Mechanization of Typography

So the setting of type by hand remained an increasingly slow and costly process.  By the middle of the 19th century presses were producing 25 000 sheets per hour, but the each letter in every body of text in every publication still had to be set by hand. This limited even the most profound daily newspapers to only eight pages. Because of this books still remained relatively precious. 

After dozens of experiments, the first patent for a type-composing machine was registered in 1825. Millions of people invested countless amounts of money in this field of automating typesetting, including writer Mark Twain. In 1886, after a decade of struggling, Ottmar Mergenthaler perfected a revolutionary invention in the history of printing – the Linotype machine. It was a keyboard-operated machine that was first demonstrated in the New York Tribune office on July 3rdthat year. The Linotype got it’s name from the editor of the NY Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, when he reacted to the invention in joyous exuberance by saying: “Ottmar, you’ve done it! A line o’ type.”

The Linotype involved the use of small brass matrixes with female impressions of the letterforms, numbers and symbols. Ninety typewriter keys controlled vertical tubes, filled with these matrixes. Every time a key was pressed, a matrix for that character was released. This matrix slid down a chute and was automatically lined up with the other characters in that line. Melted lead was poured into the line of matrixes to cast a slug bearing the raised line of type.


The Model 5 Linotype became the 
workhorse of typesetting. It had 
keyboards and matrixes available 
in over a thousand languages


This Linotype machine was doing the work of seven or eight hand compositors. Needless to say, this replaced the jobs of thousands of people. As a result of this violence and strikes broke out and threatened many installations. But because of this new technology creating unprecedented explosions of graphic material, the increasing use of the Linotype in foundries created just as many jobs as it replaced. The price of newspapers in the 1880s reduced rapidly, the amount of pages that were manageable in publications increased and circulation soared. Consequently, book publications expanded tremendously.

In 1887 an American gentleman called Tolbert Lanston invented the Monotype machine, which cast single characters from hot metal. But it took a decade of perfecting it to the point where it was efficient enough to be put into production.
But hand-set metal type faced a dwindling market since most text type was being machine set. Thus, less foundry type was needed.

As a prominent characteristic of Industrial Revolution, devastating price wars and cutthroat competition caused increasing ructions. The 1892 merger of fourteen foundries to form the American Type Foundries Company took place in an attempt to stabilize the industry by forcing the weaker foundries out of business. This consequently reduced surplus capacity but design piracy was still rampant.

By the end of the 19th century the type-foundry business stabilized.  Handset metal type was still in demand as it provided display type for advertisements and editorial headlines until the photography take-over in the 1960’s. And so the mass communication era arrived.

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