The Newspaper

by George Binney Dibblee

CHAPTER VI
THE MECHANICAL PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF A NEWSPAPER

The process of the production of a modern newspaper is one of the curiosities of industry. It is inconceivably complex. To begin with, for every single letter used in every word of the day’s issue—there is an average of about six letters to each word, nine words to a line, two hundred lines in a column, seven columns in a page and ten or twelve pages and often more in a standard morning daily—a reproduction in metal has to be made and placed in its right position between two others. That is to say about three-quarters of a million individual little metal stamps have to be made every day afresh in a certain order, never twice repeated; they are used once and then entirely destroyed. That is but the first miracle. Another is that in the output of a popular morning issue from fifty to sixty miles of double-width paper—that is four times the width of the front page—representing the denudation of perhaps thirty or forty acres of forest land, will be devoured every day. The third and most amazing miracle of all is the pace at which these huge operations are done. All these little distinct metal stamps will be made in the right order in from six to eight hours by less than a hundred men. The miles of paper will be eaten up in perhaps from two to three hours including intervals at a rate of output representing the printing of something like fifteen thousand copies of the paper per minute or two hundred and fifty per second in the offices where the largest circulations are produced.

Let us now take these processes seriatim and see if we can understand them in detail. The first point to realize about a newspaper is that everything has to be done, not at the double, but at some quicker pace, of which there is no example in ordinary life. Perhaps a Cabinet Council planning some revolutionary legislation may work quicker or a council of war summoned to meet in an emergency. The feat can only be accomplished by the strict training of all concerned to do each his own job with an intense concentration, regardless of the simultaneous carrying out by others of a hundred corresponding tasks. The news or special article as it leaves the author’s brain commences at once its progress in the form of words through the minute mechanical processes required to carry it to the breakfast table. It may never get written at all. In several New York offices only type-written matter is accepted by the city editor and the typed copy has to be either by dictation to shorthand or to the machine or executed by the reporter himself. The most progressive method of all, which has not yet been completely adopted but I have no doubt soon will be, is the use of the dictating machine, which is a special form of phonograph. The records, when the proper degree of accuracy and self-confidence have become general in a reporting staff, will ultimately come to pass direct to the compositor, thus saving one intermediate stage.

The three chief processes through which the written word has to pass in order to get into print are composition, or the assembling of types, stereotyping, or the preparing of the types for fast rotary printing, and printing proper. Of these the first is the most difficult and complicated, and has been the slowest in coming to the modern standard of perfection of all the three. As every one knows, the old-fashioned method of composition consisted in setting up together various movable types so that they successively formed words and sentences. This process has proved much too slow for modern newspaper production. The hand compositor, as he was called, could not put together more than 1,200 or 1,500 typical letters per hour. The composing room staff had to be very numerous, and the issue of very large papers was physically impossible. Besides there was the difficulty of dealing with the types themselves; they were difficult to handle in a mass for fear their order might be disturbed; they were easily injured and worn out, and they had to be distributed afresh in their proper cases after every use.

All this has been abolished by the invention of various forms of composing machines, of which I shall describe the one that is most often in use in newspaper offices. I am told on good authority that out of about 2,000 offices in the United Kingdom only about six have not at least one Linotype machine. This Linotype machine is probably the most ingenious mechanism ever planned and, with the exception of a few calculating machines, resembles the human brain more than any other. The Linotype is not content to assemble made types, but it makes them line by line as they are required. It is constituted of a keyboard actuating a magazine containing matrices, or letter-moulds in intaglio, together with a casting mechanism. By tapping the keys the operator can bring to a suitable position in the casting machine, opposite to the blank end of a small mould of exactly the size of a line of type, these various matrices in due order so as to form successive words in a sentence. When the matrices are assembled in their proper place, as he is informed by the ringing of a bell, the operator will touch a lever releasing molten metal into the empty mould and thus obtains a metal slug representing the line of type which he has to set up. The machine shaves and trims this slug to an exact size and returns the used matrices to their appropriate channels in the magazine ready for use in another line. By this method the handling of separate metal types is abolished. Fresh new printing surfaces are presented for every issue and the old ones destroyed. Above all the pace of output is more than quadrupled and very much larger issues can be produced than was possible under the old system.

The latest development of the Linotype composing machine is the provision of several magazines of matrices of different founts of type, so that for varied setting such as is generally required in advertisements successive lines of type can be used from different magazines. As many as four magazines have been attached to one machine. Besides the Linotype which is the most useful machine to a newspaper there is a German machine called the Typograph, operating in a similar fashion. The Monotype machine, very valuable for certain purposes such as catalogue work in a general printing office, casts each single type separately and sets them together. Matter set in this way lends itself more easily to small corrections.

The Linotype slugs with their new type-shaped faces are then assembled into columns and screwed up in frames so as to form a page, but they are as yet very far from being a suitable printing surface. The reason for the next transformation of these type surfaces is, as follows: it is impossible for any fast printing to be done from a flat surface. The only possible device for securing rapid pace according to our present notions of machinery is the use of rotary motion. In other words the paper must be made to run between two wheels, one of which has a type surface and the other a soft blanket. So that we have to convert a flat type surface into a curved one for our fresh purpose. This process is called stereotyping.

Fig. 1.—End Section of Two Stereoplate Cylinders. C is a cylinder holding two plates W & Y; D is a smaller cylinder of half radius; M is a tubular plate; E and F are impression cylinders.