Yesterday’s Technology . . . Today!
Historical items
Rubén Brizuela, who runs a letterpress print shop in Mendoza, Argentina is the proud owner of this Model 1 Linotype, which is in full working condition.
He would like to see the machine taking pride of place in a museum somewhere, but nobody seems interested.
Many thanks to Mike Topper for sending in these pictures he took at the Christophe Plantin Museum in Antwerp.
From the late Dave Bowles’ collection of London Fleet Street compositors items comes this great collection of trade union membership cards from 1946 right through to the 1990s.
This page was updated in 2023 with additional cards from the collection of Joseph Henry Davis.
Single-letter machine. The Model 1 Machine was later improved and built for double-letter matrices.
(This machine produced type faces up to 11-point and type bodies up to 12-point, in all measures up to 30 pica ems.)
It would appear to be one of the Whittaker company’s early photosetters.
Steve Robertshaw, Ex Whittaker & Compugraphic UK Engineer, updated this page with the following:
It is an early photosetter that used mainly linecaster technology to produce photoset output.
Interested in early photosetting technology? Check out the Early Photosetting Chat section of the Forum.
This is an early, computerised typesetting machine. The operator selects a character on the keyboard, which triggers a stroboscopic flash to set the type.
Four type styles, each with 105 characters, were available to the operator through filmstrips held on a drum.
S.A.M stood for ‘Sets All Matrices.’ It was a hot-metal linecaster made by M.H. Whittaker & Son.
This would then be cast in the machine. S.A.M. could use matrices from Ludlow, Linotype, Intertype and Nebitype companies.
The Intertype Monarch was designed without a manual keyboard. It relied totally on Teletypesetting (TTS) for setting type, using instructions from perforated tape.
It had an output of 14 lines per minute. A suction manifold held the matrices to the delivery belt as they were delivered at high speed to the assembler.
On its introduction in 1962, the Electron was said to be the fastest linecaster in the world.
It used Teletypesetting to automatically select matrices through a keyboard operated via perforated tape.