A Brief History of Inkjet Printing

Inkjet printers propel liquid ink droplets of various sizes onto a page. The sheer versatility of this printing machine has made it popular across various sectors and industries. You’ve probably encountered this printer format at least once in your lifetime.

The inkjet printer has become so commonplace that one might forgot how it was created in the first place. This machine has a very unlikely, yet expected, ancestor: the siphon recorder. Invented by William Thomson (later known as Lord Kelvin) in 1858, the siphon recorder automatically transcribed telegraphs and was rather revolutionary at the time. The recorder’s wiggling ink line is eerily similar to the current mechanics of modern inkjet printers.

In the post-WWII era, Elmqvist of Siemens patented the first practical continuous inkjet printing device, although this technology only took off with the introduction of the PT-80 serial character printer in 1977. Eventually, Epson, HP, Canon and Lexmark followed suit with their own inkjet printer models. Pretty soon, inkjet printers appeared on almost every corner of the digital world.

It is simply fascinating to think about how a simple machine created for the reception of telegraph messages in 1858 evolved into one of the most used computer printer systems in the world.

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