The New York Tribune becomes the first newspaper to use Linotype, a complex but highly efficient typesetting machine that revolutionizes the printing process.
The Linotype machine was the brainchild of Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German-born inventor who became a naturalized U.S. citizen. To see one of these machines in action is to see the age of mechanization in excelsis.
Employing a ninety-character keyboard, the Linotype operator punched out individual characters to form a line of type (or line o’ type, hence Linotype) that went to the page compositor in a “stick.” Those sticks of type were arranged by hand inside a metal frame, called a chase, to correspond to a page layout supplied by the editorial department.
The Linotype keyboard did not resemble a standard typewriter keyboard. Letters were arranged in columns by their frequency in English (the first two columns were e-t-a-o-i-n and s-h-r-d-l-u). Lowercase letters were on the left, caps on the right, with five rows of special characters and numerals dividing the two. Type could be set either justified or ragged through the use of space bands to fill out an individual line.
Mergenthaler’s invention had a profound effect on the newspaper business. Before Linotype, typesetting was done by hand, a laborious process that necessarily limited the size of newspapers. Before 1886, no daily paper was longer than eight pages.
Because of the Linotype’s use of molten lead, printers called the process hot type. It remained the dominant newspaper-production method until the 1970s, when it was replaced, first by cold type (photo-typesetting and pasteup), and then by computerized pagination and desktop publishing.—TL