Yesterday’s Technology . . . Today!
Many thanks to George Hamilton from Vienna, Austria for sending in this story.
I WAS in Bad Ischl (Austria) a week ago, sought out an antiquarian bookstore for anything on printing and was told by the prop that there was nothing, but on the way out I looked down and under a stack of stuff there was a case of what appeared to be wood type.
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.
We have another page of union membership cards, covering the period 1924-1945 here: British Print Trade Union Cards 1924-1945.
Many thanks to George Finn for sending in this video from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Says George: “The video was extracted from a video tape I was given when I retired in 1989. It was used to give visitors an overview of newspaper production prior to taking a tour of the plant. Sorry the quality is not the best.
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.