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CHAPTER XVII

RECONSTRUCTION PERIOD

18651880

THE period after the War of the States was one of reconstruc- tion, not only in the world of politics, but also in that of journal- ism. Many changes had been wrought in the mechanical pro- duction of papers. Hoe, in order to get speed out of the press, had taken the type from a flat bed and put it on a revolving cylinder: Craske had stereotyped the page of type so that pages could be duplicated for as many presses as the plant possessed : Bullock had begun to feed paper to the press from a huge roll : Morse, to help gather the news, had stretched from Dan to Beersheba an electric wire which ran direct to the newspaper office. Other changes were soon to come. Mergenthaler told the compositor to stop distributing type into cases after the paper had been printed and to cast a line-of-type at a time, to be thrown back, when used, into the melting-pot; another inventor found a cheap method of manufacturing paper from wood pulp; still another, in order that the paper might have a late entry, put a "fudge" attachment upon the press so that even after the cylinders had started revolving, a bulletin of the latest item might be printed on the front page in a colored ink if desired. The Government agreed to carry papers by weight regardless of distance to all points of the United States for two cents a pound and free of charge to places in the county of publication, save where delivery was made to homes by mail-carriers, for which an extra fee was charged.

A city news association collected the local items in every field of industry. A press association, composed of newspapers scat- tered over the continent, sent in the happenings of national importance. An international bureau of the four great news- gathering organizations literally watched the four .corn