Celebrating Linotype, 125 Years Since Its Debut

To embark on Linotype was to embark on greatness. Linotype machines powered newspapers, factories, a whole industry that was as American as any and existed for a century, at least until the tides of technology wiped it out as an occupation in the 1960s and 1970s -- and now, Linotype is nearly extinguished from American memory. Yet Thomas Edison, it's said, called the machine the Eighth Wonder of the World (no faint praise from the man who invented the light bulb). This fabled technology, this wonder, once occupied the imagination of countless people in our nation's past.

The summer of 2011 marks 125 years since the Linotype machine's innovation entered the newspaper world -- the New York Tribune first integrated the machine into its operations in July 1886. Before its invention and implementation, no newspaper could easily run longer than a few brief pages, and this new way of producing text marked a radical evolution in the history of printing and typography. Linotype dominated for nearly a hundred years, and it's time to revisit the machine's origins.

A German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler invented it in the 1880s and continued to promote and expand its use until dying in Baltimore in 1899. The Linotype's power involved transferring a line of text (typed with meticulous care by a Linotypist onto a special 90-key keyboard) to a sheet, creating a "line o' type" that could be rapidly printed onto many subsequent pages, thanks to the genius of matrices and hot metal.

A massive legion of dexterous Linotypists quickly rose up, their responsibility to type out the finished newspaper text in order to allow for quick, relatively easy printing. By 1895, London newspaper proprietors assembled to form an association of the new typesetters. Their ranks swelled throughout the 20th century, with 25,000 of the machines in use by 1911 and 33,000 by 1916, according to The Linotype Bulletin (yes, seriously) and a "complete and practical treatise" on the Linotype written in those respective years. People began to appreciate the industry as its own institution within journalism. In 1929, a Boy Scout visited a newspaper plant to earn his Journalism Merit Badge and called the Linotype "one of the three wonders of the modern newspaper plant," spending several paragraphs explaining the process. Four decades later, by 1954, the number of Linotype machines in operation swelled to 100,000. The invention had become a critical part of producing newspapers, ads, books and more.

Furthermore, typesetters' wages were "relatively prosperous" in mid-century America, according to a Linotypist's long account in a 1979 issue of Texas Monthly. As interesting as the profile itself happens to be, little can match the punch of the subhead: They travel from town to town. They drink hard, they work hard, they are dedicated to their craft. They're typesetters. Oh yes they are. The author of the piece, Pat Hathcock, later adds, "Typesetters have always been drinkers. Benjamin Franklin mentioned it. Thorstein Veblen mentioned it. My wives even mentioned it." Those practicing Linotype even acted as unauthorized editors of the newspapers, apparently, according to a 1972 New York article, a reflection of their spontaneous character. "With me, if [the Linotypists] don't like what I'm writing, they change my opinions," a writer for the Yiddish paper The Forward explained to a colleague who had noticed a spelling change in one of his articles.