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 preëminence to-day.
There is no record in any of the histories of printing, or in encyclopædias, 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 printing offices, for it can hardly be supposed that Yankee "go-aheadativeness" would have failed to recognize at once the importance of the discovery, or have long delayed its general adoption, although the hand press, with many improvements, remained the universal printing machine in the United States until 1822, when the Treadwell power press gave the first impulse to more rapid printing. The Treadwell was not a cylinder press, but its invention would have been of no consequence without the composition roller. It is certain, however, that more than sixty years ago the melting pot and roller mould had become an important adjunct to every rural printing office, and the making of a new roller was an event in the routine of the establishment. The orthodox mixture for the composition in the printing office where the writer of this was the "devil" forty-seven years ago was "a pint of sugar-house molasses to every pound of the best glue, with a tablespoonful of tar to every three pints and three pounds." And that was the customary composition of that day among country printers.