Bus 2: Printing Press

     As we arrived in Philadelphia, we met our tour guide for the first time. We saw many different places. One of these places was a printing shop that had a working printer from the era of  Benjamin Franklin. This was his printer (or maybe not, but it was the print shop in which he made his fortune.) The press was very large, almost unnecessarily large. The paper they used in that time period was made not of trees, but of linen. The letters had to be set in trays, and ink was pounded onto the letters. Then the printer pushed the linen on top of the letters and pushed it on with a press, although it had to be pressed twice because of the size of the document. The paper we saw printed was the Declaration of Independence.

T.H., Bus 2