If you took apart the press that printed the first issue of The Pacific Commercial Advertiser on July 2, 1856, you could probably carry it in the trunk of your car. Assembled, it would fit in the back of a pickup truck. In 1856, newspaper presses were being carried west in covered wagons on the Oregon Trail.

The Advertiser's new press had to be chartered by cargo ship from Europe to Hawai'i. It took six months just to make all the electronic parts work together. The press is 65 feet high and allows pressmen to walk inside it to make adjustments.

'Power' press debuts

In 1856, The Advertiser pressman stood in an ink-smudged apron, his nimble fingers plucking lead type from compartments in a tray. He read the story on a sheet of paper while setting it in type. He set the type into a metal form one column wide, called a "stick," that he held in his left hand. The type spelled words backwards because the words in type had to be a mirror image of the words printed in the paper.

Young Henry Whitney, who founded The Advertiser, started as a printer in New York. He could earn 20 cents for setting 1,000 pieces of type.

Whitney later bragged that he started The Advertiser with a new press. That wasn't true. The sailing ship didn't get to Hawai'i in time, so Whitney printed the first issues on an older, smaller press. The pages set in type were placed onto the flat bed of the printing press, known as the flatbed press.

The hand-powered press passed an inked roller over the type, then printed the page by rolling a cylinder over the paper. The printer fed paper into the press by hand. Whitney was proud of his new "power" press.

A power presscould be hooked up to a steam engine. But Advertiser presses would not be driven by steam until 1880.

Most likely, Whitney was referring to the foot power that turned the flywheel and left the printer's hands free to feed paper to the press. The printer's foot pushed a treadle that powered a flywheel, which in turn kept the rollers of the press in motion.

Labor-intensive task

One reason so many printers like Whitney and Benjamin Franklin became newspaper publishers is that they knew how to fix the press when it broke down. The first commercial newspaper in Hawai'i, the Sandwich Island Gazette in 1838, which was printed on Chinese wrapping paper, used such a rickety press that you could hardly read it, according to Whitney. The publisher didn't know how to fix the press.

Writing stories is just the tip of the iceberg in putting out a newspaper. Putting out a special edition in Whitney's time required Herculean labor, plus the handsetting of type for extra pages and foot-powering of the press to make the copies. Thousands of pieces of type had to be set. It was just as difficult to put pictures in the paper.

The first illustration in The Advertiser, outside of the harbor scene in the masthead, was a picture of the eruption of Mauna Loa in 1856. Most likely the reason the picture got into the paper was that Whitney was an artist as well as a writer and a printer. You can bet that he drew the picture. There must have been an itinerant engraver in town who made the wood or metal engraving that printed the picture in the paper.

Whitney sold the paper in 1870, but the presses kept rolling. On July 26, 1873, The Advertiser announced that three Hoe cylinder presses were in action at the same time, the first to be brought so far west. However, the power was still by foot and the type was set by hand.

So, the back shop must have been a busy place in March 1874 when The Advertiser printers, all native Hawaiians, put out the Nuhou, the Hawaii Ponoi, the Friend, and The Advertiser all in seven days. At one stretch, the printers set 295,000 pieces of type in four hours.

Picking up speed

By this time, steam engines were running ships in the harbor and planing mills in town. On Sept. 11, 1880, an item announced The Advertiser as the first newspaper in Hawai'i to use steam power to run its presses.

The setting of type by machine took longer to arrive. Newspapers in New York had already purchased a mechanical marvel called a linotype, with keys like a typewriter. An operator sat at the keyboard and typed the story while the machine cast the words in one-column lines of type from molten lead. This was known as the "hot type" method.

One linotypist could set type faster than a whole crew of printers working by hand. However, the linotype was huge, as big as a pipe organ, but with more moving parts, and it sounded like a clattering streetcar with every screw loose. Minutes of the board of directors of the company show that The Advertiser got a linotype in 1895.

The directors on the board had a long argument over whether to bring in Mainland experts to set up the complicated machine or let local printers have a go at it. Whitney, who was back with The Advertiser at the time, warned that they'd better find someone who knew his business.

Apparently the local printers didn't do so well, because the board ended up hiring W.H. Bell, a linotype operator in Chicago, to operate the machine. Later, lots of local folks of every ethnic persuasion became linotypists.

Web press rolls in

By 1930, when The Advertiser moved from King Street to its present location at the top of Kapi'olani Boulevard, it took 10 linotypes to make type to print the paper. Moving the delicate, big machines in 11 hours between editions in the rain was "one of the most interesting jobs this company has attempted," said E. F. Chapin, manager of Honolulu Construction & Draying Co.

Meanwhile, the web printing press came along that could print faster than flatbed presses. For a web press, printers cast newspaper pages on sheets of lead that wrapped around a roller of the press instead of lying on a flat bed. Also, the paper came in rolls that were fed into the press that printed, cut the pages and sorted them all at the same time in one continuous operation.

With such fast presses, you could sell a lot of papers at a high school football game in old Honolulu Stadium. The story of the game would be written and set in type except for the score. That was called in just as the game ended and the presses rolled. By the time spectators filed out of the stadium half an hour later, newsboys were selling extra editions with the details of the game.