Jonathan

It was finally time.

Now they could officially begin working on the printing press.

They had begun with some preparations already.

They had created a template and test run for the letters they would use in this printing press. Also, they had bought a wine press, which would be modified to work as a printing press.

During the time they had waited for the king’s command, they had created more paper so that they would be able to test their creation when it was finished.

In the morning, Jonathan called for a meeting of everybody: “Mr Atramento, your first mission will be to create ink. In fact, we want multiple ink types. You will get one of the letters that Mr Aurum already created as a test object, to see if you can transfer the ink to the letter and then upon the paper. Mr Aurum, you will need to create more letters, I am afraid, but how many I will leave to your jurisdiction. And you, Mr Lignum, will help me in modifying the press we have.”

Everyone went to work.

When Jonathan and Timothy reached the press, Jonathan said: “You will likely need to do most of the actual work, the last time I did anything with wood is around ten years ago. And that was connecting two random pieces of wood for fun. Our goal is modifying this press to work for our purposes. We need a place where the letters will sit on, and we need even pressure from above. In fact, this is likely the most likely point of failure. Do you have any idea how we can reach this goal?”

“I have some ideas. We need to make the plate on which the letters sit and the plate which pushes downward evenly and in alignment. At the same time, it will be very important that the ground on which the press itself stands is even. At least we got some even stonework in the time it took the king to decide if we are allowed to begin working on this. Our press will likely work from the start, but we will need to modify the plates. Do we need anything special for the plate holding the letters?”

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Jonathan looked at the press for a while answered: “It might be useful to have a mechanism with which we can prevent the letters from shifting. Besides that, I am not sure what would be necessary. Right now I plan to apply ink to the letters in some way, no idea how, then lie a piece of paper on that, and then apply pressure from above. Then I want to bring the press into starting position again and take the piece of paper away. If needed, the letters would then be inked again a piece of paper would be put there and then the same thing happens again. When we have enough copies, we would need to remove the letters and bring them into a new order.”

“This is fascinating, but I think you might have missed some implications of the processes required. Let’s go through them one by one.”

Jonathan answered: “What do you mean? But I agree. If you think I missed something, it would be for the best to make that clear now, before we have done all that work.”

“First off, we need to get the letters under the press. The higher we bring the starting position, the longer one step will take. So we need to find a solution to that problem. We either find a way to move the letters, or we need to be able to ease some aspects of the lowering or rising in some way.”

“I agree, I totally missed that. Moving means we need to find a way to ascertain that we get it into a mostly centred position over and over again, multiple times per day, finding a way to extend the starting position would likely increase the risk of damaging the important parts of the press. But moving is also a risk of damage, so we cannot forget that. Let me write that down, please.”

He took one of the new pieces of paper and a ballpoint pen and created a small note that only he could decipher.

Timothy then continued: “The same problem applies to the paper, but that might not be so important. The applying of the ink though does not give us many options. We need, most likely space for that, which means we must be able to remove the plate on which the letters will lie. So, let us begin planning, what do you think?”

“You are absolutely right. We might even find problems before they become ones when we do that!”