The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video] | Hacker News Reader

The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video]

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213 pointsdonw65 comments

I restored a small scale letterpress several years ago.

That gave way to learning about hot metal typesetting, manual typesetting, and other essentially abandoned technologies and skills.

I also got to volunteer at a local university library [0] that has a fully functional print shop to learn the necessary skills to manually typeset. Needing several parts, I got to visit a collector who had amassed a warehouse of type, typesetting materials, presses, and parts. Here are some photos [1] [2] [3]

Linotype, and this video, represent the pinnacle of mechanical automation for printing. It took over 500 years to go from Gutenberg to the recording of this video, but only a couple of years to go from the invention of the microchip to digital typesetting. What a great reminder of the transforming power of computers!

[0] - http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/KLP/tour/

[1] - https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZCKGiPrAy_zXgJslBGhi6rRHkpSu1d...

[2] - https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZnFWCPrUTwdRHmwz6hrf_hQzmuWnD5...

[3] - https://www.instagram.com/p/KSaKYciPrhndq1LVqk1S-iQBvX60FNPD...

Right, it looks like the tech progress has been exponential.

Your Instagram links aren't working.

Sorry, here they are on Imgur - https://imgur.com/a/Gh7PYp0

What always amazes me about this video is how on-board the workforce was with the change -- it was an era of stronger unions, which ensured they'd all keep their jobs for life and be trained to use the new tools, so of course they embraced the new way of doing things.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/07/29/797...

This (interesting) article was posted downthread, and makes it clear that the change wasn't accepted by the union. The good times never were:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...

"Staggered by their losses during a 114-day strike led by New York Typographical Union No. 6, from late 1962 to early 1963, the city’s publishers resolved to begin automating their composing rooms as quickly as possible. Just as quickly, the union shops, or “chapels,” began pushing back."

"But it would not be until July 1974 that Big Six and The Times and Daily News reached a landmark agreement. Their new contract freed the publishers to introduce automation, while effectively guaranteeing lifetime job security to 1,785 situation-holders and full-time substitutes, 810 of whom were at The Times"

Huh? That quote says the union negotiated a deal that did exactly what I said it did. The subject of the piece continued to work at the Times for another 38 years, until his voluntary retirement.

During their work with Linotype they got into close contact with lead, this often leads to lead poisoning. I guess they would have retired relatively early. For all the nostalgia people tend to forget that this stuff was a health hazard.

https://rarecachebroadcast.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/linotype...

Raldi said that innovation is easier when it is not in conflict with peoples' livelihood; not that innovation shouldn't happen. (Eg, when changing printing methods won't put most workers on the street)

The first quote says they resisted it. The second says it took them over a decade to reach an agreement. And if you don't believe the quotes, you can read the article, which emphasizes the same thing.

My father ran a small-town newspaper and tells me that the printers unions were very strong. When he finally did away with the linotype machines, the operators were guaranteed lifetime employment. When my father finally retired decades later, he still had some of the original linotype operators doing what he called make-work jobs. Many of these operators were never able to pick up the new required skills, but he had to find something for them to do because of the union contract. Not a good situation for anyone.

I mean it sounds like an alright situation in a country without any form of proper safety net.

It's definitely not ideal, but it's something.

The United States has a perfectly capable social safety net.[0]

It makes no sense to employ people unproductively. If you believe that your work should have meaning, this would be the ultimate insult.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...

At 14:40: "All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years is all locked in a little box called the computer. And, I think, probably most jobs will end up the same way."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOM5_V5jLAs (this talk also mentions linotype).

The Times's resident historian, David Dunlap, wrote about this wonderful film in 2014: https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...

As someone who spent the weekend figuring out `flexbox' to align copy around a webpage, after years of floating divs and pulling my hair out, I can appreciate this video. Creative destruction is an awe-inspiring, yet wistful force of nature.

Truly

I think it’s great to see why web is the way it is. These people were the web devs of their days desiging lead based layouts. Imagine having to roll back a change mid print.

Guess because I've reached a certain age I remember things like rotary dial phones, vacuum tubes and linotype machines. Until quite recently here in Michigan we still had one weekly paper with handset type.

The last linotype operator retired from the New York Times after fifty years in 2016:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-las...

There is an interesting period video that explained the mechanical inter-workings of a Linotype machine available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHOPmGUtPA

A more detailed one is [1].

The amazing thing about Linotypes is how little they changed through their century long life. One would have expected a few generations of the hardware - machines becoming more compact and simpler. But no. There were various models, but the basic form didn't change.

