Linotype at 50

Fifty years ago last week, in the Park Row composing room of the New York Tribune, a bearded young German machinist named Ottmar Mergenthaler sat at an odd machine which looked like a cross between a power loom and a punch press. Beside him stood the Tribune's Editor Whitelaw Reid. As Ottmar Mergenthaler lightly tapped out letters on a keyboard before him, Mr. Reid heard the tinkling of brass type matrices falling into place. The rack of matrices was shunted to a bubbling pot of lead inside the machine. As Editor Reid looked on, Machinist Mergenthaler touched a lever and presented him, hot from the mold, with a solid line of type.

Christened on the spot by Whitelaw Reid, the Linotype thus had its first commercial demonstration. Within a year or two it was to prove the most important single development in the printer's art since Gutenberg's invention of movable type more than 400 years before. In making the solid slug of type, Mergenthaler's invention opened the mechanical way for the multi-editioned metropolitan newspaper, the flood of books, pamphlets and magazines on which the 20th Century was floated into being.

Genesis of the Linotype was the desire of James O. Clephane, private secretary to Civil War Secretary of State William Henry Seward and later a court stenographer, for a quicker way of publishing legal briefs. In 1876 Clephane and his associates brought their ideas to the Baltimore shop where Mergenthaler, 22, was a watchmaker's handy and clever apprentice.

Clephane's group had been trying to cast type from papier-mache matrices indented by mechanically assembled characters. First big improvement suggested by Mergenthaler was to cast the type directly from an indented, metal matrix. Then, in an inspired moment, Mergenthaler conceived the idea of a freely circulating matrix which was brought into line to cast its character, returned to a magazine until needed again. To make the lines "justify" (i.e., come out even), wedge-shaped spaces were spread between the words.

From these basic principles the Lino type has never varied, though the original machine now has 75,000 descendants setting type in more than 70 languages in 86 countries. Linotypes sold slowly at first. Original users were the Tribune, Louisville Courier-Journal, Chicago News and Inter-Ocean, Washington Post, Providence Journal. In 1891 Mergenthaler Linotype Co. was formed with Philip Tell Dodge, Washington patent attorney, as its first president. Heading the present 18-acre Brooklyn plant of Mergenthaler and its affiliates -- London's Linotype and Machinery, Ltd. and Berlin's Mergenthaler Setzmaschinen-Fabrik -- are able President Joseph T. Mackey and Board Chairman Norman Dodge. Last week they signalized commercial Linotype's 50th milestone with a radio program dedicated to their best customers, the U. S. Press.

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