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What is a Linotype?

Well, we just called it a typesetting machine to start with...

...because that's what it does.

It's called a Linotype because it makes one line of type at a time.

[clinking]

I try to harken it back to those Rube Goldberg contraptions...

It is a two-ton contrivance that stands seven-foot tall.

The absolute pinnacle of Late-Victorian engineering.

...where the canary pops the balloon...

And they're insane!

You couldn't explain to them what it is.

They would just say “Well that's just a big typewriter.”

...and the bowling ball rolls down and scares the cat...

A cross between a typewriter and a backhoe and a pop machine.

...the canary pops the balloon, the balloon cracks the egg, and then I have my breakfast.

It's terribly complicated. It was invented by a German watchmaker.

It has cams and levers.

There's just a lot going on.

There's belts and pulleys, and everything's flying around in circles.

Things that would totally baffle most modern-day mechanics,

and yet, strangely enough, it works.

It requires you know the machine and you understand its limitations

and understand that it can kill you.

It burned me pretty good, yeah.

It is very intimidating.

I do sort of live in fear of it

because it can be kind of rattletrap at times.

It gets to be your friend or your enemy, depending upon how it's working.

It's a fascinating machine, A,

and B, it's a complete career dead-end.

I tell people that once you get ink and type metal in your blood, it never comes out.

It's like a love affair.

It's one of the most complicated machines I have ever seen,

and it's one of the most fun things I have ever been around.

The great inventor, Thomas Edison saw that machine and he says,

“Hey, this is the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

A Linotype is a great means of speeding up the production of typesetting.

Instead of the old cumbersome method of setting type by hand

where you're using one hand to pick out a piece of type at a time,

to put it into a composing stick,

you're instead able to sit at a keyboard,

type as fast as you can and as fast as the machine will let you go

and compose type that can then be printed from.

You hear about people picking things up by osmosis.

I kind of think that's true

because this is a case where I watched and observed,

and a lot of what I learned about the Linotype, I learned from my dad.

Oh, yes, I taught him.

I taught him some of the basics

of the printing operation,

and you can see he has expanded since then.

I tend to set maybe a few more mistakes than my dad would,

but he has always been willing to proofread for me and correct those mistakes.

I can spot a mistake a mile away.

I can spot a misspelled word a mile away.

It takes a special breed of person to run it.

I think I'm that person,

just crazy enough to think it is fun and just smart enough to keep it operating.

Once the operator is done casting his slugs, casting the page,

he will take the slugs over to the proofing area.

Here we've got some of the type that we set over on the Linotype today.

I'm going to put it in the bed of the proof press.

And the slugs will be locked into the bed of the press here

and inked and printed to determine if there are any flaws.

Lock it into place with some miscellaneous furniture.

Hopefully, it's a clean proof

so I don't have to go back and re-set anything.

Any mistakes, any errors would go back to the composer,

he would re-cast that slug,

come back to the proof er, and so on

until it was signed off on and ready to go on the press.

When it went to press, it went on a press something like over here.

Later on they learned that if you have multiple editions or multiple presses

in major urban centers like New York City or Boston or Chicago,

it's kind of a pain to proof multiple lock-ups of type

when you're running four presses, six presses, eight presses at a time,

so they would make a cast of an entire form

and put the identical cast on all of their presses,

so that way they could meet the circulation demand.

And that is how they printed newspapers, in volume, in the day.

Ever since I have been very young,

there has been some tendency for my family,

at least on my mother's side,

she wanted to show off her kids.

- ♪♪ [piano] -[Schlesinger]♪ left my heart ♪

♪ In San Francisco ♪

My brother and myself,

we liked to sing and dance around the house,

so we wound up being singers and dancers.

- ♪♪ [piano] - [people applauding]

When I was nine years old,

I was running a little printing press in my own house.

I think the circulation of my newspaper was 20-- 20 people,

all tenants in the building.

I spent 35 years working for The New York Times,

and that was my life.

And I guess I was just built for that kind of work.

I see other people were as well.

They didn't think much about it maybe.

It was just some nice work to them,

but I was maybe more sensitive, and I could see,

this was the story every night,

the story of our lives, the story of the world's life.

The world is being made new for tomorrow.

What happened today, you'll find out tomorrow,

but we are doing it to get you to that stage.

[Filmstrip Narrator] By means of printing,

the fount of knowledge accumulated through the ages

is available to everyone, rich and poor alike.

Printing is essential to all education.

All the other arts rely on it.

Religious movements depend on it.

Business could not function without it.

Nor could government.

The only thing available to people in the 1400s, anywhere,

was hand-written manuscripts.

Books were falling apart as fast as people were reading them,

so the scribe was just sort of re-creating the book

because they were disintegrating.

Monks, in an abbey, writing a Bible

for months and months and months, for one Bible.

Once you wrote a hand written Bible,

which took you one or two years to produce one or two Bibles.

That's all.

You had produced a work of art,

but you hadn't produced anything for mass culture or for mass education.

A lot of people think that Johannes Gutenberg invented printing,

and technically that is not true.

People printed for centuries before Gutenberg came along,

but they were never really good at it.

What Gutenberg did was to invent the way to do it,

which was the most efficient way,

that involved making a press,

one not unlike this press here.

So all of a sudden came the printing press,

and shortly thereafter there were hundreds of printing presses,

thousands of printing presses in Europe,

and thousands upon thousands of people were reading, were getting information,

so it was this huge explosion,

and people thought, probably, “My God, how can we possibly absorb more?”

The next big one was the Linotype.

The Linotype is the embodiment

of a different age, the age when letterpress flowered,

when it was in its grandeur,

and the problem is very few people know about it,

and I still believe that one of my roles in life

is to help the memory of the industry.

You had to have the Linotype machine

because you had an army of people setting type by hand.

Typesetting used to be done this way by everybody,

one line of type at a time, one letter at a time.

It was slow. It was cumbersome.

You have a case in front of you.

You take one letter out at a time.

So the first thing is you have to find the letter and select it.

Then you have to assemble it into a line.

Then you have to return all of that type back into the case.

And that was tedious, slow, hard work.

