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Show THE LINOTYPE Our new linotype has been installed instal-led by Mr. John Jackson, an expert from San Francisco,-and this is the first issue of the News to be set on the new machine. A brief history of the linotype might be of interest to our readers: Herman C. Mergenthaler, the son of Ottinar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Mergenthaler linotype machine, is quoted in a speech before the advertising ad-vertising staff of the New York Times as follows: Ottmar M;rgenthalcr was born in Hatchel. a small hamlet in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg. on May 11, 1S45. His father. Johann George .Mergenthaler. was .a teacher in the public school's. Instead of becoming a teacher, the boy, Mergenthaler accepted an ap-prenticeship ap-prenticeship under the brother of his stepmother, a Mr. Hahl, who was a watch and clock maker. In May, 1SCS, he begn his apprenticeship apprentice-ship aud applied himself (o master- ..t, ...c i.aue hihi snortly afterward was givon the task of keeping in repair the somewhat rebellious village vil-lage clock. There now operates a 1,'n otype whore iis inventor worked as apprentice. After Mr. Mergenthaler s apprenticeship appren-ticeship expired, in the fall of lc72. ho sought America, where a .- n of his master. August Hahl,. had a shop for electrical appliances i: Washington Wash-ington D. C. He landed in Kaltl-more, Kaltl-more, Md., in October, 1872, at the age of IS, aud went to W.ihi. gton, whera ha armod with a small green wooden trunk and ?30 in paper pa-per money. He was .'till abl to follow fol-low his calling with his new connection, connec-tion, making electrical clocks and special devices for !:i tl": I'ni.'e.'l States Signal se.-.-. Washington -am-: it th.it nine the great center for ;0.1 imp,) i jm i;i'en tors, and Mr. Meni-vi1 , r ::;:. ia-'o ia-'o dally contact v.-fj, tl-e;'i :in-1 .ipu i' as furnished -.ho topic of conversation. conver-sation. And so his firm became an e. perlmental sho f.,r new and im-t-'ed devices, an ' amorg others I ought to their attention .vns nc ' i led a writing am. i . The object of ihis ma bine was to produce by typewriting a print just l.ne that produ.-i d by or from print-.r print-.r - type, the Id .'a heins lo avoid the i S' of Btickin? type by the lithographing litho-graphing process. Mr. Mergenthaler remodeled this machine with fair results, but it was later abandoned, due to difficulty encountered in lithographing. The second machine, known as the rotary ro-tary matrix machine, was unsuccessful, unsuccess-ful, only a few being built. Mr. Mergenthaler changed his Idea again and built what is called a band machine, producing a matrix mat-rix for one line. These lines were assembled as-sembled side by side to form a stereotype ster-eotype matrix. Fair results were obtained, ob-tained, but the action was too slow. Then he built a second band machine, ma-chine, but it was also too slow for commercial use. The present linotype, referred tc by Thomas A. Eddison as the "8tl: wonder of the world," is a linecast-Ing linecast-Ing machine that makes possible the composing of every form of printed matter books, magazines, newspapers, newspa-pers, letterheads, tickets, menus and so forth from the simplist to the most involved, at a high rate oi speed and in clear-cut faces, newly cast for each occasion. And it casts an entire line at one time. The first commercially successful-linotype successful-linotype was installed by the New York Tribune in July, 1886. At the end of 1924, 49,000 linotypes were in use in sixty-three different countries, coun-tries, producing correct composition in half hundred different languages. These include Syrian, Greek and even ev-en Chinese. The Linotype has four principal divisions. , 1. The magazines which contain the matrices. 2. The keyboard and its related parts. 3. The casting mechanism. 4. The distributing mechanism. When the linotype was commercially commer-cially introduced in 1886 it revolutionized revolu-tionized printing and abolished at one stroke the troubles of individual movable type. It introduced the whole line as a unit of composition, thus reducing the printer's labor tc an astonishing degree. It gave the art the vast economy of automatically and instantly producing pro-ducing by a keyboard solid lines of composed and justified type to be used over again in the machine. However, since the first linotype composed the first newspaper, experimental exper-imental and mechanical departments depart-ments and inventors, who are life members of the Mergenthaler linotype lino-type company organization, have never ceased to work on the linotype. lino-type. Everything that the world has learned in more than thirty-eight years of machine composition is -in the linotype. No problem is evaded. Its makers never hare to compro-. mise. It contains no makeshifts. Nothing No-thing Is omitted from the linotype. |