1. Illustrated newspapers, such as "Harper's Weekly" and "The London Illustrated News", were very popular during the mid-19th century. What technique was used to produce the beautiful illustrations for which these newspapers are famous?
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Answer:
Wood engraving
These newspapers - and many books of the period - were illustrated using a technique called wood engraving. This involved carving the end grain of a very hard wood, usually boxwood, to produce a raised image. Wood engraving offered many advantages when it came to printing these newspapers. For one, the wooden blocks could be inserted alongside movable type in the printing presses; secondly, it did not require a great deal of pressure to reproduce a detailed wood engraving. But the most important feature for a mass produced newspaper was durability. Believe it or not, a wood engraving could produce many more impressions without loss of detail than a steel engraving! Since these newspapers were printed in editions numbering into the hundreds of thousands, they needed a medium whose plates would last a long time.
During the US Civil War, large newspapers like "Harper's Weekly" had artists that followed the army. They would draw sketches of a battle on the spot, and dispatch them by the fastest means possible to their newspaper's headquarters. There, another artist would transfer the sketch onto a block of whitewashed wood. The block would then be sawed into as many as 16 sections, with each section assigned to a different engraver. The finished sections would then be reassembled in a frame. Using this method, they could produce full page illustrations of important events in a matter of days. If you look closely at the pictures, you can sometimes see lines where the sections were joined together.
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