If you have a drawer of type and you're making a book

and you run out of lower-case “e,"

you've got to make more type

or you have to break down pages you've already made,

so that's what they call being “out of sorts.”

A piece of type is called a sort.

“Out of sorts”- you're screwed.

[Romano] There was money to be made in mechanized typesetting

because newspapers had a phenomenal investment

in the number of people required to set type by hand,

so there had to be some method of mechanization,

and that's what they were looking for.

And so they began to look

at the various processes

and try to think of ways of speeding them up.

They tried all kinds of schemes.

They tried having a funnel and dropping the letters in,

trying to line them up- all kinds of ideas, anything they could think of.

From the 1860s to the 1880s,

there must have been 50 or 60 different attempts to mechanize typesetting.

I'm standing in front of the Paige Compositor,

a machine that had a very big role in Mark Twain's life.

[Romano] The most famous investor was the American novelist Mark Twain,

who invested most of his fortune in the Paige Compositor,

which did not work and forced him to go bankrupt.

But generally speaking, all through the 19th century,

hand composition was the norm,

and it wasn't until the final years, about the 1880s, 1890s

that serious attempts were made.

But none of the people

who started down the road to invent a mechanized typesetting machine succeeded.

The one success came by accident.

It all starts because a stenographer wants to transcribe his notes faster.

James Ogilvie Clephane was a stenographer.

He had worked in Lincoln's cabinet,

was the fastest and most accurate stenographer of his day.

He's so famous

because of the fact that he can get his notes done fast

and get them to all the lawyers and to the judge.

The way he did that

was he used something called a “Litho Stone,"

a polished stone using lithography,

where the image is backwards,

and then you could reproduce as many copies as you wanted.

And he saw one brilliant way of using the typewriter.

“Why don't I take the paper, after I type on it, the ink is still wet,

I'll turn it over and I'll rub the ink onto the litho stone,

so now it's backwards."

What a phenomenal idea!

The problem is the ink dries at different levels on the paper.

So he has the idea,

but the typewriter is not going to do it for him.

So he finds an engineer named Charles T. Moore.

Moore comes up with an idea for a device

with a cylinder, a typewriter keyboard, with a ribbon,

and instead of doing a page, it does a line.

You cut it apart, and then you rub the ink down onto the litho stone.

This machine is not quite doing what Clephane wants,

so they go to a machine shop called Hahl & Company,

and there they meet a German immigrant,

a new American, named Ottmar Mergenthaler.

[fireworks exploding]

Mergenthaler helps them develop some of the ideas for this machine,

but says, “lt's really not going to work.

It's not going to do what you want it to do.”

He helps them develop another version of it,

but it doesn't do it either.

He says, “No. The only way

is that you are going to have to find a way of using actual type.”

Well, Clephane has another brainstorm.

He says, “When you use the typewriter, it impacts the paper.

There is pressure there.”

“Why can't we use this new material called papier-maché?”

They raise money,

and they develop a machine which we call the “First Band Machine,"

and all the letters are on a metal band,

and they are all sticking out.

They're all in relief.

You hit the keys, and they line up,

all the characters in the line.

You force the papier-maché into it,

and then you get an impression.

You then put it down, put molten metal into it,

and you get a line of type.

Great idea, doesn't really work.

They raise more money,

and they develop the Second Band Machine,

and this time all the letters are recessed into the bands.

So you line up all the bands.

You have have one line. You force molten metal in-

no more papier-maché-

you get a line of type out.

Okay, it worked, but every letter is the same width,

so the capital “M” is as wide as the lower-case

so typographically, it's not very good.

So Mergenthaler realizes at that point

that every letter has to be an individual unit

so it can be whatever width is appropriate for the design of the character.

He has to take the band

and cut it into pieces

so that every letter is an individual unit.

He can move those units around the machine

and then assemble them into a line.

So they now raise more money.

At that point, Mergenthaler creates the Blower Machine,

which uses the individual matrix

that moves the matrix around the machine and actually can work.

The Linotype machine changed the world,

and it all started because a stenographer wanted to transcribe his notes.

[Filmstrip Narrator] It was in fact a modern feat of engineering.

Hard metal molds for letters of the alphabet, called matrices,

could now be brought into contact with molten type metal.

The result? A metal bar of type,

a linotype.

The inventor's name was Ottmar Mergen-taller.

Otto Mergenthaler.

Ottmar Mergen-Thaler.

Ottmar Ludwig Mergentailer.

The “th” is not pronounced.

It's just “Mergen-Taler.”

He was a watch maker, I think, by profession, a watch and clock maker,

so he was used to dealing with precision engineering work.

If he built pieces and parts for a wrist-watch,

they had to be exactly right.

You couldn't have them a little too big, a little too small.

You're not going to keep time that way.

He takes night courses in electricity and mechanics

and starts to realize that he is going to be drafted into the Prussian Army.

He did not want that to happen,

his parents didn't want that to happen,

and they finally made some arrangement

where he was sent out of the country.

He comes to the United States in 1872.

In fact, he comes off the ship called the SS Berlin,

where he came over in steerage,

with a wooden suitcase,

and it was at a place called Locust Point in Baltimore,

where, some years later, he would have his own factory.

He made something that was right,

and you could repeat it exactly the same,

and there are a lot of watch making qualities in that Linotype machine.

He was the creative genius behind this.

Somebody else gave him the germ of the idea,

but it was his genius that made the Linotype and made it successful.

[Filmstrip Narrator] Son of humble parents,

apprentice clock maker,

immigrant, skilled craftsman,

inventor in 1886

of a machine that revolutionized an industry,

a machine that pulled the mind of humanity forward a thousand years

in the space of a generation.

The Linotype gave you the mechanization

so that one person could do the work of six.

It could set type six times faster than a man could,

and you didn't have to throw the type back in the type case when you were finished.

The hand compositors, the typesetters,

when they heard, “Oh there's a machine that's going to come and replace you,”

they started to worry, I'm sure,

because they thought, “Oh, we're going to be out of a job,”

but no such thing.

Because the Linotype was such an effective device

and it replaced all these people,

within a decade after the Linotype,

they were up to the same number of people they had with handset type

because the Linotype generated so much need for typesetting

for books and magazines and newspapers.

