Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/91

 able to photograph any object or scene in its natural colours at one operation. We can already do so in three, and by the same number of machinings we can reproduce such pictures in print, provided we can afford to print slowly enough and on a sufficiently smooth paper. The process is in its earliest infancy as yet. We shall ultimately make it far more practicable. But even so, printing presses of the present sort are far too slow for newspaper use. A hundred years hence magazines and weekly periodicals may perhaps still be printed on greatly improved presses; but daily papers will be produced by photography alone. Already the Röntgen rays will print a dozen or more images at a time on superimposed sensitive papers. In the next century all that will be necessary in order to multiply typematter and illustrations in any number of colours will be to place the original on a pile of paper and expose it to the rays of some source of energy, when the whole matter will be impressed upon every sheet, and this not by any mere contact of type and process-blocks with paper (which involves serious difficulties, owing to the interference of the paper-surface with the grain of the etched "screen") but by direct action of light, or of some influence taking the place of light, so that perfectly clear pictures will be produced. And news of all sorts will be the subject of this kind of illustration.