record in any of the histories of printing, or in
encyclopaedias, of who it was that introduced the composition roller
into use in this country, or any reference to the date when it came
into service. De Vinne, in his "Typographia," published in 1876, says
that ink-balls were in use here "fifty years ago," or in 1826; but it
must have been only in isolated and out-of-the-way rural