And the scientific electric discovery made by Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century is, at the close of the nineteenth, the motive-power used for driving the machines for type composition,—the seemingly impossible has reached the stage of possibility.
OCTUPLE STEREOTYPE PERFECTING PRESS AND FOLDER.
(Capacity, 96,000 impressions per hour.)
Dr. William Church, of Connecticut, produced a machine looking to machine type-composition in 1820. It did not come into use, although he spent large sums of money on it, and devoted a vast amount of energy toward having it taken up both in this country and in England. At the Paris Exhibition in 1835 there were exhibited several machines of this sort, one of which—the patent of Christian Sörensen, of Copenhagen—was used upon a daily paper issued during the exhibition. In 1871, at the International Exhibition in London, there was shown a machine possessing peculiar features. It used a perforated ribbon, through the medium of which types were worked into position. The machine was cumbersome, complicated, and expensive, and could not be brought into anything like general usage. In 1875 M. Delcambre, of Paris, after twenty years’ work produced a machine in New York. It had the same objections as the others. While this machine could do as much as the labor of three men by hand, it required a man to operate, another man to place the set type in lines, steam to keep it in motion, and a big cost to construct.
LINOTYPE (TYPE-SETTING) MACHINE (FRONT VIEW).
Up to this period, all the experiments had shown the want of something which would obviate the presence of a man to make the lines of the proper length and with equal spacing between the words. All the machines which were anything near available picked up and placed in position separate types. At the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, in Philadelphia, there were shown machines which used brass dies and cast a line of type. These seemed to possess the element for successful use, and the outcome was the production of the machine which is now in use in all the big newspaper offices in this country—the “Mergenthaler Linotype.” Practically it has driven all the other machines out of use, but how long it will hold sway is a question. Already men of genius are experimenting with two objects in view,—increase of speed, decrease of cost,—and it is fair to presume that before the twentieth century has gone very far into history these two objects will have been attained.
The linotype, as here shown, has the appearance of a heavy and cumbersome piece of machinery. It actually is so only when there are several of them placed in line—then they give to a composing-room the appearance of a machine shop. This machine, instead of producing single type of the ordinary character, casts type-metal bars or slugs, each complete in one piece, and having on the upper edge, properly justified, the type characters to print a line.
These slugs present the appearance of composed lines of type, and serve the same purpose, and for this reason are called “linotypes.” The linotypes are produced and assembled automatically in a galley, side by side, in proper order, so that they constitute a “form,” answering the same purposes and used in the same manner as the ordinary “forms” consisting of single types.