[ale] [OT] IT Nostalgia

[Sean Kilpatrick]

As a small boy I spent many a Saturday morning in a newspaper composing 
room in the '50s. Setting type with a lin-o-type machine was/is a highly 
skilled job.  The operator is responsible for all the hyphenation needed 
to justify the lines of type.  The keyboard is different from a querty 
typewriter and requires much more force to depress the key than for a 
manual typewriter of the day.  One of the things the machine does when the 
operator hits the EOL key is slide kerning shims into the line of letter 
molds to pad it out to the full column width.

Most lin-o-type machines only handled one type size and face, but had the 
molds for italic and bold face in the machine. The machine spit out the 
slugs or lines of type.  Of course there was the delay needed to let the 
molten lead cool enough to be released from the molds.

I'll never know why more printers didn't die of lead poisoning as 
headlines were cast in separate machines and then the cast lead was 
trimmed on a bandsaw to fit in the page form. The room was constantly filled 
with a haze of fumes from the pots of molten lead and the dust from the 
bandsaws. This gave rise to the headline style common throughout the first 
half of the 20th century where the first letter of each word is 
capitalized.  This allowed more of the "space" between the words to be 
carved away to get the headline to fit.

Converting a composing room from "hot lead" to "cold type" was more 
difficult than you might think -- especially so when a strong printers union 
was in place.  I was once hired as an editor for a newspaper about to deal 
with that conversion because I thoroughly understood both processes and 
had experience working with unionized composing rooms. One of the senior 
printers there was the grandson of Ottmar Merganthaler, the man who 
invented the Linotype machine before 1890.

Sean

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On Saturday, February 23, 2013 08:29:22 pm Ron Frazier (ALE) wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was out at Zaxby's for supper tonight.  If you've been there, you
> know they have all sorts of old artifacts hanging on the wall.  One
> thing they had was a newspaper page from 1910.  It was fascinating. 
> What was fascinating to me was not what was printed on the page.  What
> was fascinating was the way it would have been printed at the time. 
> It had about 12 or so columns about an inch or so wide.  Each column
> had many dozens of tiny lines of characters in the range of 7 or 8
> points.  I started thinking about what it took to get that page
> printed.  In 1910, doing this was quite a feat of engineering.  (Still
> is today, but engineering of a different style.)
> 
> Some of you will probably know the answer to this without googling it.
> Others may not.
> 
> Do you know how you would typeset a newspaper in 1860?  How about 1900?
> It changed dramatically around that time.
> 
> Now, while I wasn't here in 1860 or 1900, I've done some typesetting
> around 1975 or so the same way they did back then.  About that time, I
> persuaded my Dad to help me go into business for myself.  We found a
> classified ad for someone who was selling a rubber stamp making kit.  I
> think it cost $ 400 or so, but don't remember for sure.  It contained a
> number of trays of individual pieces of metal molded in small
> rectangles about an inch tall and maybe 1/8" wide and deep.  On each
> piece of metal, there was a letter, a typeface.
> 
> In order to build the mold for a rubber stamp, I had to LITERALLY
> typeset each letter in a frame, in reverse order, along with spacing
> and punctuation, in order to create each line of type that would go on
> the rubber stamp.  After stacking up all the lines in the frame, I
> would clamp it down, proofread it in a mirror, heat it, then create a
> reverse mold by pressing a piece of hard plastic into the typefaces. 
> After that, I would press rubber into the mold to create the rubber
> stamp.  If I had wanted to do printing with this process, I would have
> put the frame in a letterpress press, inked it, and pressed paper onto
> the typefaces.  This was painstaking work.
> 
> See this article:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting
> 
> See the section on manual typesetting.
> 
> Here's a picture of a type frame with type in it similar to what I
> had.:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metal_movable_type.jpg
> 
> In 1860, as far as I know, they would have had to manually set up EVERY
> character of EVERY column of EVERY newspaper page in exactly this way.
> 
> In 1884, this radically changed, because the LINOTYPE machine was
> invented.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linotype-vorne-deutsches-museum-annot
> ated.jpg
> 
> I saw one of these at a print shop once, and was quite jealous since I
> didn't have one to make stamps with.  It's a monster of a machine, an
> incredibly complex mechanical typesetting system that you can hardly
> believe works at all.  Keep in mind, we're talking 1884.  There are no
> computers.  No electronics.  This is ELECTROMECHANICAL!
> 
> Using a linotype machine, an operator sits down at a keyboard and types
> a line of text.  As he / she hits each key, a mechanism selects a
> typeface MOLD from a bank of molds.  That mold template is carried
> through a conveyor system and automatically stacked in a frame.  When
> the operator hits the LINE END (or whatever) key, the entire stack of
> molds is carried to a metal casting section where MOLTEN METAL is
> poured into the stack.  Within a few seconds, a SLUG appears in the
> output tray.  The SLUG is a metal casting of the entire LINE of
> typefaces. After casting, the machine disassembles the frame of
> typeface molds and puts them back into their storage areas.  Now, the
> machine is ready for the operator to create another line of text.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linotype_matrices.png
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linotype_Zeilenblock_Frontansicht.jpg
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Linotype_Zeilenblock_Seitenansicht.jp
> g
> 
> This is a PHENOMENAL example of mechanical engineering.
> 
> All the newspaper layout team has to do is take all these slugs, in
> order, and stack them up in columns, stack the columns side by side,
> then run them through a press for each page of the newspaper.
> 
> This is, very likely, how the page I saw was printed.
> 
> So, what's the point?  I am not normally nostalgic.  I am NOT a history
> buff.  I am very glad I was born after the 19th century.  I do NOT
> which to go back to the old, and primitive, methods of doing things. 
> I am infinitely glad that I can TYPESET this letter and DELIVER it
> without involving either the post office or any molten metal.
> 
> But, it just seems like some of the magic is gone.  It seems like some
> of the feats they did back then, with the resources they had, are even
> more magnificent than what we can (or do) do now.  I don't really know
> how to say it.  Maybe it's the craftsman versus factory concept.  I
> don't know.  But, that newspaper just made me start thinking about
> these things.
> 
> By the way, if you want to find out some interesting things about
> logistics, look at the way a shipping port or railway switching yard
> worked back then.  They still had to deal with logistics.  They still
> had to track hundreds or thousands of orders per day.  They still had
> to stack up railroad freight cars or shipping containers in order and
> get them to the right place.  Did they have information technology? 
> You better believe it.  It was slower, more primitive, less efficient,
> less flexible, more expensive per unit of work, etc.
> 
> But you can darn well bet they had it.
> 
> Also, check out Enigma, the story of the British code breakers in WW
> II.
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Dougray-Scott/dp/B00006FD9P/ref=sr_1_1?ie=
> UTF8&qid=1361668964&sr=8-1&keywords=enigma+dvd
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ron
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