New York Tribune used a new type of press for the 1st time to print its newspaper invented by Ottmar MergenthalerIn 1876, a German clock maker, Ottmar Mergenthaler, who had emigrated to the United States in 1872, was approached by James O. Clephane and his associate Charles T. Moore, who sought a quicker way of publishing legal briefs. By 1884, he conceived the idea of assembling metallic letter molds, called matrices, and casting molten metal into them, all within a single machine. His first attempt proved the idea feasible and a new company was formed. Improving his invention, Mergenthaler further developed his idea of an independent matrix machine. In July, 1886, the first commercially used Linotype was installed in the printing office of the New York Tribune. Here, it was immediately used on the daily paper and a large book. The book, the first ever composed with the new Linotype method, was titled, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports.
What Johann Gutenberg did for literacy in Europe in the Middle Ages by inventing movable type, the Linotype machine accomplished four hundred years later for European immigrants in America. The Linotype was manufactured in Brooklyn, where its introduction had profound consequences not only for journalism but also for organized labor. Thomas Edison called the machine the Eighth Wonder of the World, and an 1889 edition of The Manufacturer and Builder described it as "a remarkable triumph of inventive ingenuity."Previously, type was set by hand, one character at a time, a process that was both slow and highly labor-intensive for an army of compositors. It meant daily newspapers were generally limited to eight pages. The Linotype- short for a line of type-was a 250-cubic-foot Rube Goldberg-looking contraption invented and perfected by Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant watchmaker and machine shop operator who introduced it in 1884 after being inspired by a note-taking system that a stenographer for Lincoln's presidential cabinet was trying to perfect.Using brass matrices for each character--much like the Springerle Christmas cookie mold Mergenthaler once made for his mother-the machine converted molten lead into complete lines of type, justified for a specified column width and set by an operator at a 90-character (originally 107) keyboard. The type was fitted into a mold the size of the newspaper page and was then used to form the metal plates from which papers were printed. The Linotype allowed for more pages, quicker delivery of news, and dissemination of information to more and more readers. No city was a bigger newspaper town than New York. By 1865, one in eight editions of newspapers in the United States were being published there, and five years later, after ground wood pulp, or "brittle paper," was introduced, ninety newspapers were being published in the city alone. (The first regular comic was Richard Felton Outcalt's Yellow Kid, which appeared in the Sunday World in 1895, and the most famous editorial appeared two years later in The Sun, "Is There a Santa Claus?" in response to a letter from young Virginia O'Hanlon of 115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.)Linotypes, manufactured on Ryerson Street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, were in regular use for nearly a century and profoundly influenced the labor movement - first when they were introduced (one operator could do the work of three to six compositors) and later, when they became obsolete (the shift to "cold type," in effect set digitally by the reporter or editor using a keyboard and a computer screen). TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
