Michael Schoepke grew up with the Daily Herald, cutting his teeth on the old
typesetting machines -- alongside his father and uncles -- and ultimately helping convert its production to a modern, computerized system.
(7) Many dozens of
typesetting machines were designed and patented, some built, a few marketed, a few bankrupted, but in the end, the winners were the Linotype, the Monotype, and to a lesser degree the Ludlow Typograph.
The first commercially successful automated
typesetting machines went into operation in the late 1880s (1886 is the date often given for Ottmar Mergenthaler's invention of the Linotype machine.) Stories and body type for advertising copy set by the hot-metal devices suddenly were outputting lines of type 10 times faster than the time-honored pace.
(For those too young to remember, E-T-A-O-I-N is the first row of keys on a
typesetting machine. At the end of every story, typesetters ran a finger down that first row to create one final line of type signifying the completion of one stow .
Our first system (one of the first Macs made, in 1984), replaced a $20,000
typesetting machine and the attendant film processor, waxer, light tables, etc.
The Linotype automatic
typesetting machine, which could form an entire line of type as one piece of metal, was patented by Ottmar Mergenthaler.
``Slugs'' were exclusively a newspaper term referring to a line of type produced on a linotype
typesetting machine or intertype.
By 1913, the International
Typesetting Machine Co., based at Pulitzer's competing New York World,.
Before implementing desktop publishing, the Advance used what Tuthill calls an "army of paste-up artists" and a Varityper
typesetting machine. After.
But it was the days of physical cut and paste, cliche, Morizawa
typesetting machines. That was decades before the virtual cut-and-paste computer graphics of today.
In those days, NCR was produced by "phototypesetting." The
typesetting machines used a photographic process (film paper exposed to light and then processed through a chemical bath) to generate long columns of type on scrolls of paper.
For most graphic designers, 1987 was a year of drawing boards and
typesetting machines. The first issue of The Loyalist Gazette was typed on a proportional typewriter, then 'cut and pasted' by hand.
The Woburn, Mass.-based firm started selling hot lead
typesetting machines to publishers in 1887.