The way that this machine transformed information

is probably its most significant achievement.

If you look at literacy in the United States,

before the Linotype and after the Linotype,

there's a gigantic jump

because now you can set type faster,

and because you can set type faster, you can print faster.

So you look then at the number of books published

in the United States after the Linotype,

look at the number of magazines,

look at the number of new newspapers that started.

It was important because it made printing that much more affordable to the masses,

not just in America but around the world.

Without the Linotype machine

and the speed that it came up with,

you would not have the communications system that you have now.

It's really something,

to think that just a machine that makes letters,

from a German immigrant from Baltimore,

could have such a deep effect on people and society.

I'm Davin Kuntze.

I'm 34 years old.

I'm a Linotype operator.

I have people come in to see the shop.

We have students come in from schools all the time,

and they just are in awe.

They have no idea what this thing is or how it works,

and I show them how the type is distributed

back into the magazines, and it's magic.

I like the fact that it is old. I like the fact of the way it works.

It's not like a computer that I look at

and I don't understand how the circuit boards are making stuff do what it does.

I'm incredibly happy that I know how it works.

It's very impressive to the women.

[Filmstrip Narrator] The operations necessary to produce a slug or line of type

are divided into three groups-

composition of the matrix line,

casting of the slug,

distribution of the matrices.

The operator, depressing the keys,

releases matrices from the magazine channel.

The matrices are delivered to the assembly elevator

in the correct sequence.

Here's a close-up of some mats.

You can see the letter that has been punched, or engraved,

into which the molten type metal is going to be injected.

The line of matrices is sent to the casting unit.

Against the opening of this mold,

the mats will fit perfectly.

The plunger injects the molten type metal into the mold.

The slug is ejected into the galley.

At the same time,

the matrices are transferred to the second elevator

and raised to the distributor.

Here, they are returned to their respective channels in the magazine.

It's incredible, the thought power

that went into figuring out how this machine works.

I can't even wrap my head around it

reading the manuals, let alone try to figure it out.

We would call this a “type matrix,"

and this is of course a size to explain to people

because it has to be seen.

The mats, these are little things like this,

and they come in all different sizes.

The heart and soul of the Linotype machine is the matrix.

[Filmstrip Narrator] This small piece of brass

performs a vitally important job.

It's a matrix, a mold for a letter.

It forms, together with other matrices, a word in type...

and then a line of words in type,

a Linotype.

This is what sets the type. This is why it's a typesetting machine.

Everything else is to make this work.

This is a mat that actually went through 60 different processes to be manufactured.

[Romano] The tooth combination in every matrix

matched up to the channel in the magazine,

so as the matrices went to the top, they went along the distributor bar

and then fell back into the proper channels.

I'll sometimes be setting line after line of type,

and then I just stop

and kind of stare at the return

and watch them drop down...

and then realize I'm supposed to be doing work.

[Filmstrip Narrator] A steel wedge known as a space band

is assembled between one word and the next.

At one point, when the line goes over to be cast,

it forces the wedge up,

and as it goes up, it expands the space between the words,

justifying everything to the left and right hand margins.

Strange keyboard- if you don't know anything about the keyboard-

has 90 keys on it.

It starts out with the most used letter,

which is the lowercase 'e',

and it goes “e, t, a, o, I, n, s, h, r, d, I, u,

c, m, f, w, y, p, v, b, g, k. q, I. X. 1-”

So Ottmar put all the lowercase letters on one side, based on frequency of letter use,

all the caps on the other side,

and everything else in the middle.

So you look at the keyboard.

It's “e, t, a, o, I, n, s, h, r, d, I, u" -

“etaoin shrdlu.”

Now, the reason that became famous

was there's no backspace key or delete key on a Linotype.

If you've made a mistake-

when you started typing, you made a mistake-

you started in the wrong line or whatever-

you couldn't abort easily,

so what you would do is run your finger down the first two rows of keys.

And then when the slug came out and it said “etaoin shrdlu,"

you'd throw it back into the pot,

and no one would know what was going on,

but what would happen, as fate would have it,

is that that would wind up in print,

and so all through the '20s and '30s and '40s

that was a big joke in the printing industry.

Who is “etaoin shrdlu”?

The Linotype machine was important on several aspects.

The most important of all of them is its contribution to journalism

because, whether things are looking nice or not,

the ability to have a newspaper coming out every day is non-negotiable.

This is a shrine to the First Amendment. Part of that is the history of news.

That's where we are right now. We're in the news gallery at the Newseum.

Right behind me you'll see front pages from 1940 to 1945.

We're seeing all of World War ll right here,

and every one of these papers

was set with a Linotype machine

by a guy probably in a very hot room,

really squinting to get every single word right.

So Linotype was able to take the words of a few people

and make them available for a larger audience

because it made newspaper production possible.

It's this machine that made it possible

for newspapers to print two, sometimes even three editions a day.

The newspapers went from eight pages to 48 pages almost overnight.

The cost of newspapers was driven down.

It used to be a dime and a nickel a piece.

Pretty soon you saw the New York papers selling for a penny a piece.

You can take longer stories.

You can take more stories.

You can print more often.

You can print faster.

They had to have content that would attract readers.

Therefore the stories became more salacious.

The headlines became larger.

If it involved a murder or sex or gambling,

it was sure to draw readers in.

Even today with the gossip channel, TMZ.com, Twitter,

they got to know now, the latest joke,

the latest have-you-seen-it,

the latest Web video, viral or what have you.

It's the instantaneousness of the fact that drives the business.

[Filmstrip Narrator] The need to read, which serves the very souls of men,

is more evident in the present era of progress than ever before.

Publishers, bookstores, and newsstands

pour out thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers every day

to inform, instruct, and amuse.

The greater part of these printed materials

are made possible by various types of mechanical typesetting.

Machines which set type up in lines, cast from molten metal,

first introduced at the close of the last century,

are now the most widely used.

Linotype was one of the most profitable companies you can possibly imagine.

Newspapers had to buy machines.

They had to buy new fonts. They had to buy mats that wore out.

They had to buy parts for the machine.

They had to buy service for the machine where it was necessary.

