Consider the Linotype Machine

There was some comments a couple days ago about the complexity of twine knotters. I wonder about how anyone ever thought up the idea of the Linotype machine.

They were geniuses! When I was pretty young we went to visit the newspaper and the operator made me a stamp with my name on it, late 50's

We got one out of Arlington Mn for Junkshow. I?m glad we have an old Gutenberg to run it. It does everything except shovel the ore and fold the paper.
So often generation M asks ?how did they do that. It?s as if they don?t grasp the concept that all this came about from centuries of hands on metallurgy, woodwork, and engineering. And without circuit boards it will run for another 100+ years. ( unlike my failing toaster)

When I was in grade school we visited the local news paper and they had several linotype machines in operation. About 20 years ago I talked to a friend who wrote in the Prairie Farmer. I told him some of the articles were too late in the cropping season to be used in the current season. He said that it was a challenge to have the correct articles published at the appropriate time. He said when using the linotype machines they could get an issue out in about 6 weeks. Now with computers and sending electronically to the printer it took 12 weeks. So much for the use of modern machines.

When I was in high school, I worked evenings in our little weekly newspaper shop. In addition to the paper, we also did job printing - sale bills, business cards, auction bills, etc. The job printing was hand set type, but the newspaper was linotype, except for the full-page ads. Some of the big ads were lead cast. There were two linotype machines in the shop, but only one of them was hot - the other was a spare. One weekend, I went with the shop owner to pick up a fancy linotype that he had bought. It had been moved to it's sale location, but was still unassembled. It was a heavy machine, and we hauled it home in pieces, then put it together in the shop with no instructions or even pictures. It was more automated than the other two. A splendid puzzle! We made it work, but I was skeptical until it spit out it's first type bar.

My future mother-in-law was the linotype operator in that print shop. She could make that thing sing. You had to wear long britches to run them. If they didn't close properly, they would spit hot lead on your legs.

The shop owner jokingly said that the man who invented the linotype machine eventually went insane, and he drove everyone else insane who ever operated or maintained one.

Offset printing sent the linotype machines to the scrapyards.

When I was managing our local newspaper, we had two Linotypes. One was run manually, and the other ran on pre-punched tape that was fed into it. Gals punched the tape ahead of time on a separate machine.

The Linotype operator considered the machines HIS machines, and anyone else who so much as touched one was in big trouble. And with good reason. The operator and the machines had to understand each other for anything to get done.

There is one at The Pioneer Power site near Leseur,Mn that they show in the fall show.

Pete

In 1983 I worked for Northern Arizona University. Wwe were going to give a linotype, and a Ludlow machine to a South American country newspaper. They would move them. The building was in was built around the machines when a remodel happened. We ended up taking sledge hammers to them with vengeance in mind. They are about as complex as a mechanical device can get. Jim

That is quite a contraption!

I had an uncle that ran one of those. I was too young to even think about it, sure wish I had gotten to see it in action.

He worked for Stafford Lowden in Ft Worth Tx. They printed phone books and Yellow Pages.

I can sorta see how the machine worked, wonder how they did graphics?
Linotype Explained

Steve ..... well I guess that puts to rest the idea that the twine knotter is the most complicated machine on the planet. Amazing how some people's minds could work and think of that and then engineer and build it. Hopefully everyone who replied here will watch the video .... well done!

The linotype didn't do graphics Steve.

We had a full page Illinois Power Company ad each week in our weekly newspaper. We would receive the mold for the ad in the mail from the power company. It would be a hard and thick single layer paper material with the image embossed in it. Maybe twice as thick as card stock, and hard and brittle. It would have the text and any picture they wanted in the ad. It was a mirror image, of course. We would set the mold up in a holder (can't remember the proper name) and pour hot lead in the cavity between the holder and the mold. We used modeling clay on the back side of the mold to keep it from bending out from the weight of the lead, which would leave an unwanted dark spot on the printed page. The finished casting would be about a quarter inch thick. After it cooled, we would carefully strip the mold away and see if we got a good cast. If we did, (it rarely failed) we would drill small holes in the corners of the casting, then carefully nail the casting to a piece of wood about 3/4 inch thick (so it would be at the same elevation as the type). Card stock was used for shims behind the wood to fine tune the height. You strived for a clean image without indenting the paper.

It was an interesting place to work. I was a teenager, so that was 55 or so years ago.

The machine that we poured the ads with had an open hot lead pot with a big handle that would tip the pot to pour the lead into the molds. After the last casting was made, the shop owner would lay a sheet of newspaper on the surface of the hot lead, then set an old coffee pot on the newspaper. The newspaper sheet would turn brown, but wouldn't ignite, and it would "float" that coffee pot all evening. I never did figure that out.

Here's an example of what would have been a lead casting. Modeling clay would be needed on the back of the mold in the white space between the words "Spence" and "Hot-Water". If the hot lead bulged the mold in that area, it would make a black spot on the printed page.

I guess the earliest graphics were wood cuttings or carvings, but that was long before my time.
Example

The linotypes were amazing, as were the people who operated them. My first journalism job was at a small-town 5-day daily newspaper, printed with hot lead. If the operator was setting type for a column-width newspaper article he loaded the machine with thin brass plates, each one carrying an engraved letter or character on its edge. The operator typed on an ordinary keyboard (can't remember if it was querty or not), and each time he typed a letter the corresponding brass plate would fall into a composing tray/mold. As he finished typing enough letters (brass plates) to constitute a line of type, hitting the "Return" key would send that line to the hot metal pour, the result of which was a small ingot of lead about 1/8" inch thick and the length of the proposed column width. Each line of the news article had its own lead wafer, and all were put into a proofing tray (galley), inked and hand-rolled to produce a galley proof for editing. Headlines were usually set the same way on a separate machine.

Each page of the newspaper was made-up on a heavy metal rolling table (turtle) the size of a page. Metal frames/clamps held all the components of that page--headlines, columns, photos, captions--were filled with the lead type, along with column dividers, photo borders and various spacers. When complete, the page looked as the printed page would look, but mirror-image backward. A proof page was pulled, and corrections made, and the turtle was rolled over to a heavy press which produced a stiff fiber impression that was placed on the rollers of the printing press.

One day we were nearing deadline, and the backshop boys were rolling the turtle to the mat press, when something caused the turtle to tump over and dump hundreds/thousands of pieces of lead onto the casting-room floor, which was already littered with scrap metal. As soon as the screaming and cussing stopped the two layout guys began picking up the pieces and putting them back together. Mind you, they're reading everything backward and upside down. Incredibly, they had the page completely restored within an hour.

(quoted from post at 04:19:30 04/07/19) There was some comments a couple days ago about the complexity of twine knotters. I wonder about how anyone ever thought up the idea of the Linotype machine.

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Back in the day our high school had a functional print shop. I spent a lot of time with a quoin in my hand, now, it's just ancient history. Too bad.