One weekend, on one of my junking excursions, I tripped across a small stack of 78 RPM sound effects records. During the transition to stereo from mono record players, sound effects records were a fad that hit the hi-fi and audiophile market. The records had crazy stuff like exploding locomotives and atomic bomb blasts and human heartbeats at deafening volume, all in the new magic of STEREO! Trying to conceive of a time when the idea of listening to a baby crying at enormous volume as it cuts back and forth between the left and right channels. It was almost like the crying, screaming, incredibly annoying, ear-shattering sound was flying! Er… like magic?
It was so novel that literally hundreds of 33⅓ stereo 12-inch long-playing (LP) records appeared on the market chock-full of the weirdest sounds imaginable. All of them toying with the new stereo effects to entertain and amaze you.
The cover designs were to die for.
If you were a fledgling staff designer at some low-level record company and you were assigned to design a record cover for a sound effects record promoting the new technology of stereo, what would you do? Well, no matter what lame-ass idea that you thought of just now, I’ll bet somebody out there tried it. I mean, these covers are fantastic efforts to design what sound LOOKS like.
Back then, this was such a new and novel idea that the design work is a tour de force of experimentation and bone-headedness. Truly great. I used to collect them.
However, these things I found were 10-inch 78 RPM records. They predate the stereogram by maybe ten or more years. These don’t even have covers, they have sleeves. These were pressed to be used by radio stations as real professional sound effects records for radio play programming. Real sound effects records. I couldn’t pass them by. They were a whopping $.25 each.
This label, put out by Major Records, is one of particular interest to me as a graphic designer. This is a recording of press-room sound effects to be used as background noise in a standard radio play, or for one of those news headlines types of presentations.
Look at the sounds listed on the label. It actually has the sound of Linotype machines! I’ll bet almost none of you reading this has the slightest clue as to what that sounds like. This is the sound typesetting made for almost one hundred years in America. This is the sound of graphic design before computers. It is incredibly distinctive. The sound of the information machine, the elaborate automation of solid easy action.
The Linotype typesetting machine had more moving parts on it than any other machine ever built by man at that time. It was a ridiculously Rube Goldbergian contraption with moving chutes and ladders, slipping molds of letterforms sliding and zipping all over the place. It even had a vat of molten lead right under your nose. Everything was heavy as hell and just as noisy. Many of the parts would badly burn you if you even got close. And forget long hair, man, this thing would scalp you before you could blink.
When type was made of lead and printed on letterpress, as most newspapers were using into the 1980s, big shops full of dozens of linotype machines would be pounding away, typesetters hammering away on their bizarre (not QWERTY!) keyboards. They would be taking out the raw, still-hot strips of set type to make corrections to. If not put into place by hand, the strips would then be melted down and reset.
To accomplish this, set-up of the type would be actually text printed on small proofing presses, rolled by hand. The galleys would be sent to the editors and writers to proofread. Then the corrections would literally be cut out of the lead type by hand, or in extreme cases, entire sections re-typeset by hand.
The simple idea of kerning (how close two letters are sitting next to each other) became an exercise in slicing little chunks of lead from still-hot blocks of lead. Try to imagine how big a piece of large headline type would be—say about 120 point type, two to three inches high. These headline pieces weighed several pounds. Apply this to a full page of the newspaper. How much would that weigh? Fifty pounds? Seventy-five? One hundred pounds? It often reached that.
Typesetting back in those days (only a couple of decades back) was a big man’s laborious occupation, not a dilettante computer technician hobby. The lead fumes, the heavy lifting, the deafening clatter and racket of the machines—all took a health toll on these burly union guys running the stuff. Graphic design literally killed them. And when the technology changed it all, we tossed them into the gutter without a second thought. Charming, eh?
I had the opportunity to work with Linotype on a few occasions back when I first started out. It was still around and still a major piece of technology I needed to understand and control and learn how to properly use—just like a Photostat camera or a ruling pen. I remember visiting one typesetting shop that had about 16 letterpresses going full-steam. The sound was incredible. A huge roaring clattering tinkling thunking inferno of lead fumes. Visually it was like nothing I’d ever imagined outside of maybe a few short frames of the film Metropolis.
This little sound effects record is one of the last documentations of what this environment was like back then. Check out the documentary film Hot Metal about the old-school linotype operators. Next time you kiddies out there get all whiny and complain-y about how hard and difficult and demanding your graphic design work is, you might stop to ponder what it used to be like. You should just put on this little recording and try to imagine what a MAN you had to be to do this work. Now go back to your retina displays and update Twitter™ with what you had for lunch.
