During the period of 1904, Mr. Kasper Herman of Germany tried to improve lithography technology and tried to find a new production mode through countless experiments. Mr. Ella Washington Ruber, an American, accidentally participated in this research work. During a printing job, Ella Washington Rube noticed that a piece of paper did not follow the normal route in the printing process. He tried to print patterns on both sides of the paper. The image is first transferred from the printing plate to the blanket in impression cylinder, and then printed on paper. An unexpected scene appeared: the printing quality of the products produced by this indirect embossing method is higher, and the surface of the elastic blanket transfers the ink to the paper more evenly. The printing method invented by Caspar Herman and Ella Washington Rube was born, which is the origin of offset printing. They independently designed sheet-fed offset printing equipment, but it was not commercialized immediately. It was not until 19 12 that the world's first rotary offset printing equipment, Huanqiu, appeared, with a speed of 8000 sheets/hour, that offset printing machines were truly known to the world.

In the 1920s, Roland, Gaobao, Komori and other companies all introduced their own sheet-fed and web offset printing equipment. And cooperate with related companies to develop various automatic printing equipment with paper transfer unit, refrigeration unit, folding and drum drying parts.

1932, Radboyle Company launched the world's first four-color sheet-fed offset press-Planeta-Deca, which made offset printing technology take a big step forward.

In 1950s, prepress technology emerged one after another and developed rapidly. The appearance of imagesetter broke the 540-year history of movable type printing for the first time, and the appearance of digital graphic typesetting forms, especially the appearance of 1954 second-generation imagesetter, made typesetting technology by going up one flight of stairs. From 65438 to 0956, the appearance of prefabricated photosensitive plate (PS plate) and plate-making equipment made offset printing technology like a duck to water, and the demand for offset printing technology increased greatly. In 1950s, Roland, Gaobao, Komori and Akiyama successively developed their own two-color and four-color offset printing equipment.

In the 1960s, the balance of ink and wash in the printing process became the key to the development of offset printing technology. Invented the alcohol fountain solution. Since 1960, dagren continuous dampening system appeared, offset printing began to reach the clear level of relief printing, competing with mature relief printing for the market.

In the 1970s, commercial printing began to flourish, and prepress technology (color prepress system) developed into automatic high-end color separation technology and full-page typesetting design system, and gradually bid farewell to photographic color separation and manual color separation, making color images easier to transmit and realizing "what you see is what you get". Although the color prepress system is expensive and cannot be widely used in printing plants, it can be concluded that it is the future development direction of offset prepress technology.

In the mid-1980s, printing plants began to use computers to control the printing process. In this era, offset presses have mostly realized the automation of ink transfer, plate wetting, registration adjustment and plate reading, which simplifies the operation and improves the printing efficiency. The application of computer in offset printing and the advent of film output machine have greatly improved the working efficiency of offset printing machine. Many offset presses introduced in 1980s have ink remote control system, computer-controlled pre-inking system, wetting unit control, alcohol-free dampening, color control system, turnover device and so on.

The birth of CTP is the most important contribution of offset printing technology, which makes the work efficiency and application of offset printing machine reach an unprecedented level. Offset press has a higher degree of automation and the application of digital technology is more extensive. The highlight of this issue is GTO-DI, the world's first on-board direct plate-making printing machine jointly launched by Presstek and Heidelberg at Print9 1 Chicago Printing Exhibition, which represents the future development direction of short offset printing. On IPEX98, Heidelberg Supper SM 74DI direct imaging offset press was exhibited for the first time, which caused a sensation all over the world. Today, these configurations seem to be no longer new, but at that time, they were comparable to laser printers and met the needs of on-demand color printing, so that many printer manufacturers launched their own DI solutions on drupa2000. 1997-compacta215, the world's first commercial rotary offset press using shaftless technology, is also an important breakthrough in the development of rotary offset press, shaftless technology has been widely used in rotary offset press.