The Gorgeous Machinery of Old-School Newspaper Printing | Eastern North Carolina Now

      I have always been fascinated by machines and how they work as well as the evolution of automation through out our history.  This is  another article on the changing landscape of automation. I offer some of those here as examples of mankind's inventiveness throughout our history. BT 

   The printing press was invented in the Holy Roman Empire by the German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440.  He was building on previous printing methods. In doing so, he obsoleted all previous methods of creating printed documents by his use of movable type.

   Back when "stop the presses!" had some real meaning the Linotype machine was the state of the art for newspaper printing. It had been since 1884 when the Linotype press was invented.

     I had previously posted on automation replacing the typesetting profession for newspapers.  It covered my print shop class in 1959. Here is that article

    In actual practice newspapers were printed using a Linotype machine. For brevity, I skipped a generation of automation. Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the Linotype machine.

    The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over the previous industry standard, i.e., manual, letter-by-letter typesetting using a composing stick and drawers of letters.  If you think computers are complicated, take a look at this machine. It is a masterpiece of mechanical interaction.  It would take individual type, mold a complete line of type in lead and eject it.  This allowed for an easier composition of the column format of a newspaper.

 Original photo (Image:Linotype-vorne-deutsches-museum.jpg by Clemens PFEIFFER, Vienna. Annotations by Paul Koning, Attribution,   A Linotype machine

    The New York Times phased out the Linotype machine in 1978.  Here is an interesting story and video that covers the last days of Linotype newspaper.  You may find it interesting that automation is not a new thing but has been evolving ever since the beginning of mankind.

   Here is a short trailer about Linotype machine.

   If you found this short two minute video interesting, follow the link below for a longer video and article on the death of the Linotype machine at the New York Times in 1978. I found the video absorbing and illustrative of how automation has always been about requiring retraining and displacement of workers.  Watch the craftsmen interviewed.  Each seems to understand that you can't stop progress and at the end, you see many of them retrained to use the "Then" new computer typesetting machines.  Those too are obsolete in 2016. 

If you are interested in the meaning of etaoin shrdlu, click here.

   Notice the two left columns of keys above. 

   Because of all the manual labor involved in creating a final edition of a newspaper, book, or magazine the bar for writers must have been much higher then. The art of editing and fact checking was more important because of the permanence of a printed data. I once had an engineer tell me that working without a computer or Autocad drawing program required a higher skill and thought process.  If you have ever taken a drafting course you know that a mistake on the drawing board often requires a complete redo.  There is no recalculate button n a old drafting board.  Today to change a drawing in a drafting program like Autocad is merely a formula adjustment or scale change. 

    Now all it takes is a laptop, keyboard, internet connection and a willing publisher for pseudo-writers like me to litter the internet with an article.  Kinda of gives a new meaning to "Get the Lead Out" doesn't it.