The Linotype company was a “cash cow.”

Beginning in 1886

the Linotype spread rapidly

through the United States and Canada,

but almost simultaneously in Western Europe

and the English-speaking world

because of the British Empire.

And by 1928,

the Linotype reigned supreme

as the primary typesetting device throughout the world.

But Mergenthaler's biggest problem is he can't stop inventing.

He keeps improving the machine.

He keeps coming up with new ideas,

and the problem is the investors want to be able to ship machines

and make money from them.

He ruled with an iron hand.

Just the way he ruled his workers at the newspaper,

he ruled everybody at the company.

Whitelaw Reid wanted to make money very fast.

Ottmar didn't want to build the machines that fast.

There's a picture of Whitelaw Reid standing next to Mergenthaler.

He was listening to what Mergenthaler said,

but Mergenthaler was not an equal to him.

[Romano] So they start to become at loggerheads.

It gets to a point where Reid starts really hinting that the machine is bad.

“The machine's not doing what it's supposed to do."

What he was doing that for

was basically he thought the stock price would go lower.

He would buy more of it.

He wanted to control the whole thing himself,

and from all the records that are still out there,

he should be ashamed of what he was doing.

Ottmar was a perfectionist,

and, again, he couldn't stop inventing.

This is another thing that drove Reid crazy.

Reid had his own set of problems.

He was a taskmaster. He was demanding.

He wanted everything immediately.

He put a lot of pressure on Mergenthaler,

but Mergenthaler put a lot of pressure on himself.

But he also had the problem of working very late at night.

He had a family to take care of and afford,

and with all those things, his health began to go.

Ottmar Mergenthaler unfortunately died of tuberculosis when he was about 44.

He didn't live to see the great success that the Linotype eventually became.

If he deserves anything,

he deserves the respect of being the person that we should be thanking.

Thank you for what you've done.

You've put the world 300 years ahead

by inventing the Linotype machine.

It's almost the story of the American dream.

He comes to America with nothing.

He goes on to invent the machine

that will change the world,

and yet almost no one knows who he was.

That is the first question people ask me when they find out I'm the Public Printer.

They want to know if I print money, and I say “No,”

and then they say, “Well, can you get me my passport?”

And I say “No," and then they just move on.

We print the Congressional Record, the Federal Register.

We print the Code of Federal Regulations

We've printed every significant historical document

in the life of the nation since 1861.

So our first big historic job was probably

the printing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862.

The stumbling block, in terms of efficiency and speed,

was that we set everything by hand,

and when we really turned the equation around

from minutes-per-line to lines-per-minute,

our work here just exploded.

Well, the Linotype battery at GPO, as far as I know,

was probably the largest in the world.

I think there was about 150 in total, throughout the building,

and it was just something to see,

all those machines lined up the full length of the building,

and the noise was pretty loud,

all of those machines running at the same time, pinging away,

and men shouting and moving around.

It was almost like a ballet of machinery and men

moving around, trying to get this thing done

because every night The Record had to get out.

It's just fascinating how every piece is an integral part,

of one action leads to another action.

I've just found that to be as interesting as hell.

I was a Linotype machinist. I repaired them.

Worked with a head machinist

who was a little reluctant on teaching me at first

because he noticed I had two fingers gone, so he didn't figure I'd be able to do it.

He used to go out for lunch everyday,

and while he was gone for lunch,

of course I had to cover the 11 machines,

I'd make sure I took one of them apart,

and when he came back, he'd see that I had taken it apart.

He'd hit the roof, but that was okay.

He had to put it back together again.

In the meantime I was looking over his shoulder,

garnishing all of his knowledge.

What's really nice is when you come across

some of the old-timers that used to run these machines.

They just love it when they see a running machine.

They'll be out in the hallway,

and you hear the click-click-click,

and all of a sudden they're attracted like mice to cheese, coming in the door

because they hear that sound.

You've got the clink of the matrices as they fall down into the assembling tray.

You've got the sounds of the mold disc being pushed up against it.

You've got all 13 cams spinning at the same time.

You're adding all of these different sounds

to the whirring sound that's been going,

reassuring you that the machine is on and that it's working right.

The whirr- [imitates sound]

Then you hear- [whooshes]

Just a little tap noise.

Click-click. There's a clink, which is the spaceband.

Vroom, click.

The elevator moves down.

You hear it go- [imitates sound]

Clink, and then you hear the sound of a- [whooshes]

And then that last line comes out and goes clunk

and drops in place.

And then that's followed by the cascade of mats

as they fall back down into the distributor, down into the magazine,

and you hear that brass-against-brass sound as the mats hit each other.

You'd hear clink-clink-clink, clink-clink-clink, clink-clink-clink

wherever that mat was going to drop.

It's just a cacophony of sound,

but it is in its own, a Linotype symphony.

And that's the sound that they grew up with,

something that they did for years.

[clinking, whirring]

[clacks, zips]

[clicking, chugging]

[pinging, clanking]

“If your mouth keeps your hands from working, keep it shut.”

So that's a pretty good motto.

These people that ran them were really irreplaceable.

You just couldn't put anybody down at a machine and say, “You do this."

It took several years to really become

a decent printer at a Linotype machine,

and really many, many more years to become a good operator.

Linotype compositors were the preeminent laborers of their day.

This wasn't just a job.

This whole thing in this newspaper age, it was a calling.

It was something bigger.

They were the artists.

They were the people that created this wonderful, beautiful typography

that we try and emulate today digitally.

The people who operated them

were talented, artistic people

posing as industrial types in dirty coveralls.

They saved you from making stupid errors- especially the compositors-

really saved you from making stupid errors, from upstairs.

And sometimes the guys in composing

would find an error in the story

while they were putting it in and say,

“Did you mean to say he was guilty?"

“Because everything in this seems to say he's not guilty?"

“What did the jury say? Was he guilty?”

“Oh, I forgot to put 'not' in it,"

and it went through everybody, and they never caught it,

but you know who caught it?

The guy down there, with the cigar, that's putting it in.

The goal was to pick up your paper

at the door of your house at 7:00 in the morning.

That's the goal.

You wouldn't care how you did it at night

or when you went to press.

That's your problem.

