Adana had a his­to­ry of pro­duc­ing machines pow­ered by trea­dle (and not hand) before the T/P48 appeared.  A patent held by the founder of Adana (Don­ald Aspinall) and an engi­neer demon­strates the prin­ci­ple from the 1920s; and the firm made an Adana Trea­dle Plat­en around 1926.  This fam­i­ly of machines has an unusu­al approach of a D‑shaped drum to act as ink­ing cylin­der with the flat area hold­ing the chase.  Ink­ing rollers revolve around the drum and on to the forme — this whole assem­bly moves to impress on a sta­t­ic back plat­en hold­ing the paper.

Oth­er con­struc­tion details led to a loy­al fol­low­ing of users: the stand was made from tubu­lar steel, the main frame from a light alloy.  This kept the weight to around 2¾ cwt.  Cast iron was used where need­ed for strength: the plat­en and side arms.

In use, the unusu­al oper­at­ing prin­ci­ple has some pos­i­tive side effects — the feed is to a sta­t­ic bed (as only the plat­en moves) so is eas­i­er to use than a mov­ing back plat­en; the ink­ing is adjustable and uses more rollers than oth­er Adana machines; and the machine is chain-dri­ven so there is less fatigue on the oper­a­tor.

The T/P48 was launched as the T/P47 at the British Indus­tries Fair in 1947 but restric­tions on UK man­u­fac­tur­ers meant the machine was not adver­tised in the UK until August 1949.  Inci­den­tal­ly the T/P stands for Treadle/Power as the machine could be pow­ered by foot or elec­tric­i­ty.  This serves to high­light the appar­ent arbi­trary nature of Adana’s nam­ing sys­tem!

In 1971 the machine was updat­ed as the P71– but this appeared to be cos­met­ic: the open sides were pan­elled and the gear­ing was amend­ed.  Anoth­er ver­sion of the machine was sold with slow­er pow­er for use in schools and took the name P71S.