The documentary of the same name, which chronicles the last ever hot metal typeset edition of the New York Times, is fascinating and I highly recommend it.
It's 30 minutes and you can watch it for free on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/127605643
It's 30 minutes and you can watch it for free on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/127605643
According to the film, the last paper published with hot type was July 2 — my grandfather’s birthday. He was an avid reader of the New York Times and loved doing the Sunday crosswords — in ink!
In sharing the fun coincidence about the date of the last typeset paper with my mom, I learned one of my grandfather’s uncles worked at the New York Times doing the exact typesetting seen in the documentary. He retired in 1968, though, so never saw the transition shown in the film. It gives pause to think of the front-page headlines he may have been involved in preparing (i.e. Pearl Harbor, JFK, etc.).
I’ve worked on the web for 25 years. I wonder what my (great-great) uncle would think of digital publishing. :)
> One of Mergenthaler’s greatest setbacks was that he could not stop inventing. He constantly wanted to improve upon the machine. This made investors angry because they wanted to ship the machines and make money right away, but Mergenthaler kept coming up with new ideas—delaying the shipping process. A publisher of the New York Tribune, named Whitelaw Reid, tried to make money fast off of Mergenthaler’s invention. He began to criticize the Linotype design, in hopes that the stock price would decline so that he could buy more and take complete control of the devices. This put a lot of pressure on Mergenthaler, who was already a perfectionist and worked late into the night. Eventually, Mergenthaler’s health began to suffer and he died of Tuberculosis by age 44. His premature death meant that he never lived to see the success of his Linotype invention [0]
But it is also the technical aspects of the machine that are so fascinating: the bucket sort mechanism for the matrices used a 7-bit code for each character, encoded in the matrix teeth [1]. The machine supported text justification in a completely mechanical way. There are just so many small engineering gems in this machine, and at the end it prints out a cast letter mold. All that in a mechanical machine that fits into the corner of an office.
Mergenthaler was the Gutenberg of the 19th century. Unfortunately, almost nobody knows his name.
[0] https://sites.google.com/a/umich.edu/from-tablet-to-tablet/f...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Linotype...
Interesting article on this tech and its possible connection to our ongoing confusion about how many spaces go after a period: http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2014/01/two-spaces-old-typist...
It’s not conclusive, but there is definitely something to this and the linotype’s mechanical justification that I think overall emphasizes how much what we think of as aesthetic judgements about what makes for good typography are actually just things we’ve grown used to from the technical limitations and operational choices made by people using particular technologies in the past.
Could these machines be used in an office?
I watched the documentary mostly to see how they were used, and it looked much more like an artisan's workshop -- fairly noisy, hot type metal (mostly lead) in the machine, hammering the final page flat.
https://www.dailymoth.com/blog/the-washington-post-recognize...
And by lining up those plates next to one another you get columns. Newspaper layouts just naturally fall out of the capabilities of the technology.
So much of what we take for granted in computer typography has direct lineage to mechanical linotype concepts - all web developers should have an understanding of how linotypes worked because the machine’s function defines the form of so much of what we expect of typographical layout.
yt-dlp https://vimeo.com/127605643
Cheers :)