This is a fascinating look at the development of the newspaper industry in Canada.

The article is included in the online version of The Canadian Encyclopedia.

The first part of this detailed article is included below to give you a taste.

Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

http://thecanadianenc...

Canada's first newspaper, John Bushell's Halifax Gazette, began publication in 1752. Like most colonial newspapers in North America, it was an adjunct of a commercial printing operation. Moreover, it was dependent on the printing and patronage largesse of the colonial government. This reliance on revenues from sources other than readers - from governments, political parties and ADVERTISING - would remain a characteristic of Canadian newspapers.


The First Newspapers
There were no newspapers in New France, in part because of the opposition of French officialdom to the establishment of printing presses in the colony. The British Conquest, and the termination of the SEVEN YEARS' WAR in 1763, brought a trickle of printers from the American colonies. In 1764, 2 Philadelphia printers, William Brown and Thomas Gilmore, began the bilingual Quebec Gazette at Québec City. In 1785 Fleury Mesplet, a French printer who had been jailed because of his attempts to persuade Québec to join the American Revolution, started publication of the Montreal Gazette (now the oldest continuing newspaper in the country).

In 1793, under the auspices of Upper Canada's first governor, a Québec printer started the Upper Canada Gazette at Newark [Niagara-on-the-Lake], the first newspaper in what is now Ontario. Like the Halifax Gazette, these first papers - operating in colonies where populations were low - remained utterly dependent upon government patronage. In Upper Canada, William Lyon MACKENZIE pressed the Assembly to subsidize the province's first paper mill, in part to ensure a source of newsprint for his journal - a telling example that the close relationship between newspapers and government patronage held even for a democratic firebrand.

The development of legislative assemblies in British North America encouraged political factions. At the same time, particularly in Halifax, Saint John, Montréal, Kingston and York [Toronto], a merchant class, with an interest both in reading commercial intelligence and in advertising, was growing. Weekly newspapers sprouted up, allied with political movements and the various mercantile and agricultural interests.

In Lower Canada, the Québec City Mercury (1805) and the Montréal Herald (1811) became mouthpieces for the province's English-speaking merchants, while Le Canadien (1806) and La Minerve (1826) spoke for the rising French Canadian professional interests.

In Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie used his Colonial Advocate (1824) to argue the cause of Reformers in general and farmers in particular against the dominant professional and mercantile groups. In the Maritimes, newspapers such as Joseph HOWE'S Novascotian (1824) of Halifax also worked to challenge the authority of colonial oligarchies.

Newspapers, Politics and the State
By the early decades of the 19th century, most newspapers were allied with either the Reform (now Liberal) or Conservative Party. These early newspapers were by no means simple tools of the parties they claimed to support but rather were organs of specific leaders or factions within the parties. Thus the Toronto Globe (1844) was a personal organ of its publisher, the Reform politician George BROWN. The Toronto Mail (1872), while set up to act as spokesman for the whole Conservative Party, was quickly captured by the dominant faction led by John A. MACDONALD.

Moreover, it was not unusual for an organ to deviate from the party line. The Mail, for example, broke with the Macdonald Conservatives in the 1880s, forcing the party to set up the Empire in 1887. The relative independence of newspapers from political parties and governments varied from place to place. But in general, newspapers had more potential for independence from parties as their revenues from circulation and advertising grew.

In part, the politicization of newspapers continued because readers demanded partisanship. POLITICS was a serious matter in 19th-century Canada; newspapers were expected to have views. Thus occurred the phenomenon of the 2-newspaper town. By 1870 every town large enough to support one newspaper supported 2 - one Liberal and one Conservative. As well, newspapers have never cut themselves off completely from government patronage. Since 1867 the federal government has subsidized newspaper publishers by granting them special postal rates. Canada's first international wire service, Canadian Associated Press (1903), was subsidized by the federal government, as was the domestic news co-operative, CANADIAN PRESS, during the initial years after its founding in 1917.

The Rise of Advertising
While partisanship remained, the financial dependence of newspapers on governments and political parties did decline throughout the 19th century. The reason has to do with the economics of newspaper publishing and with overall economic development. Newspapers faced high overhead costs, ie, newspapers were forced to incur the same initial outlays for equipment, typesetting and editorial matter whether they printed one copy or a run of 10 000. In the 1860s, when daily circulations were usually under 5000, these overhead costs were covered by party or government patronage. But as population expanded and literacy increased, publishers were able to spread these overhead costs over more readers. In addition, as a newspaper's circulation increased, merchants became more interested in it as an advertising medium. With productive capacity increasing in all industries, advertising - as a means of persuading people to buy the massive volume of goods being produced - became crucial.