Our problem is we want a paper there in the morning, first thing.

You had a deadline on Thursday,

and you didn't dare miss that deadline

because if you missed that deadline,

they couldn't print the paper,

and if the paper didn't get printed,

it couldn't get in the mail.

If it couldn't get in the mail,

the subscribers wouldn't get their paper until late,

and they wouldn't like that.

It was a vicious cycle.

It was not easy...

But it was fun.

I was sitting there at my machine,

doing some classified advertising, I guess,

and along came some people.

I could see them from a distance.

The foreman of the composing room came over to me,

and he said, “Carl, we have some visitors.”

He brought all the people over,

and there was this woman, and he says,

“Oh, yes, and this is Marilyn Monroe."

You could have knocked me out of my chair if you wanted to,

but I took the shock.

I said, “Okay, Marilyn Monroe and anybody else,

you still all have to learn something about the machine at once."

I set up a line of type in her name.

I set it in bold face

because I knew she would like that.

And I gave it to her and I said, “This is your name on the piece.”

And she looked at it,

and everybody else was looking at it and looking at me, I guess.

And she said, “Thank you very much,”

and she kissed me on top of my head

because I'm sitting down here, and she's standing over me.

And I said to myself, “There goes the day.

That's all they're going to talk about now today is my head.”

In memoriam, City of Boston Printing Department, 1897 to 2010.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the City of Boston Graphic Arts Printing Equipment Auction.

Today we are auctioning off the assets of the printing department.

Here we go, lot 101: the Heidelberg 4-color perfector.

And how much- we'll start it off at $20,000,

20,000 to get it going.

20,000 a bidder, now 22,500.

Any interest in the Linotype machine?

$500 on the Linotype? $500 quickly?

Couple hundred dollars? Any interest at all?

Any interest in the Linotype? Hundred dollars-

- [Woman] 1-6-4. - 164, a hundred dollars?

- Ten dollars. - Ten dollars.

Ten, now 20? Ten, now 20?

Now $20. Ten and now 20.

Ten, now 20, now 20.

This auction is killing me!

I'm here to attempting to and successfully acquiring a Linotype machine

for the museum in Waltham.

$10, now 20? Any- for ten, 20?

You want them both? You're going to take both of them, all right?

- I'll take both. - Take them both.

I think I spent $10 for a machine.

Whether I bought one machine or two machines is a matter of conjecture.

[person applauding]

This gentleman is from one of the museums. I want you to go visit the equipment.

They were sold for ten bucks

to the Museum of Industry and Innovation out in Waltham, Mass.

They are going to be setting up some sort of demonstration

to show people how Linotypes work.

- Thank you very much, I appreciate it. - Thank you very much.

- Good luck. You'll enjoy these. - I'm going to need it.

All right, now 166.

I know what the machine does, and I know why it does it.

As far as the operation and maintenance,

I'm very much in the dark on that,

but I guess I'm going to have to learn.

Can you get that?

Of course it's got my name and address on it.

Maybe you shouldn't be photographing that.

Do you know anybody who wants to take a second machine?

Offhand, I don't,

but Dave Seat, because he travels the country-

Why don't you get the word to him?

Because I definitely do not want a second machine.

They're going to skin me for the first one.

You really, really should touch base with Dave.

Let me give you my name,

and I'll give you my phone number and my email address-

- Well- - He can get to me any way he cares to.

Well, I'll be very blunt.

You're going to have to get to him.

I'd say since '95,

I've probably worn out four vehicles

and over a million miles, I would say.

Beth and I will get in our vehicle,

and we'll start in Tennessee,

and we'll make a whole circuit of the West Coast or the East Coast

and might work on anywhere from 20 to 100 jobs.

We want to teach everybody in their own print shop

how to take care of their own equipment

because there is nobody else that's going to travel like we do.

It's good that we both get along with each other fairly well.

Otherwise I'd be hanging outside the window sometime.

Basically we're going up to see a customer at White Star, named Tim Trower.

And he wants a mouthpiece put on his Linotype.

I went ahead and dug out screws.

Your choice of mouthpieces.

- Okay. - Probably-

How big of type do you set?

These are not mouthpiece screws.

- Huh. - Nope. This is F-65.

That's mold screws.

- I don't see any mouthpiece screws in there. - Okay.

Let's go to the second location.

Looking for F-2791, is the part number.

Okay, 308 is the gas equivalent.

When I look for a part, sometimes I know the part number.

Sometimes I don't.

There is a spring down there on the left

that is a BB-479.

The rubber rollers are part number H-2601 for the smooth one.

The keys are 874. Sometimes they go bad.

Plunger is an F-898.

What we're going to replace is this piece right here.

It is called the mouthpiece.

That's the old used one.

This is the brand new one we are going to be putting on.

To run the machine,

the puppy-dog tail needs to be up.

Now we are going to partially cycle the machine.

- [Linotype whirring] - Stop it right there.

The mold slide will come all the way out of the machine.

One of the things is if the throat is dirty,

you will get bad slugs.

They won't look good, they won't fill up.

I've seen him work on a machine,

on a project that would have me literally cursing and tearing my hair out,

and he breaks a sweat, and that's about it.

This is a throat saw for a Linotype.

You want to saw on the way out so you are pulling the dirt out with you.

You don't want to push the dirt back in.

Yep, good flow.

What I just did was I pushed the plunger down again

so that the metal would squirt out all the holes

and you can see if you have a good flow to every hole and a good stream,

and it looks like we had plenty of stream,

plenty of pressure on all holes,

so it looks like we are good right here.

Squirt number two.

What I like about Dave is that he shows you all of his secrets.

He is a great teacher.

He wants you to learn what he is doing

so that the next time you have a problem

and he is in England on a service trip or in New England,

you can take care of it yourself.

It's a big, industrial machine,

and the uses today are not in that industrial setting anymore.

They're in studio settings, in small-shop settings.

- My name is John Kristensen,

and I am the first among equals

at Firefly Press in Boston, Massachusetts.

We are a commercial letterpress printing shop.

Letterpress has of course long-since disappeared

as mainstream, commercial commerce,

but it has come back in recent years as a craft.

At one point it was just how things were done.

