Imagine if printing this sentence required me to melt a mix of lead, antimony and tin, then pour it into a mold in the shape of all these words, wait for it to cool and use it as a sort of stamp to press ink onto paper. And do it thousands of times for every edition of the newspaper.
Crazy, right? But that’s how the Monitor did it for more than a century, just like every other newspaper, publisher and printing shop. The technology we used was expensive, hot and ear-breakingly loud, but it shaped the modern world. Now, it’s lucky if it doesn’t get turned into scrap.
This spasm of nostalgia was spurred by an incident last week in which the Monitor’s last Linotype machine — embarrassingly, I didn’t know we still had one — was hauled out of the depths of our building and stripped for parts by Chris Bradford and Peter Corriveau, two volunteers from the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass. Those parts will be used to keep the museum’s own Mergenthaler Linotypes running while the rest of the 3,000-pound machine will probably be, yes, scrapped.
These huge machines began to spread in the 1880s because creating printed product by placing letters or words one at a time was so slow. A Linotype allowed, as the name implied, an entire line of type to be created at once.
The operator typed on a keyboard that sent molds of individual letters called matrices into a line that was then filled with metal — “cast” is the technical term — so it could be used to print the line. Finally, and this was the difficult part, the letter matrices were returned, each to their proper slot, in preparation for the next line being typed.
This was so much faster than previous printing methods that it became possible to create newspapers cheap enough for common people to buy. The resulting explosion of the “penny press” shaped the growth of literacy and democracy throughout the world. It’s not too much to say the Linotype changed society as much as the World Wide Web did a century later.
The Monitor had a number of Linotype machines in the composing room in our old State Street building, as well as associated machines like a Ludlow, which was used to generate large type for headlines or posters. I’m sure it was miserably hot in summer — you can’t melt lead without a lot of heat — and hard on the ears, because the constant clash of metal-on-metal in Linotype machines was infamously loud.
However, I don’t know for certain; my Linotype knowledge is secondhand. I just missed the hot-type era of newspapers because I have always worked for small-city papers, which led the switch to cold type in the 1980s as computers arrived. Big-city papers kept Linotypes longer because they had unions that were understandably loathe to lose lots of good-paying jobs.
The transition was painful for the composing room. Creating a newspaper with a Linotype was physical work: Pull pages weighed as much as 40 pounds and had to be heaved onto the press using specialized tools. It took months or years of practice to get right.
Seeing that get replaced by the clickety-click of computer keyboards operated by “college boys” (a semi-joking insult from the composing room to the newsroom at a paper where I worked) was understandably painful. The pain continued: The rise of digital tech and shrinking of the newspaper industry means composing rooms don’t even exist anymore; all that work is done on screens by editors and reporters.
I’m sure retired compositors are chuckling as they watch us college kids freak out over the fear that A.I. will replace us — but that’s another story. And a cue to remind you that Science Cafe on Sept. 15 at Litherman’s Limited will talk about A.I. Don’t miss it!
As for me, watching a huge machine that once changed the world get reduced to scrap metal was a sobering reminder of the passage of time, not that people my age need much reminding. Once I finish thinking wistfully about what life was like when I was in my 20s, I think I’ll reread Shelley’s “Ozymandius.” And then prepare for the future.
