'THE TIMES' & THE STEAM-POWERED PRINTING PRESS

The Times, First Edition 1788

There is nothing better that have a cup of tea meanwhile you are reading The Times.

The Grandma loves English traditions and she practices lots of them. The Times is a newspaper based in London since 1785, then it is one of the oldest around the world.

On a day like today, The Times became becomes the first newspaper to be produced on a steam-powered printing press, built by the German team of Koenig & Bauer and The Grandma wants to commemorate this event talking about the history of this prestigious newspaper.

Before talking about The Times, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic.

The Times is a British daily (Monday to Saturday) national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register, adopting its current name on 1 January 1788.

The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times (founded in 1821) are published by Times Newspapers, since 1981 a subsidiary of News UK, in turn wholly owned by News Corp. The Times and The Sunday Times do not share editorial staff, were founded independently, and have only had common ownership since 1967.

The Times is the first newspaper to have borne that name, lending it to numerous other papers around the world, such as The Times of India and The New York Times. In countries where these other titles are popular, the newspaper is often referred to as The London Times or The Times of London, although the newspaper is of national scope and distribution.

More information: The Times

The Times is the originator of the widely used Times Roman typeface, originally developed by Stanley Morison of The Times in collaboration with the Monotype Corporation for its legibility in low-tech printing.

In November 2006 The Times began printing headlines in a new font, Times Modern. The Times was printed in broadsheet format for 219 years, but switched to compact size in 2004 in an attempt to appeal more to younger readers and commuters using public transport. The Sunday Times remains a broadsheet.

The Times had an average daily circulation of 417,298 in January 2019; in the same period, The Sunday Times had an average weekly circulation of 712,291. An American edition of The Times has been published since 6 June 2006.

The Times has been heavily used by scholars and researchers because of its widespread availability in libraries and its detailed index. A complete historical file of the digitised paper, up to 2010, is online from Gale Cengage Learning.

The Times was founded by publisher John Walter on 1 January 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, with Walter in the role of editor. Walter had lost his job by the end of 1784 after the insurance company where he worked went bankrupt due to losses from a Jamaican hurricane. Unemployed, Walter began a new business venture. Henry Johnson had recently invented the logography, a new typography that was reputedly faster and more precise, although three years later, it was proved less efficient than advertised. Walter bought the logography's patent and with it opened a printing house to produce a daily advertising sheet.

More information: Pan MacMillan

The first publication of the newspaper The Daily Universal Register in Great Britain was 1 January 1785. Unhappy because the word Universal was frequently omitted from the name, Walter changed the title after 940 editions on 1 January 1788 to The Times.

In 1803, Walter handed ownership and editorship to his son of the same name. In spite of Walter Sr's sixteen-month stay in Newgate Prison for libel printed in The Times, his pioneering efforts to obtain Continental news, especially from France, helped build the paper's reputation among policy makers and financiers.

The Times used contributions from significant figures in the fields of politics, science, literature, and the arts to build its reputation.

For much of its early life, the profits of The Times were very large and the competition minimal, so it could pay far better than its rivals for information or writers.

Beginning in 1814, the paper was printed on the new steam-driven cylinder press developed by Friedrich Koenig. In 1815, The Times had a circulation of 5,000.

More information: Letter Press Printing

Thomas Barnes was appointed general editor in 1817. In the same year, the paper's printer James Lawson, died and passed the business onto his son John Joseph Lawson (1802–1852). Under the editorship of Barnes and his successor in 1841, John Thadeus Delane, the influence of The Times rose to great heights, especially in politics and amongst the City of London.

In other events of the nineteenth century, The Times opposed the repeal of the Corn Laws until the number of demonstrations convinced the editorial board otherwise, and only reluctantly supported aid to victims of the Irish Potato Famine. 

The Times, First Edition 1788

It enthusiastically supported the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which reduced corruption and increased the electorate from 400,000 people to 800,000 people, still a small minority of the population. During the American Civil War, The Times represented the view of the wealthy classes, favouring the secessionists, but it was not a supporter of slavery. During the 19th century, it was not infrequent for the Foreign Office to approach The Times and ask for continental intelligence, which was often superior to that conveyed by official sources.

The Times faced financial extinction in 1890 under Arthur Fraser Walter, but it was rescued by an energetic editor, Charles Frederic Moberly Bell. During his tenure (1890–1911), The Times became associated with selling the Encyclopædia Britannica using aggressive American marketing methods introduced by Horace Everett Hooper and his advertising executive, Henry Haxton. Due to legal fights between the Britannica's two owners, Hooper and Walter Montgomery Jackson, The Times severed its connection in 1908 and was bought by pioneering newspaper magnate, Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe.

Kim Philby, a double agent with primary allegiance to the Soviet Union, was a correspondent for the newspaper in Spain during the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s. Philby was admired for his courage in obtaining high-quality reporting from the front lines of the bloody conflict. He later joined British Military Intelligence (MI6) during World War II, was promoted into senior positions after the war ended, and defected to the Soviet Union when discovery was inevitable in 1963.

More information: The British Newspaper Archive

Between 1941 and 1946, the left-wing British historian E. H. Carr was assistant editor. Carr was well known for the strongly pro-Soviet tone of his editorials. In December 1944, when fighting broke out in Athens between the Greek Communist ELAS and the British Army, Carr in a Times leader sided with the Communists, leading Winston Churchill to condemn him and the article in a speech to the House of Commons. As a result of Carr's editorial, The Times became popularly known during that stage of World War II as the threepenny Daily Worker, the price of the Communist Party's Daily Worker being one penny.

In 1981, The Times and The Sunday Times were bought from Thomson by Rupert Murdoch's News International. The acquisition followed three weeks of intensive bargaining with the unions by company negotiators John Collier and Bill O'Neill. Murdoch gave legal undertakings to maintain separate journalism resources for the two titles. The Royal Arms was reintroduced to the masthead at about this time, but whereas previously it had been that of the reigning monarch, it would now be that of the House of Hanover, who were on the throne when the newspaper was founded.

More information: British Library

Great journalism will always attract readers.

The words, pictures and graphics that are the stuff of journalism

have to be brilliantly packaged;

they must feed the mind and move the heart. 

Rupert Murdoch