Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/305



The rise of the Celestial Press—for so we term the press connected with outside life, as distinguished from that of our own world—was not long delayed after our entry into the higher life, and our thorough mastery of the language of that life. We had the benefit of Venus's experience to guide us, and indeed, chiefly through that ready-to-hand experience, our press interests were started with a fair correspondentship in many star quarters. Soon the celestial news became as copious and quite as engrossing as the terrestrial. We have spoken of necessity as being ever mother to invention, and this was never more clear than in the case of the modern press with its countless customers. Some of the successive steps of progress form a curious retrospect, from the huge cumbrous old-fashioned paper "broad sheet," of the nineteenth century, up to the tiny four-inch square microphied photograph, which is to-day doubled into the waist-coat pocket, and all its full category of news and events read with ease through the common diamond magnifier.

Passing over various earlier stages, we come to that great step of printing by reflection-photography; and upon that again follows the compound-reflector system, by which copies upon copies, in broad sheets, comprising each thousands of separate newspapers, are reflectively flashed off with the rapidity of ordinary light-travel, over the successively opposed surfaces, laid out above or below, wherever space could be commanded for the purpose. But as withal, still