FIG. 132.—SPACING OF ASSEMBLED LINE OF MATRICES.
The Linotype.—The most revolutionary and perhaps the most important development in the printing art of this century has been the linotype machine. The laborious, painstaking, and expensive feature of printing has always been the setting and redistribution of the types, since each little piece had to be separately selected and placed in the composing stick, and the line afterwards “justified,” which means an apportionment of the space between the words so as to make each line of type about the same length in the column. The same separate handling of each piece was again involved in restoring the type to the case. Machines for thus setting and distributing the type had been devised, but the operation was so involved, and required so nearly the discretion of the thinking mind, that all automatic machinery proved too complicated and impracticable. In 1886, however, a machine was placed in the office of the New York Tribune whose performances astonished and alarmed the old-time compositor. It rendered it unnecessary to handle the type, or even to have any separate type at all. It was the Mergenthaler Linotype machine, which automatically formed its own type by casting a whole line of it at a time. The first machine was invented in 1884, and patented in 1885, but it was subsequently reorganized and greatly improved in Pats. No. 425,140, April 8, 1890; Nos. 436,531 and 436,532, Sept. 16, 1890, and No. 438,354, Oct. 14, 1890. It is shown in the accompanying illustration ([Fig. 130]). By manipulating the keyboard, which resembles that of a typewriter, each lettered key is made to bring down from an inclined elevated magazine a little brass plate of the shape shown in [Fig. 131], and which plate is called a matrix, because it bears on its edge at x a mould of the type letter. There is a matrix plate for every letter and character used. These little matrices are spaced by wedges, as seen in [Fig. 132], and are assembled, as in [Fig. 133], along the side of a mould wheel having a slot in it which forms a channel between the aligned type-moulds or matrices on one side and the discharge mouth of a melting pot, in which molten type metal is maintained in a fluid state by a subjacent gas-burner. In the melting pot there is a cylinder and plunger, and when the plunger descends, it forces the molten metal up through the discharge spout into the slot of the mould wheel, and against the letter mould x of each one of the composed or aligned matrices. The wheel is then turned with the matrices, and the metal in its slot is afterwards discharged in the form of a linotype slug, seen in [Fig. 134], which is a metal plate bearing on its edge a completely moulded line of type ready for setting up in the form for printing. The jagged notches in the tops of the matrices ([Fig. 131]) are for co-operation with a distributer bar (not easily explained) for restoring the matrices to their appropriate magazines after being used. There are altogether about 1,500 of the little brass matrices. The machine is about five feet square, weighs 1,750 pounds, and costs $3,000 each. Notwithstanding this expense these Linotype machines have to-day made their way into nearly all the daily newspaper offices of the civilized world, even to Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. In the composing rooms of the daily newspapers and the larger book printing offices we find great rows of these Linotype machines, each doing the work of from four to five men. There are now in use in America something over 5,000 Linotype machines; and in other countries about 2,000, making 7,000 in all. Each machine may be adjusted in five minutes to produce any size or style of type, and it gives new, clean faces for each day’s issue, with none of the ordinary troubles of distributing type. The cheapness of composition, due to the machine, has led to an enormous increase in the size of papers, in the frequency of the editions, and has correspondingly increased the demand for labor in all the attendant lines, such as paper-making, press-making, the attendants on presses, stereotyping, etc. In the Boston Library, which keeps its catalogues printed up to within 24 hours of date, the Linotypes print in 23 languages.
FIG. 133.—CASTING THE LINE.
FIG. 134.—A LINOTYPE.
When the Linotype machine was first patented it was not regarded by printers generally as a practical machine, but only one of the many complicated, theoretical, but impracticable organizations which the Patent Office has to deal with. Its history, however, has been unique. It is practically the product of the brain of a single man, Ottmar Mergenthaler, a most ingenious and indefatigable inventor living in Baltimore. It was exploited under the powerful patronage of a syndicate of newspaper men, and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent in perfecting it before any practical results were obtained. To-day it stands a triumph of human ingenuity, ranking in importance with the rotary web-perfecting press, and is probably the most ingenious piece of practical mechanism in existence.