Tonopah daily bonanza. [volume] (Tonopah, Nev.) 1906-1929, 1911-04-11
THE LINOTYPE MACHINE
REACHES ITS MAJORITY

tor Lawson and NJ. f. Stone of the
Chicago News, Harry Smith of the
Chicago Inter-Ocean, W. H. Rand
of the Rand-McNally company and
Stilson Hutchins of the Washing
ton Post.
The first machine to be used
commercially was set up in the Of
flee of the New York Tribune. In
1888 Mr.. Mergenthaler and the
company suspended relations, and
the factory of the company was
moved to Brooklyn, Mr.. Mergen-
thaler remaining in Baltimore. The
wedge-shaped justifier, a device in
troduced in the second Mergenthal-
er machine to Justify" the line
OF matrices chat is to make them
fill the line by spreading the spaces
between the words), became the
subject of litigation and for years
there was quarrel in the courts
about thousand and one details
now happily forgotten. In the end
all the disputes We're settled by pur-
chase and when the perfected ma
chine of 1899 came out arrange
ments were made by which the
company and the inventor shared in
the profits.
The profits were soon to be very
large, for when, the practical ma
chine was produced almost every
newspaper wanted it at once For
several years the factories were be-
hind on orders and the linotypes
We're to be had only for cash f.
o. b. While the litigation over
the patents was pending, Mr.. Mer-
genthaler invented another kind OF
justifier, but it was abandoned
when the settlement was made.
The first machine of the 1890
type-the modern and perfected
linotype-was used in the office of
the Brooklyn Standard Union, the
next in the office of the New Or
leans Times-Democrat The Brook
Ign Standard Union also was the
first newspaper to use the limo
type with union labor. The Typo
graphical union at first was inclined
to oppose the Introduction of the
machine, but its men soon bowed
to the inevitable and hustled out
OF the dusty alleys of the old hand
set composing rooms to learn to
operate the machines.
With the Introduction OF the limo
type and the transfer of the news
paper print-shop from the realm of
the handicrafts to the dominion of
machinery, it was said that romance
would die out of the printers trade
OF course it wasn't the death of
romance that the printers union
objected to; it was the substitution
OF one machine with one man for
eight men. But as the newspapers
being assisted by the discovery OF
cheap processes for making spruce
wood pulp paper, at once expanded
sd that the composing room now
employs nearly as many men as in
the old hand set days, and at bet
ter wages and the unions fears
were soon at rest.
The printers know, and the edi-
! tors who work with them know
that the Mergenthaler has added to
rather than detracted from the
glory OF their jobs. The man who
sits at the keyboard of linotype
is by compulsion of necessity more
steadfast, more sober and more in
dustrious than his prototype tt the
case in the hand-set days It takes
q man &c lun linotype. There
is joy IN the rattle and click Of
the composing room, a delight in
the 0dGr of II hot metal, IA IL
in the hir of the motors that
never had its counterpart in the
good old days. No man who has
once known the spell of the limo
type ever can escape it's influence.
The projections of the Mergen-
thaler have been lauded in a dozen
tongues, its shortcomings have been
apologized for in a thousand edi-
torials, but none but the men who
work with this machine have any
notion of how godlike are its vir-
tues, how human its faults. In
the old days tramp printer oc-
casionally would fall from the wa
ter wagon just when he was most
needed, but never was there man
so peryerse as a linotype on a
spree. All over the country there
are hundreds of well-behaved limo
types that never strayed from the
narrow path of virtue, that are
model machines, that never have
stayed out nights and that don't
know the first rules of poker-but
there isn't one of them that isn't
waiting quietly and patiently for
the time when the whole shop de-