The most colourful of several conflicting theories is that, like so many other great inventions, screen printing originated in China. Textile prints from China of great age do exist and it is believed that they were produced by some form of stencil system in which human hair was used to support the unattached parts of the master stencil. The prints are reputed to be nearly two thousand years old, hence there is no corroborative evidence proving how the prints were made; suffice it to say that they could have been produced by a system similar to what we know as screen printing.
It was in the textiles printing industry that the first modern form of the process originated in both England and France about 1850. Details of the method used are now unclear but it seemed to incorporate the use of a stencil system for the production of continuous lengths of printed fabric. In 1907 Samuel Simon of Manchester was using a fabric printing system in which the designs were produced from stencils which were drawn onto bolting cloth stretched on frames but the printing operation, if it can be called that, was made by brush through the mesh.
Albert Kosloff gave a demonstration in Berlin in 1920 of screen printing on paper using a wooden frame stretched with bolting cloth which supported a stencil and on which a rubber-bladed squeegee was used to print the ink through the stencil. Shortly afterwards, Kosloff emigrated to the USA and there became one of the pioneers of the process.
The first commercial use of the process in modern times seems to have been in the USA about the year 1911. A group of enterprising signwriters foresaw the need for the quantity production of destination boards and advertising signs for the newly motorised omnibuses. John Pilsworth is cited as being the leader of this team, which also used bolting cloth as the means of supporting their hand-cut paper stencils. Bolting cloth was the name given to the material woven from natural silk which for many years had been used for sieving flour in the milling industry. Its ready availability and relatively low price assisted the development of the new process and a company was formed to market the signs - The Selectasine Company.
Realising the big potential of their process these pioneers developed their business further and provided the know-how to other companies under a licensing system.
A Lieutenant-Colonel Mayhew, who was a member of a milling company in Britain, obtained the United Kingdom patent rights from Selectasine in 1918 and set up a similarly named company, Selecticin, in London. Largely due to Colonel Mayhew’s efforts, news of the new printing technique spread and it was adopted by a number of companies in the advertising and signwriting trades. Early development was largely hampered by lack of suitable materials and the screen printers had to solve all the technical problems that the new technique produced.
Note: This introductory section is an edited extract from the History of the Display Producers and Screen Printers Association Limited, researched and written by Mr G W Robertson of Dane and Company Limited.
All lettering or designs which had free centres, as for example in the letter O, needed to have ties. If not, the middle would fall out and a “l” would result. For this reason only relatively large characters could be employed. In the early 1930’s Selecticin developed a stencil material comprising a shellac film on a paper support. The design and lettering were cut from the film with a knife. After cutting, the film was placed under the gauze and a warm iron used to melt the shellac. This did away with the ties and was therefore a step forward in permitting smaller lettering and longer runs. However, the standard of reproduction depended entirely on the skills of the cutter.
A major breakthrough was achieved in the early 1940’s by Colin Sharp, a chemist at the Autotype Company in Ealing, Middlesex, who developed the first photographic stencil. This was a development from the Gelatine film used in the production of copper photogravure rollers. This stencil is still in use today and is known as the indirect type. We will say more about this later.
After the Second World War and up to 1950, little progress was made due to extreme shortage of materials. The process was still almost exclusively used for the production of point-of-sale posters and show cards.
Only one machine had been developed by a Scottish firm called McCormack. This was used for printing the larger sizes of poster, where hand squeegeeing is extremely tiring for the operator. It is perhaps interesting to note that as far as can be ascertained a comparable situation existed in Continental Europe and the USA. As an exception to this general rule there were machines which had been developed specifically for the printing of milk and other bottles, such as Coca Cola, using ceramic enamel which was fused into the glass.
During the 1950’s the process began spreading at a rapidly increasing rate, particularly within light manufacturing industries, due to the fact that many new materials could not be satisfactorily printed by traditional methods. Examples include the tremendous range of PVC and polythene components and containers that were constantly being introduced.
In addition there were changes in manufacturing methods; for instance, the printed circuit board replaced wiring. The range and volume of consumer products were increasing as supplies of raw materials became more readily available. Instructions and nameplates for radio, TV, motor vehicles and refrigerators needed to be printed permanently and more cheaply than applied metal or paper labels.
At first, printing was done with crude, manually operated equipment. Naturally a demand was created for better, faster methods. Established printing machine manufacturers did not respond to these demands and a multiplicity of small companies emerged to satisfy the requirement. (DEK was one of these in 1969).