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ANTONIO GONZÁLEZ BUENO Y RAÚL RODRÍGUEZ NOZAL AN. R. ACAD. NAC. FARM.

this invention, and possibly its improvement, was little and of scant
relevance. The year 1872 can be considered as the real takeoff of the
elaboration of tablets, with the presentation by the German Isidor
Rosenthal of a new system of manual compression, based on the ac-
tion of a screw press which supplied the compression force (19). These
machines opened a new page in the history of drugs, and began a
process of improvement and popularisation unknown till then by any
pharmaceutical preparation.

If Germany became one of the principal suppliers of this new tech-
nology to the pharmaceutical world, the other was the United States.
The Americans, in the same way that the teutons had done, developed
their own procedures of compression, competing directly, in space and
in time with German technology and, contrary to what happened with
the latter, taking into account the first English patents. North Ameri-
can research in this field gave fruit and this time the technological in-
novation would be truly original; on the one hand the manual lever
press (1879) and on the other, the excentrical and vertical tableting
compressor machine (1874) also activated manually but with the vo-
cation of being able to transform itself or influence in future automat-
ic inventions. Two technological proposals that would compete during
the last quarter of the 19th century, with the German screw press, in
an endeavour to achieve hegemony which was exclusively based on cri-
teria or parameters of mechanical origin. The German-North Ameri-
can competition in this field should not be understood to be based on
reasons or postulations of a strictly pharmaceutical type, focused on
obtaining a final product of formulation, desegregation, solubility and
optimum stability but rather on arguments of technological basis, more
concerned with engineering than pharmacology (20, 21).

The tools used to carry out the elaboration of tablets respond es-
sentially to one same reason, sustained on two premises which, in our
opinion, are fundamental for understanding the success of this phar-
maceutical form and its excellent industrial implantation: the tenden-
cy towards the unification of all the procedures of pressure and the
search for processes of continual function, capable of achieving a to-
tal automation of the machinery (17, 22).

Another pharmaceutical dosage form used by the Centro-European
industries was a rebirth of the french capsules, adapted in the 1870s

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