People weren't too precious about it,

but I think that, given the way that technology has evolved,

I think there is a certain amount of integrity in the process

that I respond to.

Letterpress is increasingly being seen as something quite special,

not because it has changed,

but because the rest of the world has changed,

and now the bite and the use of the nice papers

and the brilliance of the colors

and the physical presence of the printing

is something that people now know to appreciate and to desire.

I love the fact that sitting down at a keyboard,

I have only so many typefaces,

and so it's my responsibility to use them with intelligence.

And here then is an element

that enters into letterpress

that simply does not play so large a part

in any of the more modern printing technologies,

and that is craft.

The simple knowing of a technique.

Craft means you care

and you know about what you are doing.

I think that anybody that is going to study typography

needs to get rooted first in the letterpress method

whether they set type by hand

or use a Linotype or a Ludlow.

They need to know how to use type before they use it.

I had a romantic notion of letterpress

when I was a young fellow,

and I began collecting the stuff

because I never had much of a budget to work with,

and the stuff was all free.

I studied journalism in college,

and I always wanted to publish my own journal or magazine.

The Almanac tackles a lot of land issues,

environmental things,

sort of the cultural health of the state.

I don't think there is another publication in America on this scale

that is done hot metal.

Eldon is one of those angels

who happened to be around when I was starting out,

and his career- because of the technology-

his career as a Linotype operator was winding down

because there just weren't any left,

and he started to working for me, and he has always worked for me part-time.

He comes out when I need him.

There would have been no Wapsipinicon Almanac,

at least in its current incarnation, without Eldon.

[Tim Trower] One of the reasons that newspapers liked to employ deaf people

is because they weren't bothered by the noisy work conditions

and yet, strangely enough,

even though they couldn't hear the machine,

they could sense what was going wrong with the machine

and were able to respond just about as quickly as a hearing person.

♪ [music playing] ♪

[Woman interpreter] He says, “I'm not a show-off."

It's very easy to go into a lot of print shops and see hand printers working,

but very few of them have the experience

of seeing a full, working Linotype machine that we have here

with our Linotype operator Mr. Ray Loomis,

who comes here every Saturday as a volunteer.

My name is Raymond Loomis,

born in Baltimore, Maryland 82 years ago.

So I have been around a while.

Our machine is 75 years old,

and it still runs, and it runs well.

It was well-maintained over its lifetime,

and we try to keep it running, too.

When I was working by myself,

which is a bad thing on a machine like this,

to be by yourself,

and I was checking to see if the cooling blower was on,

and I put my hand down,

and the machine came back on my hand and held it.

I turned it off quick enough as soon as I felt it, but I was stuck.

I couldn't move, I couldn't reach anything,

I didn't know what to do.

And then I thought the only thing I could really do

is to pull that advance lever and let it go do its thing,

and I pulled it and squinted,

and it backed right off.

It didn't come any further than my fingers were already caught.

They were black-and-blue for a while,

two or three of those fingers there.

Operating a Linotype can be a little frightening.

You don't hurry on the Linotype.

You clear your head before you start,

and you can't be thinking about a lot other things.

There is a lot going on, a lot you have to watch for.

[John Kristensen] This is all pre idiot-proof,

all pre-OSHA equipment.

The assumption was you knew what you were doing.

There are so many moving parts,

and there is metal that is 550 degrees

that could explode on me at any minute.

There is something we call a squirt.

Lead will squirt out,

and you're used to- you hear a certain sound, you shove back.

That meant there was something wrong in the setting line

where there was a gap or a space.

That space was going to be filled with hot metal,

and it was going to come at you.

[Harry Saracena] And when lead comes out of that thing,

it's got to be right on the button.

You get so attuned to the machine

that you can hear it getting ready to squirt.

And if you're good,

you can get out of the way.

Otherwise you get a pant leg full of metal.

But a lot of the times I would jump out of the chair while I was casting,

just in case I didn't do it right.

I saved my first squirt.

I have it somewhere. I'm not sure where it is.

Good morning.

Morning.

I asked a guy one time,

“ls there anybody teaching this?"

And he says, “No, not anymore.

They used to do it all the way around the world.”

I said, “Well I'd like to start Linotype University 1."

And... pretty good idea.

If you read the word that says “Linotype University,"

you're thinking of a campus with big brick buildings or something.

Well, that's not the printing business.

This is Linotype University VIII class-

this is where people come to the United States, to Denmark, Iowa

to learn how to operate a Linotype.

[Ruth Skelton] I probably learned more about the machine this week

than I ever had in the 15 years or so that I operated the machine.

[Buddy Lang] People all over the country and world that are interested in it,

like this week we've got one fellow from Australia and one from England.

[Nicholas Smith] We have a very good range of professional or ex-professional Linotype engineers

who are very, very generous with their advice and help.

Linotype University is a unique corner of America,

run by a guy named Larry Raid.

This gentleman that runs this museum here

and welcomed me here,

is Mr. Larry J. Raid,

and I've got to say, as we say in Australia, “Good on ya, mate!”

And he, from what I could gather,

is just a fanatic for the machine

and taught himself how to use it.

His two passions are vastly different:

Linotype machines and locomotives.

The train?

It's a Davenport Locomotive,

an 060 diesel mechanical

with a CAT-V8 engine in it.

I rebuilt six miles of rail road track with that Ford 8N,

had a little boom on the back.

He bought a train and laid track for it?!

Who does that kind of thing?

Larry's a collector.

It's very hard for him to part with anything, as you can see.

Most of the places that have them are museums,

and if they have one Linotype,

they don't need two of them.

If they have one printing press,

they don't need a third or fourth or fifth one,

and I'm not that way.

These are a couple Linotypes and lntertypes that I'm using for parts,

and as we go down, there's another Linotype over this way.

I've just been a collector,

and I just keep collecting and keep collecting,

and now I've got something like over 90 of them all together.

What some people don't understand about Larry

is his dad owned a junkyard,

so Larry grew up in a junkyard,

so having machines sitting outside or rusting or whatever

doesn't surprise Larry.

Larry says, “Oh yeah we'll get that running. We'll fix that.”

And so it's just setting there waiting to be restored again.

