Yesterday’s Technology . . . Today!
Roy Bowker’s story of the possibly unique “banging in” ceremony at Spicers, London.
SO WHERE do I start? Well my first insight to the printing game was at secondary modern school when the teacher asked if anybody was interested in joining a printing class that was being started. My hand went up basically because a friend of mine had volunteered.
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.
Launched as one of a range of ’70’ series linecasters, the model 79 was specifically designed for use with Teletypesetting (TTS). During TTS a perforated tape was passed through a special attachment on the linecaster. The perforation activated a keyboard and selected the appropriate matrices.
A keyboard operator perforated the tape, encrypting the original text in a series of dots. The tape could be transmitted by telegraph to a reperforator in the printer’s office, which replicated the perforated tape. It was then passed to the linecaster operator.
The C4 had four magazines allowing type up to 18 point, and used sliding carriages to help ease the changing of magazines.
A High-Speed version was introduced in 1954 that used Teletypesetting (TTS). TTS is a means of automatically selecting matrices using perforated tape running through a special attachment on the machine.