Peace in Chicago

After 22 costly months, the strike of 1,500 printers on Chicago's five major daily newspapers came to an abrupt end last week. The settlement closely fitted the publishers' terms. President Woodruff Randolph of the A.F.L. International Typographical Union told his strike-weary printers to accept a $10 weekly wage boost (to $95.50)--the same offer he had high-handedly ordered them to reject six months ago, after Chicago's Local 16 had approved it. The strikers had lost $13 million in wages, and the I.T.U. had paid $1 i million in strike benefits and costs. Consensus of the printers: "We took a beating."

The ostensible reason for the strike was wages (the printers had asked for a boost of $14.50 a week), but the real issue was Randolph's defiance of the Taft-Hartley Act ban on closed-shop clauses in contracts. Randolph dropped a formal contract, asked publishers to agree to "conditions of employment" continuing the prized closed shop that Chicago's printers first won 50 years ago. In many cities, publishers agreed; in Chicago, they refused.

To the surprise of the printers, and most newsmen, the strike did not cripple Chicago papers; they went over to Vari-Type without missing a day (TIME, April 25). By last week, even Randolph recognized that Taft-Hartley would not be repealed soon, and that VariType had him licked. He settled for a contract that did lip service to the ban on closed shops, without disrupting the union's monopoly.*

Under the settlement, the VariType machines will be wheeled into the back room, and Chicago's newspapers will again use linotype, as soon as possible--one to three weeks. But the publishers will keep the machines handy, just in case.

As the linotype got a renewed lease on life in Chicago last week, the Graphic Arts Research Foundation, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass, announced a new typesetting process that it hopefully predicted would make the linotype as obsolete as handset body type. The machine (suggested names: Lumitype, Anti-Type, Any-Type) does away with casting of type metal, "sets type" photoelectrically on film instead.

The operator pushes buttons alongside the standard typewriter keyboard of the desk-size machine to select the desired type size and style, types the line, corrects any mistakes. Then, by a combination of an electronic memory and an electric eye, the machine automatically "justifies" the line, i.e., spaces it to fit flush in the column, and transfers it to a film on a rotating drum. At six letters a second, it can set twelve newspaper lines a minute, three times average linotype speed. Automatically developed, the film is ready for photoengraving.

While the initial composition on film by the new method is faster than conventional typesetting, the slowness of the photoengraving process tends to cut down the time saved. But the Graphic Arts Foundation, subsidized by 139 newspaper, magazine and book publishers, hopes to speed up photoengraving by further research. Until then, photo composition's chief value will be in offset and gravure printing.

The machine was invented by French telephone engineers Rene Higgonet and Louis Moyroud, later developed by scientists including Dr. Vannevar Bush, wartime boss of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. The Lithomat Corp. expects to market commercial versions for "less than $5,000" within 18 months, well under the average price of a Mergenthaler linotype.

* Under the contract, the foreman of the composing room, who does the hiring, "shall be a union member"--a virtual guarantee that no non-union printers will be hired.

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