Chapter 9

SUMMARY:
The Industrial Revolution was a tremendous change of social and economic proportions. It wasn't just a time period. Energy took on a whole new meaning with the use of animal and human power and the emergence of factories. Cities grew quickly along with population. Political power became more important than the aristocracy that ruled prior centuries. Manufacturing dominated production and science became important in improving it. The capitalist replaced the landowner and nearly everything became a matter of efficiency.
With the emergence and frequency of manufacturing, this obviously led to a significant increase in typeface innovation. It was no long solely a matter of 26 letters and grammatical symbols but rather letters became visual and abstract forms. Major design innovators of this time were the London type founders. These type founders assisted in the shift mentioned above by inventing a more decorative type. They also developed the "bold" type and sans serif.
During the economically important time the woodtype was developed to replace the heavy metaltypes used in printing. They were expensive and difficult to produce. The wooden types were light, cheap and just as efficient. Printing also took a big shift when the steam-powered printing press was invented. Next it was modified more when the first version of the type writer was released. This sped up newspaper printing and book making.
Photography also became an important part of this era of change. Photography was initially a research tool that was used to developed wood-engraved illlustrations. It was used to capture major events and eventually became a very important part in mass communication. Many different people worked at developing a simpler process for photography. It began to define human history and began to capture very important events such as the Civil War.

Most Intersting
I found Victorian typography and other parts of this period very interesting. I sort of wish I would have done my project on this!