Because to Larry nothing is ruined.

It's all still good. It's metal.

It'll fix.

I've also encountered people

that sort of belittle the whole program,

and I can see why.

He's not classically trained.

He wasn't trained by Linotype to do this,

but in his own way he's a total genius.

There's so many people that have called and said,

“Well Larry Raid says call you,”

or “Larry Raid says this," or “Larry says that."

And it's because Larry's excited, other people get excited, too.

He's the kind of prophet

that I think this sort of thing needs, this gospel, if you will, needs,

is somebody who is passionate

and maybe a little bit crazy.

You need that, I think.

[Filmstrip Narrator] People change.

Products change.

Everything changes,

and every change adds to the problem of communications.

The rate of change is accelerating,

faster, faster, faster.

Stop!

But you can't stop.

You can't hold back the surge of change

or the growth of information.

It will continue in spite of you,

and you're going to have to cope with it.

- Otherwise... - [explosion]

The death knell for the Linotype

and all typesetting machines that use metal

started in 1945,

when the lntertype company

showed a machine called the Fotosetter.

A Fotosetter mat doesn't cast hot metal at all,

but it shoots a beam of light through a small photo negative in the mat,

onto a specially prepared piece of paper,

which is then photographed

and prepared for offset production.

So it looked like a Linotype, acted like a Linotype,

did everything a Linotype did

but photographically.

Okay, here we have-

and I don't know if you can get in on that.

It's from The New York Times.

It's the last standing type

as the Times went from hot-metal to cold-metal type,

but I believe this is a page of the obituaries,

which is kind of sad, isn't it?

In one way you felt sadness.

You had to because you knew it was coming eventually,

like a dying patient.

And they came to work one day, and it was all over.

I've been a printer now for 26 years,

been at this place for 2O years- six years apprenticeship,

20 years journeyman-

and these are words that aren't just tossed around.

All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years

is all locked up in a little box now called a computer.

[sigh]

I had some guys around me, and we poured a couple of glasses out,

and we said “To yesterday.”

So we said “goodbye" to the past and “hello" to the future.

We had these machines on the back of a dump truck,

and I stopped at a junkyard,

a salvage yard,

and I just turned my head and pulled this lever,

and those machines slid off.

I couldn't even look at it

because I knew they were good machines,

but nobody was running them anymore,

as far as I knew.

And the wreckers-

they just smashed it up

with a big 12-pound hammer,

and I thought, “Oh, that's the sad part of it all.”

At the end of the Linotype's usefulness here,

there was no market for the machines,

and the only way they could be gotten rid of was to scrap them.

As far as I know, they were all surplussed, and they were let go.

Unfortunately, they were probably junked.

They opened up a window at the back of the floor

where the largest of the Linotype batteries was,

and just pushed them out into the parking lot,

pushed them out to be piled up and hauled off for scrap.

They're scrapped in two ways.

The machines are hauled to the junkyard and melted,

and the skill sets and the expertise

and the knowledge of the people that ran them

is also hauled to the junkyard.

All the presses, the Linotypes, the proof presses,

all of that disappeared,

all that iron scrap went out in the back and rusted there, for this.

[Filmstrip Narrator] it's a cathode-ray tubed

photo typesetting system

called "Linotron 505. "

It produces high-quality typography.

Machines like the Photon,

the very first photo typesetting machine...

It looks like a combination of a Steelcase desk, a typewriter,

and something from Star Trek.

This was the future back in 1985,

and as you can see, the future has passed.

Well, this is the end of the tour.

This is the unresolved thread of our tour.

This is the computer room,

the “Digital Type Setting Room,” and it is very old.

This is from 1990.

♪ Farewell, farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu ♪

♪ The best years of my life I've spent with you♪

♪ Now our printing days are at an end ♪

♪ You've set your final type, my friend ♪

♪ Computers are the thing that finished you♪

This is what the Linotype company looked like in Brooklyn.

At one time two blocks, two square blocks, were the factory.

One square block was where they made the machines.

The other square block was the headquarters and the matrix manufacturing.

It's now a storage facility for some moving company.

It's very sad.

♪ You've got to go ♪

♪ No more hot lead ♪

♪ The type we love to set ♪

♪ That way is dead ♪

♪ Computers and cathode tubes replaced us ♪

♪ But, by God, they'll not erase us ♪

♪ 'Cause we taught them ♪

♪ Everything they know ♪

When Mergenthaler moved out of the old Ryerson Street building,

I walked through the building with the old building supervisory,

and I found a few things including this rather nice sign.

I don't know where it had been on the walls at Mergenthaler,

asking employees to keep the place clean,

but I thought it was kind of nice,

and I saved that and some reason have kept it ever since.

I'm Matthew Carter, Type Designer,

former Linotype employee.

There was a huge amount of work involved,

particularly for the letter drawing office,

in adapting the metal types for film.

My job was to explore certain advantages there might be

in this new technology,

a sort of liberation from the constraints of metal typecasting.

[Filmstrip Narrator] At Mergenthaler,

we make a tool for the graphic arts industry,

a sophisticated tool using modern electronics

to perform one of the most vital functions in printing and publishing-

high-speed photo typesetting.

I think there are some qualities that did get lost.

There's often something very beautiful about the impression of type on good paper,

as was done in the past if you look through the history,

so there may have been some loses along the way.

For me, the gains outweigh the losses. That's all I can say.

If I put them in the balance, the gains win,

but, again, other people sitting here

could disagree with me violently about that.

And then I suppose the other very significant development since then has been the Web,

screen fonts and so on.

Linotype GmbH has taken over as the responsibility

for the typefaces but not for the mechanical parts,

so we sometimes have customers asking here

for spare parts to the machine,

but we have no material, and we have no solution for that.

Linotype of today, the current company,

has no relationship at all with the Linotype machine.

The machine is no longer in use,

and the other Linotype machines which Linotype has developed

also disappeared from the market,

but what we see as the heritage is to continue our typefaces.

The Linotype machine had a really good contribution to type design.

This is secondary in terms of the overall population,

but for the type-design world, this is really important

because the fact that the Linotype machine became so popular around the globe

gave it enough capital to be able to invest in good typography.