[1] https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_...

A great many systems and designs reach stability relatively early on. Particularly for mechanical systems.

Computers are something of an exceeption so far as scale goes, what with Moore's law, though other principles are vastly more durable.

(x86 architecture, Unix, core memory, von Neumann / Turing machines, Boolean logic.)

In mechanical systems, it's often some particular breakthrough somewhere which makes for changes. In the case of printing, the period from about 1780 -1920 was profound: from wooden "wine press" designs of perhaps 60-120 impressions/hr to electrically-powered, steel-framed, web-fed, linotype-set, offset-press based systems running 1,000,000 impressions/hr.

My favourite is how they could set spaces that were springs that would adjust to the width of the column.

I was fortunate enough to have a school field trip to the NY Times in the 70's. If you were a nerdy kid the word "shrdlu" showed up a few times, mostly in PBS documentaries about AI, as it was at the time. If you grew up in the tri-state area, everything important was on Channel 13. Except for Star Trek which had moved into syndication by that time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJz4YKUwqw

SHRDLU was a natural language interface program by Terry Winograd at MIT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU

On the one hand, it's fascinating to see how (overly) complicated the process of printing used to be. On the other hand, it looks much simpler now because we gloss over all the complexity in the silicon. Back then there were thousands of components, today there are billions and they all operate at millions or billions of actions per second. But it all happens inside tiny little packages about the size of a sugar cube.

This is extremely cool, although it's a little unnerving to see people working with so much lead with bare hands, especially considering a lot of them had the job for decades. Was lead poisoning an occupational hazard among typesetters?

This was my first thought. Although, they were also exposed to enormously high levels of lead just walking around outside because of leaded gasoline.

Solid lead is not really a problem if you wash your hands before eating after handling it because it doesn't absorb through the skin. Whether or not these people actually did that, I have no idea. But to this day there's still plenty of solid lead stuff that hasn't been banned: fishing weights, bullets, etc. The main causes of lead poisoning back in the day were all from inhalation: soldering results in inhaling lead fumes, machining/sanding lead resulted in inhaling lead dust, exhaust from cars using leaded gas (this was the big one that affected basically everyone), etc.

Lead bullets are actually slowly starting to get banned. California is phasing in a ban on their use in hunting, for instance (see https://www.wildlife.ca.gov/Hunting/Nonlead-Ammunition), and the Obama Administration's Interior Department issued a ban on their use in federal wildlife refuges. That latter one was later repealed by the Trump Administration (see http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/322058-interior...), but given the hazards lead poses to the environment that's unlikely to be the last word we ever hear on the subject.

Beyond hunting, the military is moving in the same direction; the Army has switched to using lead-free bullets as its standard rifle ammunition (https://www.americanrifleman.org/articles/2014/5/21/testing-...), for example.

But surely that's due to environmental pollution, not any (human) health concerns?

Yes, environmental, not human, concerns are the primary reason for banning lead bullets.

The amount of lead fumes you'll inhale from soldering is minimal -- the temperature at which the work is done is almost always below the temperature at which the lead will vaporize. See https://diamondenv.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/lead-exposure-du... -- low-temperature melting of lead (below 500 degrees Celsius) "is not liable to result in significant exposure to lead".

There is no safe amount of lead.

> The main causes of lead poisoning back in the day were all from inhalation

In addition to those mechanisms, I think another popular one is cigarette smoking. If you were handling lead, it could get absorbed into the cigarette and inhaled that way.

I got to take a tour of a little "Newseum" in the New York Times building that displayed some of the lead lines and brass matrices. One person on the tour asked if printers got sick from handling lead and our guide said, "Oh, yes!"

People are surprised how industrial the process used to be, and how tough and unregulated industrial jobs were back in the 70's and the decades prior. Our guide told us that in the old NY Times building (the one shown in this film) there was a hospital on the 13th floor for people who got burned or (his word) mangled during the hot type process. The New York Times had doctors on staff for printers who got hurt badly enough that an ambulance ride uptown would take too long.

A couple of the workers in the movie are wearing paper hats. That's to keep ink that's floating around in the air out of their hair. No masks! But at least their hair would be clean.

Lead isn't quite the danger that people think it is--a lump of solid lead that you hold with your hands isn't going to hurt you. The problem is when you ingest lead flakes or dissolved lead (lead compounds tend to be weakly soluble, but this is pH-dependent--that's what caused problems in Flint).

