Kahan 2000

Kahan, Basil. Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine. Oak Knoll Press, 2000.

""typesetting by hand as the major bottleneck in newspaper production" (1)

Church's keyboard

"Church, and many others, tried to emulate the hand compositor using movable type, but at least two operators were required to make those early machines effective - one to set text continuously and another to justify it. An operator who broke off setting to justify lines took more than twice as long as two people working together. Most of these inventions were not successful commercially and it was reported that the cellars at The Times, which tried to encourage new inventions, were blocked with discarded machines. The bottleneck in the composing room became so critical that in 1869 the New York World, then owned by Manton Marble, proposed that publishers subscribe to a prize fund of $500,000 for a machine that would speed up composition and reduce costs by at least 25 per cent. No records have been found to confirm either that the money was raised or that any prize was awarded." (2)

"Clephane's machines were based on the idea of making impressions; his concept of machine composition did not call for the distribution of type, because typewriters produce print immediately from an inexhaustible, but limited, master alphabet. Further, every machine was designed to be operated by just one person." (14)

"is only fair to point out that printers would have found the quality of this process far from satisfactory, but engineers and shorthand reporters who wanted a quick turn round of legible text, regardless of style, may have found it acceptable in the short term." (15)

"After he left Clephane's project Mergenthaler became obsessed with the problem of inventing a successful typesetting system." (17)

Miss J. Julia Camp — fastest operator; “in the biography, Morgenthaler referred particularly to the operating skills of Miss J Julia camp who always obtained better results than other operators.” (21)

"Over 80 years before the second band machine, Herhan obtained French patent No 285 for composing lines of matrices but his idea, which was not developed commercially, was to make a stereotype directly from a page of character matrices assembled by hand. The novelty of Mergen-thaler's invention was in the mechanism by which an operator assembled and justified lines of matrices from which lines of type were cast and which were automatically restored for the matrices to be used to set the next line." (21)

"October 1884, the Printers' Register reported, without naming the source: 'An American contemporary says a new type-setting and manufacturing machine is attracting much attention in Washington.' It mentioned that $50,000 had been spent so far, that Mr Rounds, the Government printer, had declared (possibly referring to Miss J. Julia Camp) that 'a girl with sense enough to run a type-writer can set up as much as ten men now can, and make her own type as she goes along, too,' and that it cast lines of type 'at the stroke of a finger.' These details could apply to the demonstration at the Bank Lane workshop." (23)

"Mergenthaler was a steady precise workman who tended to be cautious rather than rash but was sometimes reckless and intemperate. He claimed that having no printing background had been an asset because he was not bound by preconceived notions." (24)

First Linotype output is printed in the New York Tribune, “ the only perceptible difference in appearance, being that the lines of the type were finer and sharper” (36) — December 1885