Here you have one of the most amazing archives that anyone has ever known about.

It is every drawing, for every glyph, or character, or symbol,

that was ever made into a matrix for the Linotype machine.

This is a 9-point Caslon old-face italic,

and here you can see the drawings for italic “A" in Caslon.

They did alternate characters as well,

so here's a beautiful cap “A" with a swash on it.

This is an example of a drawing

of the kind that was made at Linotype for many decades for metal type.

It wasn't just this nuts-and-bolts, let's get black stuff down on white paper

and that's all that was necessary.

Linotype and Monotype were committed to fine typography.

As you go through here, you actually see the history of typography.

Here's Century Schoolbook.

Right now in front of me I've got Cloister.

I've got Garamond.

Memphis. Memphis is a square serif.

Here's Devanagari. That's the first font I ever worked on.

When we talk about typefaces,

everybody knows the canon of the Linotype typefaces,

but they never really think about where they came from or how they came to be.

Here's Primer, which was used for textbooks,

Metrolite, which was very popular for the newspapers for display advertising,

Opticon, which was one of the newspaper typefaces.

This is very interesting. Here's Bengali Bold,

so to sell machines in India,

they had to create a font for the Bengali dialect.

Even when the Linotype machine is not there, it's legacy continues

because it made possible for us to have these typefaces,

and we still use them today.

And that's amazing to me,

that the designs are so strong for this machine

that they've transcended the transition into a digital face.

If the 90-some machines are gone to the junk man,

all my endeavors are gone down the tube after I pass away.

Someday I will.

My wife is probably going to throw the machines in the hole right after me.

It's the only way you're going to keep me down.

Hopefully they'll go onto somebody else that will take them

and learn how to use them.

Hopefully I'll find somebody that wants to learn the machine,

and I'll be able to teach them.

Then the best case scenario, if that doesn't happen,

is that they go to a museum

where they're at least preserved as a static display

of what they used to be able to do.

Worst case scenario?

Somebody's going to come in here, look at them, and go,

“Man, that's worth nine cents a pound.”

A scrap metal man would want money to break one up and remove it for you,

but that is why those guys are usually measured by size-17 shirts,

size-17 shoes,

and size-17 IQ.

They weigh about 4,000 pounds.

I think scrap is going for $280 a ton in this area, someone told me today,

so, you know, $560,

total value, if you took it to the scrap yard.

It is a damn shame

that so much is being pushed out of the back of factories,

just crashing to the ground or being broken up.

Most Linotypes got thrown out.

My dad says he's probably thrown out a thousand Linotypes in the scrap

because they have no use for them.

That should give a sense of urgency

to the maintenance and the salvaging of the stuff that is already out there.

There are just too many.

You would like to save some, but there are too many.

You have to do something with it.

It would cost me maybe $4,000 or $5,000 to get it operating again.

We've offered the machine to a number of museums.

Most museums already have a Linotype,

but they too are just sitting there.

They aren't doing anything.

Most of these machines are headed for salvage yards,

and I wish it were otherwise.

So we have made the decision

to take this to the salvage yard, with a few tears.

It's not what I really prefer to do.

But I want to be here carefully to document the fact

that, that is the right decision,

and it is not an easy one

as we say goodbye to this today.

I guess I'm glad not to have to watch it

because I know how finely machined this thing is,

what a fine tool it is,

and to see it just destroyed,

my mind keeps going back to the inventor,

Ottmar Mergenthaler,

and that hurts.

[bangs]

[bangs]

Well, that's pretty devastating,

but it also shows you the durability of the machine.

It was emotionally tougher than I expected it to be.

A little twinge of regret, but not really

because, hey, everything has to make way,

and even Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype has to make way.

Over the next few decades,

without Dave Seat and people like him,

these machines will just stand here idly.

After a while, because they are doing nothing,

they will sell them for scrap metal.

Being a young operator

and learning this stuff from people who are 80 years old

also feels like a bit of a responsibility,

that I should learn as much as I can, while I can.

If it's to survive, if it's to be appreciated,

and if it's to endure,

I think someone is going to have to pass it on.

The machines themselves were put up for auction in Boston.

They were purchased by one of our founders and trustees,

a man named Howard Gorin,

who in turn asked if he could donate them to the museum.

We expected to only receive one.

However, when the riggers left this afternoon, there were two here.

We had two Linotype machines delivered.

They still need to be connected electrically.

A lot of electric wiring has to be replaced.

They are going to need some mechanical attention.

A lot of the drive belts have to be replaced,

and from there on we will just see.

The accomplishment is seeing them not going to China as scrap metal.

I was looking for a home for the second one,

and we couldn't find a home for the second one.

I would not feel sorry about finding a good home for it,

but I'll be goddamned if I'm going to see this thing cut up for scrap,

and that's what it boils down to.

I think, for most commercial purposes,

you have to say, “Yes, it is a dead machine."

You can do it all much more quickly in other ways.

On the other hand, I think it's not a dead machine

in that there are enthusiasts around,

and I hope there will continue to be enthusiasts

who find them sufficiently interesting.

Anything that I get into that's new is going to be obsolete soon,

so why not get something that is already obsolete

and make the best of it?

It's a closed system.

It has become what it will now always be,

so though there is a lot to learn-

a lotto learn, one lifetime isn't enough-

at least the technology stands still for you.

Somebody had to say something about what the future was like

and who was being affected by it,

so I said, “I'll take the voice of the Linotype machine,

and I'll be the poet.”

- "This Ottmar Mergenthaler chap, ”

"The Linotype he did unwrap. ”

"Created quite an awful flap, "

"Within the marketplace."

"Type foundries trembled,”

“then they went under. ”

"Printer's jobs were rent asunder. ”

"Investors' bellies grew rotunder. "

"And Linotype replaced a case.”

"Books and papers multiplied"

"In an ever-growing tide, ”

"Making wings for thoughts to ride”

“Up to outer space. ”

"Now Linotype has said farewell... "

Right there.

“Computer type it did foretell. ”

"But it let out one final yell: ”

'”I've served the human race.

That's it.

- You want to do this one for me? - Oh, yeah.

- Take four! - [laughter]