The longevity of good electrotype plates is dependent upon the care with which they are handled and the quality of paper printed from them; but with smooth book paper and good treatment it is entirely possible to print from them a half million impressions without their showing any great or material wear.[Back to Contents]
COMPOSITION BY THE LINOTYPE MACHINE
By Frederick J. Warburton
The Linotype, pronounced by London Engineering "the most wonderful machine of the century," was not the product of a day. Its creator, whose early training had never touched the printer's art, was fortunately led to the study of that art, through the efforts of others, whose education had prepared them to look for a better method of producing print than that which had been in use since the days of Gutenberg; but his invention abolished at one stroke composition and distribution; introduced for the first time the line, instead of the letter, as the unit of composition; brought into the art the idea of automatically and instantly producing by a keyboard solid lines of composed and justified type, to be once used and then melted down; rendered it possible to secure for each issue new and sharp faces; abolished the usual investment for type; cheapened the cost of standing matter; removed all danger of "pieing," and at the same time reduced greatly the cost of composition. The story is an interesting one.
In the autumn of 1876, Charles T. Moore, a native of Virginia, exhibited to a company of Washington reporters a printing machine upon which he had been working for many years, and which he believed to be then substantially complete. It was a machine of very moderate dimensions, requiring a small motive power, and which bore upon a cylinder in successive rows the characters required for printed matter. By the manipulation of finger keys, while the cylinder was kept in continuous forward motion, the characters were printed in lithographic ink upon a paper ribbon, in proper relation to each other; this ribbon was afterwards cut into lengths, arranged in the form of a page, "justified," to a certain extent, by cutting between and separating the words, and then transferred to a lithographic stone, from which the print was made. Such print was not, of course, of the highest character, but it was a beginning; and the machines were used in Washington and New York, mainly in the transcription of stenographic notes taken in law cases and in the proceedings of legislative committees. A number of these machines was built, but mechanical difficulties became so frequent that the parties interested resolved, very wisely, before proceeding to build upon a large scale, to put the machine into the hands of a thorough mechanical expert, so that it might be tried out and a determination reached as to whether or not it was a commercially practical one. At the head of the little company of men who nurtured this enterprise and contributed most largely by their labors and means to its development, were James O. Clephane, a well-known law and convention reporter, and Andrew Devine, then the Senate reporter of the Associated Press. In their search for an expert, a Baltimore manufacturer named Hahl, who had constructed some of these machines, was consulted, and upon his recommendation his cousin, Ottmar Mergenthaler, was selected to undertake the work, and thus the future inventor of the Linotype was discovered.
Mergenthaler was born in 1854, in Würtemberg, Germany, had been a watchmaker, and at this time was employed upon the finer parts of the mechanical work done in Hahl's shop. The contract was that Mergenthaler was to give his services at a rate of wages considerably beyond what he was then receiving, and Hahl was to charge a reasonable price for the use of his shop and the cost of material. The task undertaken, however, proved to be a far larger one than had been anticipated, and the means of the promoters were exhausted long before the modifications and improvements continually presented had been worked out. The circle of contributors was therefore necessarily widened, and indeed that process went on for years, enough, could they have been foreseen, to have dismayed and disheartened those who were there "in the beginning." Mergenthaler and Moore, assisted by the practical suggestions of Clephane and Devine, continued to work upon the problem for about two years, by which time the lithographic printing machine had become one which indented the characters in a papier-maché strip, and this being cut up and adjusted upon a flat surface in lines, the way was prepared for casting in type metal. The next step of importance was the production of the "bar indenting machine," a machine which carried a series of metal bars, bearing upon their edges male printing characters, the bars being provided with springs for "justifying" purposes. The papier-maché matrix lines resulting from pressure against the characters were secured upon a backing sheet, over this sheet was laid a gridiron frame containing a series of slots, and into these slots type metal was poured by hand to form slugs bearing the characters from which to print. This system was immediately followed by a machine which cast the slugs automatically, one line at a time, from the matrix sheets.
