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While the production and design of ephemera relied on changes in printing technologies between the late-18th and early-20th centuries, these historical remnants of the everyday also reflect the influence of economic, social, and cultural transitions during this time. Old and new professions and trades, like job printing, papermaking, photography, and entrepreneurship, affected and mirrored in their work the daily major and minor life events of a rapidly industrializing and evolving society. This period witnessed the market revolution; changes in reading practices; the invention of lithography and photography; and the introduction of steam power. Production of ephemera was often in the hands of the job printer, who had to be creative, economical, and efficient to produce material of a common or commercial nature, generally referred to as job work. Wood engravings, type, lithography, new grades of paper, and photography facilitated this mass production of works for mass consumption and helped to foster a visual world familiar to, yet distinct from, our own.
TIMELINE
1800s -1810s:
Iron handpress invented
1820s:
Commercial lithography studios established in U.S.
1830s:
Wood engraving process improved with development of milling router
American woodtype design innovations begin
1840s:
Electrotype invented
Process to make paper from wood pulp developed
1850s:
Steam-powered printing presses and card and billhead platen presses mass manufactured
Paper photographs and stereographs introduced into the U.S. market
1860s:
Chromolithography process perfected and mass marketed
1870s-1880s:
Fully-mechanized lithographic printing presses developed
Photomechanical processes begin to be used widely in the printing trades
“In this age of progress, of letters, and of multiform occupations, from the time that education is commenced to that period when active engagement ceases, earnest and practical people are ever taxing the eye to its utmost capabilities.” J. Henry Clark, M.D., Sight and Hearing, How Preserved, and How Lost (1856)