Rambles about Portsmouth. Sketches of persons, localities, and incidents of two centuries: principally from tradition and unpublished documents. By Charles W. Brewster.

370 RAMBLES ABOUT PORTSMOUTH.
at Portsmouth now and compare it with what it was fifty
years ago, no one will deny that it has made steady progress in many important particulars-such as we may well
be proud of.
The changes in the outer world have been as great as in
any half-century since the flood. The printer's eye is
naturally cast first on the progress of that art which is the
preservation of all arts. In 1818, he put in type a paragraph which announced a new discovery in paper making.
In March of that year, Messrs. Gilpin, on the Brandywine,
gave notice of a discovery whereby paper can be made by
machinery, in a continuous sheet of any length. Until then
every sheet of paper was made singly by hand, and when
used for paper hangings, sheets were pasted together to
make the roll. This discovery saved more than half the
expense of labor in paper manufacture.
Fifty years ago the most rapid Printing Presses in this
country could not print more than 300 impressions per
hour. The London Literary Gazette, in March 1818, announced that a wonderful invention had just been made in
England, whereby one thousand sheets of that paper could
be'printed in an hour. It says that it is an improvement
on the steam press of the London Times, which had been
in operation about three years. Now, 30,000 impressions
are made per hour by the Hoe presses, and only last month
it was announced that a new press in Paris is sending out
600 impressions per minute! Although this statement
needs confirmation, yet the known facts show that the progress of Printing in the last fifty years has been greater
than from the time of its discovery in 1429 to 1818.
Fifty years ago he thinks there was not a City in any
New England state, excepting Connecticut. The town
of Boston contained about fifty thousand inhabitants.
The cities of Lowell, Lawrence, Nashua and Manchester
had not even received a name,-and the flowing waters