It was in this work that Mergenthaler received the education which resulted in his great invention and in due time he presented his plans for a machine which was known as the "Band" machine. In this machine the characters required for printing were indented in the edges of a series of narrow brass bands, each band containing a full alphabet, and hanging, with spacers, side by side in the machine. The bands tapered in thickness from top to bottom, the characters being arranged upon them in the order of the width-space which they occupied. By touching the keys of a keyboard similar to a typewriter, the bands dropped successively, bringing the characters required into line at a given point; a casting mechanism was then brought in contact with this line of characters, molten metal forced against it through a mould of the proper dimensions, and a slug with a printing surface upon its face was thus formed. This was recognized as a great advance and was hailed with delight by the now largely increased company. The necessary funds were provided and the building of the new machine undertaken. But Mergenthaler continued active, and before a second of the "Band" machines could be built, he had devised a plan for dealing with the letters by means of independent matrices. These matrices were pieces of brass measuring 1-¼ inches by ¾ of an inch and of the necessary thickness to accommodate the character, which it bore upon its edge in intaglio; they were stored in the newly devised machine in vertical copper tubes, from the bases of which they were drawn, as required, by a mechanism actuated by finger keys, caught by the "ears" as they dropped upon a miniature railway, and by a blast of air carried one by one to the assembling point. Wedge spacers being dropped in between the words, the line was carried to the front of the mould, where "justification" and casting took place.
Success seemed at last to have been reached, and now the problem was, first, how to obtain means to build machines, and second, how to persuade printers to use them. The first of these was the easier, although no slight task; the second was one of great difficulty. The field for the machine then in sight was the newspaper, and the newspaper must appear daily. The old method of printing from founder's type, set for the most part by hand, was doing the work; a revolutionary method by which the type was to be made and set by machine, although promising great economies, was a dangerous innovation and one from which publishers naturally shrank. They could see the fate which awaited them if they adopted the new system and it proved unsuccessful. However, a number of newspaper men, after a careful investigation of the whole subject, determined to make the trial; and the leaders of these were Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune, Melvin Stone of the Chicago News (to whom succeeded Victor F. Lawson), and Walter N. Haldeman of the Louisville Courier-Journal. Into these offices, then, the Linotype went. To Mr. Reid belongs the honor of giving the machine a name—line of type—Linotype, and of first using it to print a daily newspaper. Of the machine last described, two hundred were built, but before they were half marketed, the ingenious Mergenthaler presented a new form, which showed so great an advance that it was perforce adopted, and the machines then in use, although they gave excellent results, were in course of time displaced. The new machine did away with the air blast, the matrices being carried to the assembling point by gravity from magazines to be hereafter described, and the distributing elevator was displaced by an "arm" which lifted the lines of matrices, after the casting process, to the top of the machine to be returned to their places.
The improvements made in the Linotype since Mergenthaler's time (who died in 1899 at the early age of forty-five) have been very great; indeed, almost a new machine has been created in doing what was necessary to adapt it to the more and more exacting work which it was called upon to perform in the offices of the great American book publishers. These improvements have been largely the work of, or the following out of suggestions made by, Philip T. Dodge, the patent attorney of the parties interested in the enterprise from the beginning, and later the president of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. They went on year after year under the supervision of a corps of gifted mechanical experts, the chief of whom was John R. Rogers, the inventor of the Typograph, until from the machine of Mergenthaler, supplying through its ninety keys as many characters, a machine appeared yielding three hundred and sixty different characters from the like keyboard. The magazines, too, were capable of being charged with matrices representing any face from Agate (5-point) to English (14-point), and even larger faces for display advertising and for initial letters, by special contrivances which cannot be described without carrying this article beyond reasonable limits. Among the ingenious devices added are: the Rogers systems of setting rule and figure tables, box heads, etc.; the reversal of the line so as to set Hebrew characters in their proper relation; the production of printers' rules of any pattern; the making of ornamental borders; a device for the casting of the same line an indefinite number of times from one setting. The machine was also greatly simplified in its construction.
The amount of money expended in the enterprise before the point of profit was reached was very great; it aggregated many millions of dollars; but the promoters had faith in the success of the machine and taxed themselves ungrudgingly. Among those who contributed largely to the ultimate result by substantial aid and wise counsel in the conduct of the business the name of D. O. Mills should be particularly mentioned.
It was Mergenthaler's great good fortune to have had as his supporters many men of the character of those mentioned above, and in thus being relieved of all financial anxiety and permitted to work out thoroughly and without delay every idea that suggested itself either to him or to the ingenious men who had been drawn into the enterprise. His profits, too, were proportionate to the company's success, and although he did not live to enjoy them for his natural term of years, he had the satisfaction of knowing that a handsome income would continue to flow into the hands of his wife and children.