The Cambridge Evening News is celebrating the publication of its 40,000th edition. To mark the occasion it delved into the archives to look what was happening in the world during the time of its 10,000th, 20,000th and 30,000th editions, publishing a spread on each. It also looked at how the paper came into being, back in 1888...

The Cambridge Evening News is one of Britain's oldest surviving newspapers.

It first hit the streets of Cambridgeshire back in 1888, founded by Bury St Edmunds businessman William Farrow Taylor, and cost a halfpenny for a four-page edition.

In those days, journalists wrote their copy out by hand and compositors made up the pages in lead type - a letter at a time. It could take a whole day to set just one column.

The newspaper was printed on a flatbed press, each sheet of newsprint being fed in by hand.

Taylor's philosophy was that the News, then called the Cambridge Daily News, should be "gentle to the poor, bold on behalf of the oppressed, and champion the good of Cambridge".

Within a short time, the paper proved it was as good as his word. It waged a successful campaign to abolish the old Spinning House, a notorious house of detention in St Andrew's Street where women accused of prostitution, most of them unjustly, were locked away.

Then it went on to fight for a better public health system in Cambridge, including helping to establish England's first dental clinic for schoolchildren.

The paper grew rapidly and by the 1930s, rotary presses had been introduced.

Each page was printed from a curved plate which fitted onto the press's rollers. When the rollers turned, paper was drawn across the inked-up plates at great speed, allowing pages to be printed more quickly and in greater quantity.

The Second World War put the brakes on the expansion of the News. Paper was in short supply, and every printworks was given a monthly ration, limiting daily editions to a single broadsheet or four pages.

But after the war, in the boom years of the 40s and 50s, it went from strength to strength and moved from its original St Andrew's Street premises to a purpose-built new headquarters in Newmarket Road.

The production plant was modernised, bigger and better papers began to hit the streets, and circulation rose rapidly. In 1969 came a new name too - its present title the Cambridge Evening News.

Today the paper is written and printed at Milton, where production was switched in 1991.

What was life like in 1888?

Electric light had just been invented, and the forerunner of the car, Karl Benz's petrol-engined Motor Wagen, had just taken to the roads. In London that year, Jack the Ripper murdered five women.

In Cambridge, the Street Tramways Company laid lines from the railway station to Christ's College and Senate House Hill, and modern-style cycles appeared - the chain-drive "safety bicycle", fitted with pneumatic tyres.

There was a royal visit - by the Prince and Princess of Wales, to the Fitzwilliam Museum - work was under way on building Victoria Bridge, and efforts were starting to create a proper sewer system for the town.

The population of Cambridge was fewer than 40,000, a third of what it is today.

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