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.

Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are extremely DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopier, some might benefit from professional production while losing none of their core appeal. However, the professional print world has a few gotchas, and in true hacker spirit [Mabel Wynne] shares things she learned the hard way when printing her solo art zine.

[Mabel] says the most useful detail to nail down before even speaking to printers is the zine’s binding, because binding type can impact layout and design of an entire document. Her advice? Nail it down early, whether it’s a simple saddlestitch (staples through a v-shaped fold of sheets), spiral binding (which allows a document to lay flat), or something else.

Aside from paper and print method (which may be more or less important depending on the zine’s content) the other thing that’s important to consider is the finishing. Finishing consists of things like cutting, folding, and binding of the raw printed sheets. A printer will help arrange these, but it’s possible to do some or even all of these steps for oneself, which is not only more hands-on but reduces costs.

Do test runs, and prototype the end result in order to force unknown problems to the surface before they become design issues. Really, the fundamentals have a lot in common with designing and building kits or hardware. Check out [Mabel]’s article for the full details; she even talks a little about managing money and getting a zine onto shelves.

Zine making is the DIYer’s way to give ideas physical form and put them into peoples’ hands more or less directly, and there’s something wonderfully and inherently subversive about that concept. 2600 has its roots in print, but oddball disk magazines prove one doesn’t need paper to make a zine.

Turning trash into art is something we undoubtedly all admire. [Davis DeWitt] did just that with a massive mural made entirely from discarded receipt paper. [Davis] got lucky while doing some light dumpster diving, where he stumbled upon the box of thermal paper rolls. He saw the potential them and, armed with engineering skills and a rental-friendly approach, set out to create something original.

The journey began with a simple test: how long can a receipt be printed, continuously? With a maximum length of 10.5 feet per print, [Davis] designed an image for the mural using vector files to maintain a high resolution. The scale of the project was a challenge in itself, taking over 13 hours to render a single image at the necessary resolution for a mural of this size. The final piece is 30 foot (9.144 meters) wide and 11 foot (3.3528 meters) tall – a pretty conversational piece in anyone’s room – or shop, in [Davis]’ case.

Once the design was ready, the image was sliced into strips that matched the width of the receipt paper. Printing over 1,000 feet of paper wasn’t without its issues, so [Davis] designed a custom spool system to undo the curling of the receipts. Hanging the mural involved 3D-printed brackets and binder clips, allowing the strips to hang freely with a kinetic effect.

Though the thermal paper will fade over time, the beauty of this project lies in its adaptability—just reprint any faded strips. Want to see how it all came together? Watch the full process here.

On the one hand, we were impressed that a tiny Brother label maker actually uses CUPS to support printing. Like [Sdomi], we were less than impressed at how old a copy it was using – – 1.6.1. Of course, [Sdomi] managed to gain access to the OS and set things up the right way, and we get an over-the-shoulder view.

It wasn’t just the old copy of CUPS, either. The setup page was very dated and while that’s just cosmetic, it still strikes a nerve. The Linux kernel in use was also super old. Luckily, the URLs looked like good candidates for command injection.

Worst of all, the old version of CUPS had some known vulnerabilities, so there were several avenues of attack. The interface had some filtering, so slashes and spaces were not passed, but several other characters could get around the limitations. Very clever.

The post contains a few good tricks to file away for future use. It also turned out that despite the Brother branding, the printer is really from another company, which was useful to know, too. In the end, does the printer work any better? Probably not. But we get the urge to check some of the other devices we own.

The last time we saw CUPS save an old printer, it had to be bolted on. CUPS was meant to support 3D printers, but we never see anyone using it like that.

There was a time when the very idea of building a complex circuit with the intention of destroying it would have been anathema to any electrical engineer. The work put into designing a circuit, procuring the components, and assembling it, generally with point-to-point wiring and an extravagant amount of manual labor, only to blow it up? Heresy!

But, such are the demands of national defense, and as weapons morphed into “weapon systems” after World War II, the need arose for electronics that were not only cheap enough to blow up but also tough enough to survive the often rough ride before the final bang. The short film below, simply titled “Potted and Printed Circuits“, details the state of the art in miniaturization and modularization of electronics, circa 1952. It was produced by the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), the main electronics R&D entity in the UK during the war which was responsible for inventions such as radar, radio navigation, and jamming technology.

The first bit of the film below focuses on circuit potting. The circuits shown are built “cordwood style”, meaning that axial-lead resistors, capacitors, and inductors are mounted between two flat plates and wired together with short jumpers. It was a tedious and time-consuming construction method, but had the virtue of mechanical strength and low material cost. The potting process that followed was just as tedious, with mica-impregnated polyester resin being added to the circuit after mounting it in a mold. The resulting brick was un-molded and active components, which at the time meant vacuum tubes, would be mounted externally and wired up separately.

Where things get really interesting is in the printed circuit production process, which at the time took the “printed” part very much literally. Rather than etching copper from a pre-clad board to create traces, a die of the traces was built up from steel tooling, referred to as “type” in a nod to the printing industry, and used to press silver powder into traces onto a phenolic substrate. On the other side of the board, resistors were created by etching an even layer of graphite powder using shot blasting. And if all that doesn’t pique your interest, wait until you see the glass boards — not fiberglass, but actual glass.

For a construction method intended to make circuits cheap enough to blow up, everything shown here is fantastically labor-intensive. Then again, it was just after the war, and labor was probably pretty cheap, and when have governments ever been shy about throwing money at arms makers? Plus, it was more likely that robustness and reliability were the true imperatives driving these methods.

You don’t think of hobby-grade 3D printing as a good method for creating rocket nozzles. But [Mister Highball] managed to create a copper nozzle using a common printer, a kiln, and some special copper-bearing filament.

The copper filament is about 90% metal. Virtual Foundry recommends preheating it before printing and you have to sinter it in an oven to remove the plastic and leave a solid metal piece which will, of course, shrink.

The results were not great at first, but the final run looked pretty good. You’d do well to take note of any advice on using the filament since it is quite a bit more expensive than regular PLA. There are clearly some very specific steps you need to follow to get good results.

Of course, you also need a kiln and the other equipment you need to handle molten metal. While it is impressive that you can create a metal part this easily, it still isn’t as easy as a normal print and it isn’t much easier than simply casting the part using a lost PLA technique.

While 3D printing rocket parts isn’t a new idea, earlier efforts haven’t used cheap FDM printers. We are looking forward to having a real metal 3D printer one day.

A few machines have truly changed the world, such as the wheel, steam engines, or the printing press. Maybe 3D printers will be on that list one day too. But for today, you can use your 3D printer to produce a working printing press by following plans from [Ian Mackay]. The machine, Hi-Bred, allows you to place printed blocks in a chase — that’s the technical term — run a brayer laden with ink over the type blocks and hand press a piece of paper with the platen.

The idea is more or less like a giant rubber stamp. As [Ian] points out, one way to think about it is that white pixels are 0mm high and black pixels are 3mm high. He suggests looking at old woodcuts for inspiration.

This might be just the thing for doing something fancy like custom invitations. Seems like it would be pretty hard to do a booklet or magazine, although anything is possible if you are patient. Real type was made with lead and we doubt the plastic type will be quite as durable.

Of course, if you just want the old school feel, you could try a mimeograph or hectograph. In the old days, typesetter put type in from big cases that often wind up now as shadowboxes. But then came the Linotype.