If you want to print, say, a book, you probably will type it into a word processor. Someone else will take your file and produce pages on a printer. Your words will directly turn on a laser beam or something to directly put words on paper. But for a long time, printing meant creating some physical representation of what you wanted to print that could stamp an imprint on a piece of paper.

The process of carving something out of wood or some other material to stamp out printing is very old. But the revolution was when the Chinese and, later, Europeans, realized it would be more flexible to make symbols that you could assemble texts from. Moveable type. The ability to mass-produce books and other written material had a huge influence on society.

But there is one problem. A book might have hundreds of pages, and each page has hundreds of letters. Someone has to find the right letters, put them together in the right order, and bind them together in a printing press’ chase so it can produce the page in question. Then you have to take it apart again to make more pages. Well, if you have enough type, you might not have to take it apart right away, but eventually you will.

Automation

That’s how it went, though, until around 1884. That’s when Ottmar Mergenthaler, a clockmaker from Germany who lived in the United States, had an idea. He had been asked for a quicker method of publishing legal briefs. He imagined a machine that would assemble molds for type instead of the actual type. Then the machine would cast molten metal to make a line of type ready to get locked into a printing press.

He called the molds matrices and built a promising prototype. He formed a company, and in 1886, the New York Tribune got the first commercial Linotype machine.

These machines would be in heavy use all through the early 20th century, although sometime in the 1970s, other methods started to displace them. Even so, there are still a few printing operations that use linotypes as late as 2022, as you can see in the video below. We don’t know for sure if The Crescent is still using the old machine, but we’d bet they are.

Of course, there were imitators and the inevitable patent wars. There was the Typograph, which was an early entry into the field. The Intertype company produced machines in 1914. But just like Xerox became a common word for photocopy, machines like this were nearly always called Linotypes and, truth be told, were statistically likely to have been made by Mergenthaler’s company.

Kind of Steampunk

For a machine that appeared in the 1800s, the Linotype looks both modern and steampunk. It had a 90-key keyboard, for one thing. Some even had paper tape readers so type could be “set” somewhere and sent to the press room via teletype.

The machine had a store of matrices in a magazine. Of course, you needed lots of common characters and perhaps fewer of the uncommon ones. Each matrix had a particular font and size, although for smaller fonts, the matrix could hold two characters that the operator could select from. One magazine would have one font at a particular size.

Unlike type, a Linotype matrix isn’t a mirror image, and it is set into the metal instead of rising out of it. That makes sense. It is a mold for the eventual type that will be raised and mirrored. The machine had 90 keys. Want to guess how many channels a magazine had? Yep. It was 90, although larger fonts might use fewer.

Different later models had extra capabilities. For example, some machines could hold four magazines in a stack so you could set multiple fonts or sizes at one time, with some limitations, depending on the machine. Spaces weren’t in the magazine. They were in a special spaceband box.

Each press of a key would drop a matrix from the magazine into the assembler at the bottom of the machine in a position for the primary or auxiliary letter. This was all a mechanical process, and a skilled operator could do about 30 words per minute, so the machines had to be cleaned and lubricated. There was also a special pi channel where you could put strange matrices you didn’t use very often.

Typecasting

When the line was done, you pressed the casting level, which would push the matrices out of the assembler and into a delivery channel. Then it moved into the casting section, which took about nine seconds. A motor moved the matrices to the right place, and a gas burner or electric heater kept a pot of metal (usually a lead/antimony/tin mix that is traditional for type) molten.

A properly made slug from a Linotype was good for 300,000 imprints. However,  it did require periodic removal of the dross from the top of the hot metal. Of course, if you didn’t need it anymore, you just dropped it back in the pot.

Justification

You might wonder how type would be justified. The trick is in the space bands. They were larger than the other matrices and made so that the further they were pushed into the block, the more space they took. A mechanism pushed them up until the line of type exactly fit between the margins.

You can see why the space bands were in a special box. They are much longer than the typical type matrices.

How else could you even out the spaces with circa-1900 technology? Pretty clever.

If you have been paying attention, there’s one major drawback to this system. How do the matrix elements get back to the right place in the magazine? If you can’t automate that, you still have a lot of manual labor to do. This was the job of the distributor. First, the space bands were sorted out. Each matrix has teeth at the top that allow it to hang on a toothed distributor bar. Each letter has its own pattern of teeth that form a 7-bit code.

