THE INKJET PRINTER HISTORY

When did the InkJet printer first come into existence?

The Inkjet printer produces a digital image by spraying droplets on demand onto paper, and are the most commonly used printer today, largely due to their low entry cost which has found favour with the home and small office user.

The first  recording device, using electrostatic forces, was invented by William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, in 1858. This was the Siphon recorder. The apparatus was used for automatic recordings of telegraph messages and was patented in 1867

The first practical continuous  Inkjet printing device was patented by Elmqvist of Siemens in 1951,  with the rapid development of inkjet technology starting off around the late fifties. But not much happened until 1977 when Siemens introduced the PT-80 serial character printer. This printer ejected ink droplets on as it was needed to print, as opposed to continuous inkjet technology that IBM had developed earlier in the 1970’s., which was far more complex , and far more expensive.

Also about then Canon introduced bubble jet printer technology, a drop on demand inkjet printing method where ink drops were ejected from the nozzle by the fast growth of an ink vapour bubble on the top surface of a small heater. HP did likewise and coined the name ‘thermal inkjet’.

The invention of thermal inkjet (TIJ) fundamentally changed inkjet research. By

the replacement of the piezoelectric by a thermal transducer, the main bottleneck

concerning miniaturization was resolved. The thermal transducer became a

simple, small, and cheap resistor

Today, the technology used for inkjet & bubblejet printers is the serial printing process, where the printer uses print heads with nozzles arranged in vertical columns – a process which is the same as is used in dot matrix printers.

The dot matrix printers  ( both serial & line dot matrix printers are the most popular today owing to the fact that they are the least cost per page for print usage when compared to other inkjet printers.

So don’t just sit there -  go and use your inkjet printer to print this out.

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