The real danger in the newsroom is in the hot metal press, because you've got hot metal (likely causing some problematic airborne lead) running around at high speeds. The composing proofs themselves are going to be very minor in comparison to the linotype and printing machines, which are going to be occupational safety hazards for sure.

More unnerving to me is seeing people around all that noise without hearing protection. They mention in the video that many of the printers were deaf -- I wouldn't be surprised if those that weren't to start, ended up that way!

My father ran a newspaper and he said that the state school for the deaf trained linotype operators. It was a good job for them because the high noise-level wouldn't be an issue.

Thank you, great video!

This 30 minute movie from 1960 explaining mechanical typesetting is absolutely fascinating if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus

Anyone interested in Linotype would greatly enjoy Linotype: The Film [0], a full length documentary that interviews several of the people that made this film.

[0] - https://vimeo.com/15032988

Link is to a trailer, not the actual film. The actual film is at https://shop.linotypefilm.com/ and is $20 for blu-ray or $8 on itunes or $8 on amazon video.

I loved the movie Helvetica, I'm sure I'll love Linotype!

Look at the computers that replaced them and then imagine how often those have been replaced since then. Of course they did get less expensive pretty quickly (and I'm sure that even though the guy who invented the linotype could sit down at that machine and use it, that doesn't mean those are the same machines from when the NYT started using linotype, which was my initial silly assumption)

I'm somewhat fascinated by the technical aspects of the videography here. Solid chunks of color "shimmer" as though random noise was added by a digital sensor. Then there are lines, presumably on the original film, that appear light green instead of white. I can't think of anything to account for either of these effects.

Film scratches are not all equal. Some scratches would go all the way through the emulsion resulting in solid white or black lines depending on if it was a print or a negative. However, if the scratch as not that deep, then the scratch would have a color tint depending on its depth.

Maybe this is what you are seeing? If you provide a time reference to a specific example, I can take a look to see if that matches what I'm describing. I used to work in film post in transferring and restoration. The restoration software is pretty magical. The scanning software/hardware has also come a long way, but the really nice equipment is still $150k-$250k(US) depending on the options.

2:37 is one. There are others that are green in dark areas and pink in light areas, however. That's what's so weird about it.

I will think more but scratching the emulsion only partially sounds like a really good explanation to me. Where the image is dark, though, there should be very little dye left in the emulsion, so I'm not 100% convinced. Still thinking about it though :)

I wonder how many Quark users would dream of going back to the manual ways? Quark is still my number one of "least favorite to use programs". I could just never think the way Quark wanted me to thing. I took to PageMaker in a heartbeat, but just never got Quark.

Quark 4 was definitely full of quirks and there were plenty of things it just couldn't do. It featured decent keyboard shortcuts, though, which I once relied on daily for newspaper layout — and which proved quite difficult to teach to my successor as, ultimately, I knew them only by feel!

Sigh, almost makes you wish for the days when it really cost something to publish words, and not every moron with a wifi connection could tweet to the world one more banal opinion adding to the noise saturating everyone's attention spans.

This is a very interesting observation. The decrease in the difficulty of publishing vastly increased the noise. I think I understood that this was happening but hadn’t consciously made the connection.

"Headlines are still set by hand."

I now understand where the word "typesetting" comes from.

Alot of font terms comes from that time, like leading and kerning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

Interestingly, the term "font" itself came from the fact that typefaces were cast.

"Font" originally described a size, weight, and face. It no longer includes a concept of size, because digital typesetting allows sizes to be changed so easily. What we refer to as a "font" today was originally referred to as a "typeface," that is, the general style of the lettering.

This explains too how sometimes you see a list of every combination of every "font" in a list and other times you see every font and can configure them.

Likely some confusion around this in the documentation and in programmers who implement these features.

I had a similar thought when they were talking about reading the "galley proofs" and finding errors which were then corrected before the final edition: "Aha! 'Proofreading!'"

Wow, I saw one of these at the Bristol Industrial Museum. A very impressive piece of kit.

Are there any PDF's available of this last manual typeset edition of the NYT for viewing online?

Apparently[1] it was the July 1, 1978 edition: https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/01/iss... (NYT subscription reqd)

1. https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...

It's actually July 2nd 1978, which was produced the night of July 1st.

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/02/iss...

After about the 11 minute mark the footage shows them working on the front page of the July 1 issue. Looks like they didn't shoot it all in one evening.