A machine which, I consider, to be a jewel in machine design. The printing process, in the pre-digital era, required these machines to "set the page". Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents.
The Machine: From Wiki "The linotype machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing sold by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company and related companies. It was a hot metal typesetting system that cast blocks of metal typefor individual uses. Linotype became one of the mainstay methods to set type, especially small-size body text, for newspapers, magazines and posters from the late 19th century to the 1970s and 1980s, when it was largely replaced by phototypesetting, offset lithography printing and computer typesetting. 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.
The linotype machine operator enters text on a 90-character keyboard. The machine assembles matrices, which are molds for the letter forms, in a line. The assembled line is then cast as a single piece, called a slug, of type metal in a process known as hot metal typesetting. The matrices are then returned to the type magazine from which they came, to be reused later. This allows much faster typesetting and composition than original hand composition in which operators place down one pre-cast glyph (metal letter, punctuation mark or space) at a time.
The machine revolutionized typesetting and with it especially newspaper publishing, making it possible for a relatively small number of operators to set type for many pages on a daily basis. Before Ottmar Mergenthaler's invention of the linotype in 1884, daily newspapers were limited to eight pages."
The Inventor: From Wiki "Ottmar Mergenthaler (May 11, 1854 – October 28, 1899) was a German-born inventor. In 1876 he was approached by James O. Clephane, who sought a quicker way of publishing legal briefs, via Charles T. Moore, who held a patent on a typewriter for newspapers which did not work and asked Mergenthaler to construct a better model. Mergenthaler recognized that Moore's design was faulty and two years later he assembled a machine that stamped letters and words on cardboard. While he was riding on a train, the idea came to him: why a separate machine for casting and another for stamping? Why not stamp the letters and immediately cast them in metal in the same machine? By 1884 the idea of assembling metallic letter molds, called matrices, and casting molten metal into them, all within a single machine, was applied.Mergenthaler reportedly got the idea for the brass matrices that would serve as molds for the letters from wooden molds used to make "Springerle," which are German Christmas cookies. His first attempt proved the idea feasible, and a new company was formed, then fights with shareholders and unions followed with the press even in Germany attacking him. Finally success came with many honors, including a trip to his old home town.
Another fifty patents were required before Mergenthaler could show a more or less usable model to the New York Tribune on July 3, 1886. "
Even though digital printing has taken over from these beautiful machines the design, in itself, is hardly obsolete. Various mechanisms found in this machine are still widely in use in present day automation machines and will continue to do so as long as there are mechanical machines in this world.
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