Linotype Operator

For nearly a century the daily newspaper was built, line by line, out of molten lead by a worker sitting at a strange ninety-key keyboard beside a pot of metal kept at around 280 degrees Celsius. The Linotype, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler and first installed commercially at the New York Tribune in July 1886, cast an entire justified line of type as a single slug of hot metal. It ended four centuries of setting type one letter at a time by hand, and it made the large, cheap, fast modern newspaper possible.

The Linotype operator was a high-skill craft worker. From the keyboard, pressing a key released a brass matrix — a mold for one letter — that slid into a line; between words the operator dropped in wedge-shaped “spacebands.” When the line was full, the spacebands were driven up to push the words apart and justify the line to an even width, molten lead was injected to cast the slug, and the matrices were automatically sorted back to their channels. One machine did the work of several hand compositors.

The job left its fingerprints on the language. When an operator made an error mid-line, the fastest fix was often to finish the slug with nonsense and discard it; running a finger down the first two vertical columns of the keyboard produced the famous gibberish “ETAOIN SHRDLU,” which slipped into print often enough to become printing folklore. The hot-metal composing room itself became a stronghold of skilled, well-paid labor, organized in the United States by the International Typographical Union.

Then the technology that had displaced the hand compositor was itself displaced. Phototypesetting in the 1950s and 1960s, then computerized and CRT typesetting paired with offset printing, made hot metal slow, dirty, and obsolete. The most-cited symbolic ending is the New York Times’s final hot-metal night of 1 July 1978, captured in the film “Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu.”