The Washington press differs from the Columbian and Albion in that a very simple toggle joint provides pressure to the platen and on each side of the platen are coil springs which raise it to open position.

The Washington hand press is the invention of Samuel Rust, an American who first produced his press in 1821. In 1834, R. Hoe & Company took over his firm and continued to make the Washington. Many firms manufactured the Washington, some well into the 1900′s. It was the last style of hand press made in the United States.

This press was made and sold by Palmer & Rey of San Francisco, the first successful Far West typefounder. (71 inches high)

I’ve been looking into a number of aspects about the newspaper business in the Old West lately, including business models, ethics, and content strategies. My interest is historical parallels to today’s communication disruption and the paradigm shift in journalism and news media. This press, the Washington Hand Press, was the technological material equivalency of a wordpress or another personally manageable content management system.

It was behind hundreds of pioneer newspapers. They were moved from town to town and run in tents. But most interestingly, the newspapers were rarely, if ever, the money making business. The press itself was. Printers fought for the contracts to print legal notices, land information, wanted posters, and other such information. Many newspapers actively lobbied to get county seats moved where their presses were. Many editors even fabricated news to fill space.

a game going off in the american museum of natural history in nyc tonight.

television has moved from a device to an experience. courtesy of cyberjournalist.net.

Ever wonder how long a Tweet is good for? We did. Being the analytical geeks that we are, we decided to do our own research. The analysis brought us to the conclusion that the average life of a Tweet is about 48 hours.

…..

This analysis was based on click through activity. There are other factors such as re-tweets and replies that are interesting to look at. However, we were interested in finding out how effective Tweets were in driving traffic using an embedded URLs. Twitter conversations, while important, were not addressed in our analysis.

Of the Tweets examined, 54% had click through activity. Within the subset of Tweets that had click through activity, here is what we found:

• 73.8% of the clicks occurred in the first hour
• 85.0% of the clicks occurred in the first 12 hours
• 92.5% of the clicks occurred in the first 48 hours

 

For the past couple of months CityMystery has been building a new game, called PHEON. (A pheon is an ancient Greek arrowhead that has come to symbolize nimbleness of wit.) The purpose of our game is to celebrate (and reinforce) the American impulse to innovate. An economist friend of mine recently said that we have to “invent” our way out of our current mess. With PHEON I am promoting the idea that Americans understand innovation as a reoccurring utility of our democracy, one that matches our ability to adapt and succeed. PHEON’s subtext has to do with how ideas are passed along: how one person articulates a wish that another fulfills.

PHEON is also a story about transformation, which is the subtext of all innovation. Narratives don’t arise all at once – they develop incrementally through character and situation, and a lot of what I have been doing lately (as we pick up sponsorship) is tell and retell the story, editing and embellishing as I go, which feeds the game, which feeds the story, and so on and so forth. PHEON is a multi-institution, mission-based game – with missions emanating from the expertise of participating institutions and agencies. What that means is, let’s say, the Smithsonian American Art Museum has a robust folk art collection, and the missions it may choose to sponsor focus on folk art, or any other collections they want to feature.