As the distributor bar carries them across the magazine channels, it will release those that have a particular set of teeth missing, because it also has some teeth missing. A diagram from a Linotype book makes it easier to understand than reading about it.

The Goldbergs

You have to wonder if Ottmar was related to Rube Goldberg. We don’t think we’d be audacious enough to propose a mechanical machine to do all this on top of an automated way to handle molten lead. But we admire anyone who does. Thomas Edison called the machine the eighth wonder of the world, and we don’t disagree. It revolutionized printing even though, now, it is just a historical footnote.

Can’t get enough info on the Linotype? There is a documentary that runs well over an hour, which you can watch below. If you’ve only got five minutes, try the short demo video at the very bottom.

Moveable type was to printing what 3D printing is to plastic manufacturing. Which might explain this project. Or this one, for that matter.

[Scott M. Baker] wants a paper tape punch for his retrocomputer collection. That’s fine with us, we don’t judge. In fact,  these electromechanical peripherals from the past have a lot going for them, especially the noise. But alas, such things are a little hard to come by these days, and rolling one from scratch would be a difficult proposition indeed. What to do?

Luckily, we live in the future, and eBay holds all sorts of wonders, including these typesetter keyboards from the 1970s, which [Scott] promptly reverse-engineered. We’ll get to the details in a minute, but first, can we just take a moment to think about the workflow these things were part of? These aren’t terminals — they lack any kind of IO apart from the punched paper tape they spewed out. The operator’s job was to punch in copy without any kind of feedback that they were hitting the right keys, and just sent the paper tap record of the session off to the typesetting machines. And you think your job sucks.

To give this thing an interface, [Scott] first had to revive the power supply, whose capacitors had seen sunnier days. With that out of the way, he set about understanding the CPU-less machine by analyzing its 7400-series logic, as well as planning how to make the native 6-bit output into a more manageable 8-bit. Thankfully, the tape punch already had solenoids for the top two bits, but finding a way to drive them wasn’t trivial.

The solution was to bypass a buffer so that the bits for the desired character can be set with a Raspberry Pi and an ATF22V10 programmable logic device. That’s enough to force the punch to do its thing; actually getting it to talk to something else, perhaps even [Scott]’s Heathkit H-8 computer.

Printing customized Christmas cards is a trivial matter today: choose a photo, apply a stock background or border, add the desired text, and click a few buttons. Your colorful cards arrive in a few days. It may be the easiest way, but it’s definitely no where near as cool as the process [linotype] used this season. (Editor’s note: skip the Imgur link and go straight for the source!)

The first task was to create some large type for the year. [linotype] laser printed “2018” then used an iron to transfer toner to the end of a piece of scrap maple flooring. Carving the numbers in relief yielded ready-to-go type, since the ironing process took care of the necessary mirroring step. The wood block was then cut to “type high” (0.918 inches; who knew?) using a compositor’s table saw – with scales graduated in picas, of course.

Maybe the slickest part of this hack is the tree print. [linotype] had previously bought a bunch of old Linotype slugs with the intention of melting them down for re-use, but this project offered the opportunity for a more direct approach. After trimming type off the edges of successively narrower sections of slugs, the neat outline of a tree emerged. The re-purposed slugs had originally been cast to print bank account numbers using the E13B font, adding to the charm of the finished cards. This font was designed for printing in magnetic ink so that 1D magnetic scanners could automatically read the numbers, and the distinctive shape of the characters creates the look of a decorated tree in the print.

The resulting card, printed in Pepper Red and Forest Green, has a perfect, simple look we all can enjoy virtually, even if we can’t see one in person.

If you’ve never seen [linotype’s] namesake, a Linotype machine, in person either, you can at least read about their history and efforts to save one machine in particular.

The journalist’s art is now one of the computer keyboard and the internet connection, but there was a time when it involved sleepless nights over a manual typewriter followed by time spent reviewing paper proofs freshly inked from hot lead type. Newspapers in the golden age of print media once had entire floors of machinery turning text into custom metal type on the fly, mechanical masterpieces in the medium of hot lead of which Linotype were the most famous manufacturer.

