Speaking Of Type | Ottmar Mergenthaler

By Marjorie Crum

Which man’s invention did Thomas Edison call the Eighth Wonder of the World? It is the same man who’s invention also revolutionized the art of printing —Ottmar Mergenthaler, who spent much of his life in Baltimore, Maryland. He invented the linotype machine—which enabled printers to create and assemble type far faster than was done previously. Making it possible for publishers to print books, newspapers, magazines, and other work much faster than before. With the time they saved, they printed more than before.

Born near Stuttgart, Germany in 1854, Mergenthaler was most interested in machineryand mathematical instruments and did not want to become a teacher like his father. He apprenticed to a watchmaker before moving to America in 1872 to work in Washington, DC for the son of the man he apprenticed with in Europe. Within two years, the shop moved to Baltimore and Megenthaler had become the shop foreman. His first major project was designing a machine that would speed up the steps that court stenographers went through in transferring shorthand to type.

Fascinated with the complexities of mechanizing the typesetting process, Ottmar Mergenthaler opened his own shop in 1883 where he designed and built a series of typesetting machines. The first machine that was used commercially, known as “The Blower,” was demonstrated in the New York Tribune’s composing room in 1886. Within four years, the Tribune had a dozen Linotype machines and had published a 500-page book.

As a result of his cost-, labor-, and time-saving machine and the attention it got via the Tribune, Mergenthaler’s business increased: he enlarged his Camden Street shop and expanded to an additional building on Preston Street to handle the flood of orders. In 1890, Mergenthaler’s new Square Base Linotype demonstrated the viability of the inventor’s novel approach to composition. He started by breaking fundamentally with Gutenberg — no more moveable type. Instead, the Linotype operator sat at a keyboard of 90 characters and typed out the reporters’ copy. With each keystroke, the machine released a brass matrix (or mold) for that letter or a blank band for a space, and it arranged the letters and spaces into a justified line. Next the machine automatically tapped a reservoir of molten pot metal (heated to 550° F, 288° C) to cast a slug from the justified line of matrices, producing a single line of type — hence the machine’s name. Each successive slug was trimmed and ejected from the machine, forming columns of type ready for assembly into pages for the press.

If this process of mechanical typecasting was brilliant, the next stage equaled its significance. After casting each line, the machine automatically sorted the matrices, ready for reuse. Thus the Linotype eliminated the time-consuming chore in hand composition of distributing individual sorts of type after use.

A Square Base Linotype had 5,000 parts, and it was expensive, selling for $1,000. But the machine was reliable and durable, and it enabled a five-fold increase in the speed of composition while offering other sizeable economies. No wonder Thomas Edison called the Linotype the “eighth wonder of the world.” Thanks to its efficiencies, the Linotype allowed further growth in the number, circulation, and size of daily newspapers, while lowering costs in book publishing. Its productivity improvements also aided compositors’ efforts to achieve a nine-hour working day.

In all, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company sold 366 Square Base machines to customers around the globe before its replacement by a long line of improved designs, beginning with the Simplex in 1892. These durable machines remained in use until photo-offset printing succeeded hot-metal composition during the 1970s. The Square Base machine receiving the ASME’s designation as a Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark was made in 1890 for the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal. One of only two Square Base machines known to survive, it is displayed at the International Museum of Printing in Carson, California.

Soon afterwards, Mergenthaler contracted tuberculosis and died at the early age of 44 in Baltimore on October 28, 1899.

Posted by newyorkupstate in Design Education | May 10, 2010