By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

A new printing press has arrived in Our Honolulu. It can print 140,000 copies of The Advertiser in one hour. It's as long as a football field, stands four stories high and weighs 1,200 tons. The cost: about $26 million.

A space shuttle is probably a little more complicated to put together. And the battleship Missouri may have a few more parts. But when you consider what The Advertiser started with in 1856, our new press deserves a mention. The only things the same are the paper and ink.

It's ironic that the best-informed person I could find about the history of Advertiser printing presses is Tom Bijl, a Dutchman from the Netherlands. Photos of early Hawai'i presses don't exist. There's no description of The Advertiser's first printing press except that it was new.

Bijl, project supervisor for installing the new press, believes publisher Henry Whitney brought in a sheet-fed press. Picture a dining table that seats 12. That's the flat bed on which the typesetter composed the newspaper page. Each page was set in a frame that held the thousands of pieces of lead type together.

The paper came in sheets. A printer smeared ink on a hand roller and rolled it over the type. Then he placed a sheet of paper over the page. The press had a hand-powered roller on one end, something like the wringer in an old fashioned washing machine, that the printer rolled over the paper and back to make an impression of the newspaper page.

The printer removed the paper and set it aside to print, say, 600 copies, then printed the other side.

The big revolution came with the rotary press. By casting the newspaper page on one piece of lead and curving it to a roller, the sheets could be run through the roller and printed much faster. Rotary presses probably came to The Advertiser with the advent of electricity in the 1880s.

Electric motors could be used to power the rollers. From then on, the paper came in rolls instead of sheets. The Advertiser was still using this process when I came to Hawai'i in 1951. The next revolution came with cold type that is too complicated for me to understand. It's an electrical-chemical process operated by computer in which the newspaper is printed from sheets or plates instead of type.

To bring the enormous new press to Hawai'i, the Gannett Co. chartered a ship, the Sea Lion, chosen because it was small enough to fit into Barbers Point Harbor. The voyage from Bremen, Germany, took six weeks. The press will take six to eight weeks to put together and another 12 weeks to connect all the parts to a computer. Installation in the new press building at Kapolei began last week.

The Rev. Kaleo Patterson of the Ka Hana O Ke Akua Church in Wai'anae blessed the press because one man was killed and another hurt during installation of the last one nearly 40 years ago. The ti leaves he used are housed inside the press.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.