[Sidenote: Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration]
It was during the early seventies that the inevitable happened, or at least began to happen, with regard to newspaper illustration. The excessive cost of illustrating periodicals by wood engraving, and the time required for its slow accomplishment, together with the growing eagerness of the people for pictures, set a multitude of men of clever wits at work to devise some cheaper and speedier process of reproducing drawings and photographic pictures. I myself invented a very crude and imperfect process of that kind, which I thought susceptible of satisfactory development. I engaged a certain journalist of irregular habits and large pretensions, who was clever with his pencil, to join me in the development and exploitation of the process, he to furnish such drawings of various kinds as I needed, and I to experiment in reproduction. Of course I had to explain my process to him, and he, being a shrewd young man whose moral character was far less admirable than his always perfect costume, mastered my secret and sold it for a trifling sum to a man who promptly patented it and, with a few changes which I had not the cleverness to make, brought it into use as his own.
I said some ugly things to my dishonest coadjutor, whose manner of receiving them convinced me that he was well used to hear himself characterized in that way. Then I laughed at myself, went home and read about Moses and the green spectacles, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," and so calmed my spirit.
But mine was an extremely unsatisfactory process, even after the inventor who had bought it from my rascally associate had improved it to the limit of his capacity, and there were far cleverer men at work upon the same problem. By 1874 one of them had so far succeeded that an enterprising firm, owning his patents, decided to set up in New York a daily illustrated newspaper, the _Graphic_.
The failure of the enterprise was freely predicted from the beginning, and in the end failure came to it, but not for the reasons given by the prophets. The _Graphic_ failed chiefly because it never had an editor or manager who knew how to make a newspaper. An additional cause of its failure was its inability to get itself into that great news-gathering trust, the Associated Press, whose agents, local and general, covered the whole country and the whole world with a minuteness that no single newspaper could hope to approach.