The "Franklin" Common Press, National Museum of American History

An English common press from about 1720, the workhorse of the 18th-century shop and not far removed from Gutenberg's: a timber frame, an iron screw and a bar the pressman pulled once for each impression. It came from John Watts's printing house in London, where a young Benjamin Franklin worked in the 1720s, and tradition says it is a press he used there. The link is unproven, and the Smithsonian presents it that way. An American, John B. Murray, acquired it in 1841 and shipped it across the Atlantic. The brass plaque on the head, added in 1833, records Franklin's return visit to the shop in 1768. It is in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, missing its tympan and frisket.