The grown-up Jimmie felt as he stood by the new press very much as he felt years before. Could there be a more wonderful machine? Eight rolls of paper were feeding the monster; eighteen plate cylinders were revolving, each carrying type enough for eight pages of a large newspaper; the cylinders, turning at a speed of three hundred revolutions a minute, were consuming paper at the rate of 108 miles of paper six feet wide in an hour. Jimmie, then an experienced newspaper man, watched the four sets of folders pouring out thirty-two-page papers at the rate of 75,000 an hour, until he turned away, saying, "Can it be possible that printing will ever be easier? How I wish Benjamin Franklin could see this press! How he would glory in its possibilities! It is perfectly true that the printing press is to literature what the steam engine is to the industries, and what the locomotive is to traffic."
When Anna Holman was twelve years old she had to sit perfectly still for one hundred twenty seconds--think of it! two whole minutes!--to have her picture taken. Now she could have it taken in one hundredth of the time at one hundredth of the cost.
The only likenesses of people which Anna knew about before she was twelve were the pictures in the parlor of her home. Two of these were pictures of her Grandfather and Grandmother Holman, whom she had never seen. These pictures always interested her, though for a certain reason she did not like them.
Anna had been told that her grandmother was a great beauty in her day, and she often tried to see if she could tell how her grandmother had looked. This she never felt sure she knew, as the picture was only a silhouette. Of all the different kinds of pictures that people have had made, the silhouette, surely, is the most unsatisfactory.
These were not uncommon in the days before photography was known. They were made by using a strong light to obtain a clear, black shadow of the profile of the sitter, and then cutting from plain black paper as perfect a copy as possible of the shadow head. Of course, the sitter was always posed for a direct side view in order to get an outline of the features; and, of course, in such a picture the expression of the face was wholly lacking.