George E. Clymer

George E. Clymer (1754 – 1834) was an American mechanic, statesman and inventor from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1813 he invented the Columbian Printing Press, an iron, lever-operated replacement for the wooden screw presses based on Gutenberg's design.

Clymer began making wooden presses of the Gutenberg model around 1790. He switched to exclusively making the Columbian Press in 1816. His improvement still printed a page at a time but could be operated with less effort and more certain results. A similar press was invented around the same time by Lord Stanhope in England, and was called the Stanhope Press. Another model developed in America was known as the Washington Press.

Clymer found a limited market for his press in the U.S., so in 1818 he moved to England to compete directly with the Stanhope Press. A few years before their invention, a steam-powered continuous press using rollers was invented in Germany by Friedrich Koenig. It was a much larger press and could produce much higher volumes. He made his first sale to the London "Times," which could afford the press and take advantage of its volume output. The Columbian, Stanhope, and Washington presses enabled smaller printers to remain somewhat competitive, and the manufacture of them all continued until late in the century. Later invention of the rotary press and offset lithography doomed all of these presses.

Examples

Surviving examples of the Columbian Press can be found in many museums:
*William Clowes Printing Museum, Beccles, Suffolk, England
*Werkstattmuseum für Druckkunst (Workshop Museum for the Art of Printing), Leipzig, Germany
*Milton Keynes Museum Printshop, England
*Amberley Working Museum, Amberley, West Sussex, England
*Cambridge Museum of Technology, Cambridge, England
*National Print Museum of Ireland
*Foyer of "The Sydney Morning Herald", Sydney, Australia