It is widely known that Michael Faraday, one of the leading scientists of the nineteenth century, began his career as an apprentice bookbinder and educated himself by reading the books he handled. It is less well known that while Faraday became deeply interested in chemistry and especially electricity, he retained more than a passing interest in developments in the printing industry.
Faraday’s apprenticeship in print and electricity mirrored that of US statesman Benjamin Franklin, who was apprenticed to a printer located in the Great St Bartholemew’s church in Smithfield and who went on to experiment with lightning. Faraday stuck to science, was a key member of the Athenaeum Club and started the annual Royal Institution lectures at Christmas which continue to this day.
And among his experiments in electrical induction, magnetism and the behaviour of gases, Faraday found time to keep up to date with developments in print. He gave a lecture at the Athenaeum in Pall Mall in May 1845 to explain the Anastatic printing process, a forerunner of modern litho printing.
At that point litho was literally printing from the stone using images drawn on the smooth limestone surface (this before the development of photographic imaging). Anastatic printing used a zinc plate and an original which was transferred to the plate through pressure – the Victorian equivalent of a contact frame.
The hydrophilic and hydrophobic aspects are described along with the wetting properties of metal, especially a gum solution enhanced with a weak solution of phosphatic acid. The original image, say a sketch made on paper, is moistened by a weak solution of nitric acid and then pressed, perhaps by a roller onto a sheet of zinc. Where there is no image, the acid is free to pass through the paper and to etch the surface of the plate slightly. Where lines or marks have been drawn, these are set off onto the plate leaving the oil from the drawing on the plate.
When washed with the gum and acid solution, the non image areas are able to repel ink while the image areas attract the ink applied by a leather covered roller, followed by application of the sheet or paper to be printed.
In his lecture, Faraday also described how it was possible to use the Anastatic method for old originals where there is no set off effect under pressure: “The page or print is soaked in a solution, first of potash, and then of tartaric acid,” says a report published in the Year Book of Facts in Science and Art published in 1845.
Anastatic printing laid the groundwork for wider acceptance of litho printing, indeed zinc plates were in widespread use well into the 1970s. The Anastatic Press became part of Cowells, later WS Cowell in Ipswich as a leading litho printer for illustrated children’s books in particular.
Nor was this Faraday’s only link to modern printing. In other experiments, he noted that the optical effects of gold colloids (nano particles) were different to that of the bulk metal, something that Wikipedia says “might be considered to be the birth of nanoscience” and is the same effect that Benny Landa says gave rise to the idea of nanography.
