Ask who did most to change newspapers in the 20th century and answers fall into predictable categories: for the English-speaking world, great editors (C.P. Scott, Ben Bradlee), powerful proprietors (Northcliffe, Katharine Graham), multi-national tycoons (Roy Thomson, Rupert Murdoch). Even a few journalists might get a mention. But a strong case could be made for Staley McBrayer, who died on April 14th aged 92.
He introduced offset printing into newspaper production, and his invention did more than anything since the Hoe steam press to change the face of journalism. And to preserve it.
Staley McBrayer lived quietly, out of any limelight. He was born on June 22nd, 1909, in Saltillo, Texas. In 1933, he took his BA from East Texas State teachers' college and went on to graduate study in journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.
He worked in all the departments of provincial journalism: as reporter, printer, salesman, business manager. He acquired his own printing works in 1940, and with it a clutch of low-circulation suburban newspapers.
During his second World War service, Staley McBrayer's companies were run by his wife, Beverly. Postwar, the financial viability of the small local newspaper was precarious. Particularly expensive for proprietors like him were hot metal Linotype machines and the highly skilled (and highly unionised) machinists who ran them. In an attempt to lower his overheads, Staley McBrayer experimented with offset printing.
The technique was not new. It had been discovered in 1904 (by American printer Ira W. Rubel) and it involved transferring print, as an image, to another surface (initially rubber), which can then be offset on to paper. It is a cold (planographic) process.
For newspapers in the early 1950s, the problem lay less with the technique (widely used for books and in advertising) than in finding a sufficiently powerful printing machine to run it. Staley McBrayer, in collaboration with a printer (Herbert Killickand) and an engineer (Grant Ghormley), created his prototype Vanguard web-perfecting press in 1957. Its advantages were immediately recognised by the newspaper industry, overall suffering cost problems. But his workshop could not supply the market and, in any case, he wanted to get back to editing and running newspapers.
In 1962, his Vanguard company was sold to the Cottrell division of Harris-Intertype, which mass-produced the new machinery. The results were dramatic. By the end of the 1970s, 72 per cent of the 2,000 or so newspapers in the US were offset printed. Suburban and local newspapers were the first to convert (and thrive). The big metropolitan titles (where unionisation was strongest) managed to hold out a decade before hot gave way to universal cold.
Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries newspaper printing processes changed relatively little. A printer would have been doing much the same on his first day as an apprentice as when he got his gold watch 40 years later.
Since 1957, the pace of change has been tumultuous. Staley McBrayer's innovation opened the way to photo-offset and, more recently, digital composition in which keyboarding journalists are the compositors.
His invention enhanced the efficiency of big national and metropolitan newspapers and was the salvation of the newspapers serving small communities. He always said he was inspired to experiment with offset under financial duress, the mother of invention.
"I was sinking financially in the newspaper business. The development of offset was the way I survived." The way a whole industry survived, as it transpired. A plaque in Fort Worth marks where he invented his Vanguard Press. The page in which this is read is likely to be another monument.
His wife died in 1997.
Staley Thomas McBrayer: born 1909; died, April 2002