35 Automatic Gathering Machine
The great printing presses on the first floor of the Printing Building, print and fold the pages of our Big Catalogue in sections of 32 pages each. To make the complete book requires 38 of these 32-page sections, and these several sections of the book must be gathered together either by hand or machinery. The picture on the other side of this card shows you the Automatic Gathering Machine which gathers these different sections, piling them one on top of the other in their proper sequence and delivering the book ready for the Covering Machine. It is difficult to describe the mechanical operations of this machine-one of the marvelous inventions used in the printing industry. The 32-page sections are piled in boxes around b6th sides of this machine and with every tum of the wheel, a mechanical finger pulls one of these 32-page sections from the bottom of the pile and drops it upon a moving carrier beneath; as the finger returns to pull another section from the bottom of the pile, this carrier moves to another box to receive an entirely different section, and by the time each carrier has moved from box No. 1 to box No. 38 it has received the 38 different sections and the book is complete. The mechanical fingers of this machine are operated by compressed air and are adjusted with marvelous accuracy. If, for instance, a page should be missing from a 32-page section, this finger instantly detects the defect and stops the machine and displays a signal indicating where the trouble lies. On the other hand, if it should accidently get two sections between its fingers instead of one, it would immediately indicate the fault by stopping the machine and displaying the signal. In other words, this machine is so nicely adjusted that it automatically discovers any missing pages or excess of pages; thereby preventing imperfect copies of the book passing to the Automatic Covering Machine. This machine guarantees better results therefore than were obtained by the old method of gathering by hand. This is the largest Gathering Machine in existence and was built especially to our order.
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