Early advertisers were wholesalers trying to catch the attention of other merchants, but by the 1880s retail advertising, aimed at a mass market, was dominant. By 1900 consumers were flooded with newspaper advertisements calling upon them to purchase such things as soap, patent medicines or electric belts. Big-city dailies were earning between 70% and 80% of their revenues from advertising.

Technological developments in the newspaper industry, and in the economy as a whole, hastened the trend to large-circulation, advertising-based newspapers. The spread of the TELEGRAPH during the 1850s and the laying of the Atlantic cable in 1866 increased the availability of world news to newspapers, but at the same time increased their overhead costs of production. By the 1880s, high-speed web presses and stereotyping allowed newspapers to expand their circulations in order to earn more revenue to cover these costs. In 1876 the combined circulation of daily newspapers in the 9 major urban centres was 113,000. Seven years later, it had more than doubled. Railway building, from the mid-19th century onwards, put more of the population within reach of daily and weekly newspapers. By the 1890s, typecasting machines such as the linotype were allowing daily newspapers to expand their size from the standard 4-, 8- or 12-page format to 32 or 48 pages. This greatly increased the amount of advertising space.

The Nautilus Design

I recently found a PDF document of an analysis of Jules Verne's iconic submarine the Nautilus.

In a previous post, A School of Nautili, I linked to a catalog of designs based on Verne's descriptions in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

This analysis by Stuart K Wier entitled simply "The Design of Jules Verne’s Submarine Nautilus" examines not only the details of the design but also some ideas of why Verne designed the Nautilus as he did and what some potential influences and inspirations he may have had.

Examining the original illustrations done for Verne's book is fascinating, since the illustrators were friends and acquaintances of Verne they had discussed the details with him before creating the illustrations. The paper includes many of these images which show the interiors of the Nautilus in all her glory.
 
I highly recommend this paper for anyone interested in the details of the Nautilus.

There are some snippets of the paper below to give you a taste of the style of this excellent paper.

Enjoy
Keep your sightglass full, your firebox trimmed and your water iced.
KJ

Introduction

In 1867 when Jules Verne was beginning to plan a novel about an undersea voyage, he and his brother Paul traveled to the United States on board the Great Eastern. The Great Eastern was an enormous vessel for its time, 213 meters (698feet) long, and 23 meters (75 feet) wide, in fact the largest vessel afloat, and it incorporated some of the newest features of marine architecture. It had a double iron hull, sails, steam engines, paddle wheels, and a propeller 7.3 meters (24 feet) in diameter. Verne showed and described his keen interest in the ship, and noted details of its design, construction, and operation. Thinking of an advanced undersea vessel, he found himself living on the the most advanced ship of his time. In the United States Verne saw other new technology, such as the large and fast Hudson River steamboats. This was a period of delight in rapid technical progress.


For the past century the submarine has played an important role in naval affairs, and more recently submersibles have become valuable in exploration of the oceans. Yet a fictional submarine, conceived decades before real submarines took up seagoing duties, remains a candidate for the most renowned: Jules Verne's Nautilus, from his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Jules Verne is rightly regarded as a prophet of many of the inventions which characterized twentieth century life. The novels of Jules Verne are as well known for their technical innovations as for their plots of journeys to exotic locations. The submarine Nautilus and its enigmatic captain Nemo are among Verne's most famous creations. Even some who have not read Verne know that the Nautilus foreshadowed large modern submarines.

Wier's analysis of the propulsion system is interesting

“The dynamic power of my engines is nearly infinite”:
Power, Propulsion, and Control

Despite a popular notion that Verne's Nautilus had some sort of futuristic power supply, such as atomic power, Verne based his technology on what was known in his day. The power supply is chemical batteries. Verne realized that the actual batteries of his day were far from adequate, as batteries remain today, but suggested they might be greatly improved. Nemo says he uses “large and powerful” Bunsen batteries rather than Ruhmkorff batteries which are less powerful. Nemo has improved the Bunsen battery by using elements of a sodium zinc amalgam in place of zinc alone, which Nemo claims doubles the “electromotive force” of the batteries (what we call today the voltage). Perhaps Verne was unaware of the explosive property of sodium in contact with water.
Nemo extracts sodium from sea water on a remote island, where the process is fueled with sea coal. The new sodium would recharge Verne's hypothetical batteries, which seem to last for months between charges.