The man they called The Chief was mesmerised by his thundering new presses: The paper is literally flowing in like a rushing stream, and at the other end the papers are being tossed out in dozens. to the carts in waiting, and the race for the railway stations and distributing agencies begins, he recalled.
It was May 4, 1896, and 30-year-old Alfred Harmsworth had been working non-stop for two days, editing, fine-tuning and overseeing his brainchild.
Now, the first editions of the Daily Mail were speeding through the machines at up to 96,000 copies an hour.
But that was not fast enough to keep up with demand for this revolutionary daily journal, offering all the news in the smallest space for only a halfpenny.