The Birmingham News

A MACHINE THE NEWS BELIEVES IN

~~The Birmingham News, Sun, Aug 26, 1894 ·Page 4

   Yesterday THE NEWS’ type-setting machines were ready for the operators. The first line set was “Great is Birmingham!” The second should have been “And THE NEWS is its prophet.” It is going to take a little time for our compositors to get accustomed to the keyboard, and then THE NEWS will put the machines in daily use.

   The machines in use in THE NEWS office are known as the Mergenthaler Linotype machines. For four hundred years the art of type composition remained practically unimproved. The only machine in use was the hand of the compositor. During the present century many inventors have spent their energies and their lives working on the problem of type-setting machines, and fortunes have been squandered in the search for some solution of it.

   So little success attended all this effort that naturally printers and those connected with the printing trade believed it impossible to substitute a machine for the hand of the printer.  But in recent years the solution has come. Formerly one brain was required to guide the hand of one man.  Now that one brain directs a machine that works with the rapidity of four or five pairs of hands.

   This result is found in the Mergenthaler machine, such as is used in THE NEWS office, and which has been introduced in many newspaper offices throughout the country. The operator sits in front of the machine at a keyboard, his “copy” being held by a “copy” holder, placed at a convenient distance from his eyes. He presses the lettered keys, just as the operator on a typewriter does; the machine does the rest.  When the key is touched a flat little bit of brass, notched like a Yale lock key, slides down from a compartment in a fan-shaped magazine to a point where it is caught and held by the mechanism. Another key is touched and another flat bit of brass slides down and takes its place by the first, and so on.

   These bits of metal are intaglio type or matrices. When enough of these have slid into place to fill a line, which the machine automatically justifies, the line is carried by a series of mechanisms to a point where molten type metal is forced out a casting pot through a little narrow mold and against the intaglio line. The metal quickly cools and forms a solid bar with the letters corresponding with the intaglio type raised in relief. This line is trimmed automatically and in a few seconds delivered through a small opening into a receptacle made for the purpose. Meanwhile the line of intaglio type or matrices has been picked up by an unerring steel hand, carried up behind the machine to the top of the magazine and there distributed again, each type or matrix being dropped into its proper compartment and being ready for use again.

   This automatic distribution is one of the most marvelous performances of the machine. It is in this process that the notches referred to come into play.  The little pieces of brass are suspended from a traveling type bar and keep their places as long as the notches are engaged in corresponding notches on the bar.  When they become disengaged they drop into the machine below, and the mechanism is so adjusted that they always drop just at the right place to fall into the proper compartment of the fan-shaped magazine. Line after line is cast up till the operator has finished his “take,” or filled his galley, when he takes up the lines set and “dumps” it at the bank, where the foreman receives it. Then the operator beings on another “take.”

   THE NEWS has five of these machines, which cost at the factory $15,225.00*. This investment displays the confidence THE NEWS has in Birmingham, present and future, more than any words possibly could.

*Equivalent to $571,831 in 2025.