Computerised desktop publishing might have banished the Linotype from the newsroom in the 1970s or 1980s, but a few have survived. One of the last working Linotypes in Europe can be found in a small print workshop in Vienna, and since its owner is about to retire there is a move to save it for posterity through a crowdfunding campaign. This will not simply place it in a museum as a dusty exhibit similar to the decommissioned Monotype your scribe once walked past every day in the foyer of the publishing company she then worked for, instead it will ensure that the machine continues to be used on a daily basis producing those hot metal slugs of type.

Fronting the project is [Florian Kaps], whose pedigree in the world of resurrecting analogue technologies was established by his role in saving the Polaroid film plant in Enschede, Netherlands. There are a variety of rewards featuring Linotype print, and at the time of writing the project is 46% funded with about four weeks remaining. If you are curious about the Linotype machine and its operation, we’ve previously brought you an account of the last day of hot metal printing at the New York Times.

The short film, Farewell — ETAOIN SHRDLU, produced in 1978 covers the very last day the New York Times was set for printing in the old way, using hot metal typesetting.

We’ve covered the magic of linotype machines before, but to see them used as they were in their prime is something else. They saw nearly a hundred years of complete industry dominance. Linotype machines had entire guilds dedicated to their use. Tradesmen built their lives around them. For some of us we see the rise and fall of technology as an expected thing. Something that happens normally, sometimes within spans that cover only a few short years. Yet it’s still a strange thing to see a technology so widely used shut down so completely and relatively rapidly.

To make it even stranger, the computer that replaced the linotype machines is so alien to the technology used today that even it is an oddity. In the end only the shadow of the ‘new’ technologies — showcased as state of the art in this video — are still in use. Nonetheless it’s important to see where we came from and to understand what it means to innovate. Plus, you never know when you see an old idea that’s ready for a bit of refurbishment. Who knows, maybe part of the linotype’s spirit is ready to be reborn, and all it takes is a clever hacker to see it.

Oh, and that title — ‘etaoin shrdlu‘ — is the linotype equivalent of ‘qwerty’. The first two columns of keys on the linotype machine make up those two words.

[via Colossal]

For this week’s Retrotechtacular we’re looking at Linotype Machines; mechanical marvels that brought about the mass production of printed media.

It was a cold dreary day in 1876, when a German inventor living in America named [Ottmar Mergenthaler] was approached by [James O. Clephane], who required a faster way of producing legal briefs. Various patents existed for newspaper typewriters but they did not work very well, so [Mergenthaler] set to work on a new design. Traditionally type sets were cast on one machine, and stamped on another to create the text. On a train [Mergenthaler] thought, why not just combine the machines? And with that the idea for a revolutionary machine was born.

The Linotype Machine has a library of matrices, which are character molds that create the slug — the name for a cast line-of-type. The operator uses a keyboard to input the line of text, which then releases the matrices of the corresponding letters. These are then transferred to the casting station, where type metal is cast into the matrices in a process called hot metal typesetting. The matrices are then returned to the library, and the cast lines of text are cooled, removed, and used for stamping in the mass production of printed media. It sounds simple enough, but now realize the entire machine is mechanically automated; as long as you keep filling it with type metal, you can continue producing slugs simply by typing on the keyboard.

The machines were used from the late 19th century all the way up to the 60’s and 70’s until they were replaced by more efficient offset lithography and computer typesetting.

After the break, check out the fascinating documentary from the 1960’s, you will marvel at the mechanical workings of the machine. If you don’t have 35 minutes to blow, at least check out 1:30 to 6:45 for the basic overview. But you probably won’t be able to stop watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wHiddZOfa8

If you want to see one of these amazing machines in person and you happen to live in the UK, you’re in and out of luck! The Whittington Press holds an annual open day on the first Saturday of September every year at which you can see a one of these machines in action. Unfortunately this means you’ve just missed this year’s opportunity. But put it on your calendar for next year because this is one of the few printing presses left that still prints books by letterpress.

For the Americans in our audience, there is an operational one at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, although you’re unlikely to see it in action. Fear not however, you can check out the Linotype Film which has many screening events across the country. Some of them even include a real Linotype machine demonstration!

Retrotechtacular is a weekly column featuring hacks, technology, and kitsch from ages of yore. Help keep it fresh by sending in your ideas for future installments.

[Thanks Matthew!]