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 Wuertemberg, 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-mache 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-mache 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 1-1/4 inches by 3/4 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.
The company's principal works are situated in the Borough of Brooklyn,
New York City, and have a space devoted to manufacturing purposes of
about one hundred and sixty thousand square feet. Approximately one
hundred Linotypes, besides a large number of smaller machines and a
vast quantity of supplies, are turned out from there every month; but
the growing demand from abroad for American-built machines has led to
the consideration of plans for an entirely new establishment, to be
built in accordance with the latest modes of factory construction.
About ten thousand Linotypes are now in daily use.
The machine as at present built is shown in part by the accompanying
cut, and its operation may be briefly described as follows:--
The Linotype machine contains, as its fundamental elements, several
hundred single matrices, which consist of flat plates of brass having
on one edge a female letter or matrix proper, and in the upper end a
series of teeth, used for selecting and distributing them to their
proper places in the magazine. These matrices are held in the
magazine of the machine, a channel of it being devoted to each
separate character, and there are also channels which carry quads of
definite thickness for use in tabular work, etc. The machine is so
organized that on manipulating the finger keys, matrices are selected
in the order in which their characters are to appear in print, and
they are assembled in line side by side at the point marked _G_ in the
illustration, with wedge-shaped spaces between the words. This series
of assembled matrices forms a line matrix, or, in other words, a line
of female type adapted to form a line of raised printed characters on
a slug which is cast against them. After the matrix line has been
composed, it is automatically transferred to the face of a slotted
mould, as shown at _K_, and while in this position the wedge spaces
are pushed up through the line, and in this manner exact and
instantaneous justification is secured. Behind the mould there is a
melting pot, _M_, heated by a flame from a gas or oil burner, and
containing a constant supply of molten metal. The pot has a perforated
mouth which fits against and closes the rear side of the mould, and it
contains a pump plunger mechanically actuated. After the matrix line
is in place against the front of the mould, the plunger falls and
forces the molten metal through the mouth pot into the mould, against
and into the characters in the matrix line. The metal instantly
solidifies, forming a slug having on its edge raised characters
formed by the matrices. The mould wheel next makes a partial
revolution, turning the mould from its original horizontal position to
a vertical one in front of an ejector blade, which, advancing from the
rear through the mould, pushes the slug from the latter into the
receiving galley at the front. A vibrating arm advances the slugs
laterally in the galley, assembling them in column or page form ready
for use. To insure absolute accuracy in the height and thickness of
the slugs, knives are arranged to act upon the base and side faces as
they are being carried toward the galley. After the matrices have
served their purpose in front of the mould, they are shifted laterally
until the teeth in their upper ends engage the horizontal ribs on the
bar _R_; this bar then rises, as shown by the dotted lines, lifting
the matrices to the distributor at the top of the machine, but leaving
the wedge spacers, _I_, behind, to be shifted to their box, _H_. The
teeth in the top of each matrix are arranged in a special order,
according to the character it contains, the number or relation of its
teeth differing from that of a matrix containing any other character,
and this difference insures proper distribution. A distributor bar,
_T_, is fixed horizontally over the upper end of the magazine and
bears on its lower edge longitudinal ribs or teeth, adapted to engage
the teeth of the matrices and hold the latter in suspension as they
are carried along the bar over the mouths of the magazine channels by
means of screws which engage their edges. Each matrix remains in
engagement with the bar until it arrives at the required point,
directly over its own channel, and at this point for the first time
its teeth bear such relation to those on the bar that it is permitted
to disengage and fall into the channel. It is to be particularly noted
that the matrices pursue a circulatory course through the machine,
starting singly from the bottom of the magazine and passing thence to
the line being composed, thence in the line to the mould, and finally
back singly to the top of the magazine. This circulation permits the
operations of composing one line, casting from a second, and
distributing a third, to be carried on concurrently, and enables the
machine to run at a speed exceeding that at which an operator can
finger the keys. A change from one face of type to any other is
effected by simply drawing off one magazine and substituting another
containing the face required, so that the variety of faces needs to be
limited only by the number of them which the printer chooses to carry
in his stock.
[Illustration: A Linotype Matrix.]
[Illustration: Diagram of the Linotype Machine.]
[Illustration: Linotype Slugs.]
[Illustration: The Linotype Melting Pot and Mold Wheel.]
Matrices are also made bearing two characters, as the ordinary body
character and the corresponding italics, or a body character and a
small capital or a black face, and either of these is brought into use
as desired by the touching of a key, so that if, for instance, it is
required to print a word in italics or black face at any part of the
line being composed, it is effected in this way, and composition in
the body letter is resumed by releasing the key.
The latest pattern of machine is supplied with two magazines,
superimposed one above the other, each with its own distributing
apparatus. The operator can elect, by moving a lever, from which
magazine the letter wanted will fall--the same keyboard serving for
both. It is thus possible to set two sizes of type from one machine,
each matrix showing two characters as described above.