Yesterday’s Technology . . . Today!
This machine was intended to produce display lines of type, such as newspaper headlines, as a Ludlow Typograph set-up would have done in a hot metal shop.
It was also suggested in the publicity material that it would also be useful for setting languages such as Chinese and Japanese, where the number of characters used was greater than the number of keys on the Intertype Fotosetter.
The illustrations on this page are from the Ottmar Mergenthaler Museum, digitised by Doug Wilson.
You can read more about how Doug came across these images on the Metal Type forum here: Linotype: The Book.
Many thanks to Rocky Baranowski, from Arizona USA, for sending in these pictures from his collection.
These gifts would have been given away at trade shows and exhibitions early in the 20th Century.
Many thanks to Graeme How, from New Zealand for sending in this illustrated article.
Machinery In The Modern Printing Plant of the ‘Northland Age’ –
Many thanks to Bill Westland for sending in these great photographs. They were taken at the Rochester Times-Union and Rochester Democrat and Chronicle newspapers before computerisation.
A well-dressed Linotype operator
Check the “Related Pages” menu for details and pictures of Neotype linecasters.
Information about Russian linecasting machines is pretty scarce on the internet, but the Metal Type Forum has some real gems.
Check the “Related Pages” menu for further reading on Russian linecasters.
The following pictures and descriptions come from an un-dated glossy brochure produced by Neotype, West Germany.
This is a small part of the Metal Type Library. The rest can be found using the “Related Pages” menu.
There is some lively discussion about these machines on the Forum.
There are even pictures of some of these machines “in the wild.”
“The latest development in the field of modern setting machine technology” is the heading on the cover of the leaflet promoting the Universa linecaster, one of the very few such machines to be built incorporating a bank of six magazines and which was the impressive leader in the range of “New Line” machines produced during the 1960s by Mergenthaler Linotype GmbH of Frankfurt.
As this 3000kg giant was intended only for manual operation, its casting speed was 8 to 12 lines per minute, and it could be fitted with a mixture of split 72- and 90-channel magazines in various combinations (three of each; two 90s/four 72s; one 90/five 72s, etc) as circumstances demanded. The keyboard automatically adjusted itself according to which type of magazine was in use. Elevation and fanning of the magazines was an electrohydraulic operation to facilitate the mixing operation from four adjacent magazines.