Category: Historical

The basic patent on a combined assembling, casting and distributing machine granted to Ottmar Mergenthaler on 12 May 1882, expired in 1902 and the Mergenthaler patent on the Schuckers expandable wedge spaceband expired in 1909. Certain other Linotype patents became void soon after 1909.

By 1912 it was legally possible for anyone with sufficient capital to manufacture a machine that would assemble and cast lines of type. Read the Full Article . . .

Principal Features:

This machine had two magazines always in position, and each magazine contained a complete set of double-letter matrices, all of which could be used in a single line, set from one keyboard. It was the first double-letter distributor Linotype. Read the Full Article . . .

This machine had the following improvements over the Model 1 (Old Style):

A light magazine, capable of being changed from the front of the machine. Read the Full Article . . .

Reconstructed Model 1 Linotype with Light Magazine.

This machine produced type faces and bodies up to 14-point, in any measure up to 30 ems.
It was fitted with a light magazine which slid off the front of the machine so that another magazine could be substituted. Read the Full Article . . .

Terry Foster sent in these superb pictures of early Machines, taken from an old book. The captions are also taken from the book.

Before the machine described as The Blower had been on the market very long, a new model (now known as the Square Base) was presented, which showed so great an advance over the first machine that it was at once adopted, and the machines then in use were in course of time displaced.

This new machine did away with the air blast, the matrices being carried from a diagonally positioned magazine to the assembling point by gravity, and the distributing elevator was displaced by the now familiar arm which lifts the line of matrices, after the casting process, to the top of the machine. Read the Full Article . . .

The first commercial Linotype was introduced (after many years of experiment) in 1886. With this machine only 106 characters were available to the operator, as compared with 944 characters which the operator can control on a modern Linotype.

The somewhat elongated keyboard consisted of four banks of key buttons. The keys were pivoted in a supporting frame carried by a bar attached to the magazine tubes, and each had a vertical slot or opening for the passage of a matrix, which dropped by gravity as the key was depressed; at the same time another matrix descended from the magazine tube to take the place of the one discharged, and rested on the upper edge of the key. Read the Full Article . . .

TYPESETTING. As we have seen composing type by hand was a very slow and skilled trade. The machine in this picture was called the Kastenbein Typesetter. Instead of picking up each tiny letter by hand the typesetter just tapped the letters he wanted, like a typewriter. The machine also sorted out the letters after they had been used, so they could be used again. The Times installed this typesetter in the 1870s