Results: The History of News and Communication * Part Fourteen * Lithography and the Industrial Revolution's impact on the Newspaper Industry. The Semaphore, a visual telegraph using the telescope and how it advanced communication.

The process was discovered in 1798 by Alois Senefelder of Munich, who used a porous Bavarian limestone for his plate (hence lithography, from Greek lithos, "stone"). The secret of lithographic printing was closely held until 1818, when Senefelder published Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A Complete Course of Lithography). Were you aware of Alois Senefelder prior to this survey?

Lithography became a popular medium among the artists who worked in France during the mid-1800s; Francisco de Goya (in voluntary exile in France), Théodore Géricault, and Eugène Delacroix were among the first lithographers. Honoré Daumier was far more prolific, however, making about 4,000 designs, ranging from newspaper caricatures to broadsides printed on a single sheet. Daumier was one of the first lithographers to make use of the process called transfer lithography, by which the tusche drawing is made on paper instead of on the lithographic stone. The drawing is then transferred to the stone and printed in the usual way. This method, which is more convenient than working on stone, retains the paper's texture in the final print. In the second half of the 19th century, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet worked in lithography, and Odilon Redon made it his principal means of expression. Did you know about this method of Lithography prior to this survey?

Era of the Industrial Revolution - New technology influenced newspapers both directly, through the revolution in printing techniques, and indirectly, through the rapid developments in transport and communications. In printing technology, necessity determined invention when the demand for newspapers exceeded the few thousand weekly copies required of the most popular titles. In 1814, the steam-driven "double-press" was introduced at The Times in London, allowing an output of 5,000 copies per hour. The higher output was a contributing factor in the rise of The Times's circulation from 5,000 to 50,000 by the middle of the century. Were you aware that James Watt the inventor of the steam engine, contributed to the advancement of the Newspaper Industry?

Back In the 1800s during the Industrial Revolution, people had a very limited variety of ways to communicate with each other. The semaphore, a modern precursor to the electric telegraph. Developed in the early 1790s, the semaphore consisted of a series of hilltop stations that each had large movable arms to signal letters and numbers and two telescopes with which to see the other stations. Like ancient smoke signals, the semaphore was susceptible to weather and other factors that hindered visibility. A different method of transmitting information was needed to make regular and reliable long-distance communication workable. until the telegraph was developed. Were you aware of the semaphore visual telegraph system invented by Claude Chappe?

In Part Fifteen, we will see how the Telegraph, Morse Code and Electricity impacted News and Communication. Do you know how to read Morse Code?