Linotype machine Repair

One piece of machinery that IMHO is totally amazing in construction, design, and complexity, is the Line casting machine.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/celebrating-linotype-125-years-since-its-debut/238968/

The machine has been around for over 125 years. It was called the 8th wonder of the world by Thomas Edison . It was used to set type for newspapers and other busnesses for something like 80 years. It became obsolete sometime in the early part of the 20th century. The article says it became obsolete in the 1960s to 70s but there was a local print shop using several at least into the early 1990s .

The machine had hundreds of brass molds or matrices. Several for each lower case letter,uppercase letter ,the numbers , characters and spaces.Each of these had its own bin. Hit a key and that character would drop into the casting station. when an entire line (think newspaper column ) was complete and the return key hit the machine would cast the line in lead. he molds would drop and then be automatically sorted. the line of type would drop onto the composing table . when a column was complete the type setter would move it to the printing frame. When the frame was complete , the type was inked and a proof was printed. the proof went off to the proof reader and it was marked up. Any lines with errors were reset/recast the bad line(s) were removed from the frame and the corrected ones inserted.

I can only imagine the task of maintaining one of these machines.. But I came across a book of tips on troubleshooting this complex device.

http://archive.org/details/HardingLoomisLinecastingOperatorMachinist1958

Hope folks find this of interest.
And the next time you see one in a museum maybe you will understand this amazing machine at least a little bit.

To my amazement the linotype company is still going strong providing typographic services to the world.
Type is now set with a computer . offset plates are prepared with a laser printer. Virtually every home in the modern indusrial world has there own typesetting machine(word processor) and printing press(we call it a printer) and it started with mechanical technology 1n1866.
http://www.linotype.com/48/aboutlinotype.html

Tin

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKe5k6HbEU[/ame]

I was editor of the campus newspaper at university in the 1960s. One of my weekly jobs was to take copy to the print shop where it was linotyped and composed, and then I would proofread it on site. These machines were definitely interesting to watch in action.

Some volunteers at the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham MA have restored a linotype machine and had it running at the NEMES show last February. it is an interesting machine to watch.

I sold some computers to the R.R. Donnely company in Willard OH back about 1969. These were DEC PDP-9s they were hooked to a room full of linotypes- as I recall one PDP-9 controlled 8 machines. The PDP-9s did the formatting to lines and operated solenoids that pulled the keys.

ETOAIN SHERDLU is the keyboard layout, If I remember right. I was a paper boy for my small-town paper in the 1960s and we wandered around the shop waiting for the press-run to end. I got to sit in the chair once and make a slug of my own.

Strewth!!! If it took 7 years to learn to operate and maintain it how long must it have taken to invent and construct it ?

Some volunteers at the Charles River Museum of Industry in Waltham MA have restored a linotype machine and had it running at the NEMES show last February. it is an interesting machine to watch.

Click to expand...

Nice Did not know they had it running would be cool to see it in operation. I have seen them in action . It has been a few years like close to 20. I think my son was about 5 or 6 when we took the shop tour. A former neighbor now passed on , owned and ran a local print shop. He had been the foreman for the local newspapers job shop . They closed the shop and auctioned off the machines . He purchased most if not all of the equipment and opened up his own shop. Ran it successfully for years then passed it on to his nephew who he had taken under his wing and trained. the business is still active but I have no Idea if the Linotype machines moved when the business did . The move was just across the street.

I Have a line of type set with my name in it . one of the little treasures In my tool box.


ASME linotpe page

in 1890 the machine cost $1000. approx $20,000 adjusted for inflation.

If it took 7 years to learn to operate and maintain it how long must it have taken to invent and construct it ?

Click to expand...

Only 3 or 4.



Tin

In the early sixties I used to work at an electronics shop that rented/ shared space with a small town newspaper publisher, they had one of these machines too.

There is one that is operated each year at the Iowa state fair. Aside from the deep fried wonders that is my favorite part of going.

And do not forget the workhorse that used the type.
The Heidelberg Printing press.

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=okEPMABxkQE[/ame]

When I was in high school I purposelessly filled my schedule. IMHO study hall was a wast of time. So I took things like photography and print shop to fill my schedule. It was ironic because my main interest was in electronics . I took several years of electronics. But it was the print shop classes that landed me my first real job. I ended up spending 6 1/2 years in the trade. And decent pay for the time.

In print shop we learned to hand set letters, had to memorize the locations of every letter and character in the case. Had to learn the basic serif and sanserif type styles. made silk screens by hand and photographically. Made rubber stamps . printed our own personalized note pads and business cards..... We learned the process camera and the dark room made negatives and positives. learned paste ups etc.
And we learned and used the Heidelberg printing press.
I never got to the offset stuff that was the second year and I was a senior when i took the basics. Fun stuff and good memories.


The Heidelberg was fully automatic and weighed a ton. You could load a case of paper on it set it up ink it and it would run . it had two arms to move the paper from the feed bin to the platen then to the finished bin. another amazing machine and again the company is still in business but not making letter press machines.






Tin

One has to realize that these were the days before the xerox machine and the modern convenient office equipment. Al companies of any size needed letter heads memo pads business cards order forms time cards ledger books... Rule books safty posters.. so a small company would rely on a large print house for off the shelf needs and a local job shop for short run custom needs. Large companies like Ford, Dupont and others would have there own printing department.
Tin

There is an 1886 "Blower" Linotype in the Smithsonian museum.
My late father was responsible for its restoration in the early 1970's when he was a director at M.H.Whittaker & Son in Leeds UK.
http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/27/garden/smithsonian-gets-historic-linotype.html

I well remember him using a little Wolf Jahn jig borer to make the set of new matrices for it. I still have some of those in a box somewhere. The Blower was presented back to the Smithsonian along with the Wolf Jahn as part of the spares kit.

My dad also designed the SAM machine whilst at Whittakers.
http://www.metaltype.co.uk/photos/photo57k.shtml

I have just today been using some Linotype matrix wedges to square up castings on the milling table.

Phil

Having spent much of my childhood in and around the compositing rooms of The Times, Sunday Times and Guardian, I will never miss the overpowering and oppressive levels of opression and urgency that filled every nook and cranny, infiltrated every cell of my anatomy and drove many who spent their every working hour being subjected to it to the brink of madness..... The last years of the Lancashire Weaving sheds in Burnley, Nelson and Colne in the early '70s were as peaceful gardens of tranquility in comparison....

If you're in western PA, stop by the Portersville steam show (big summer show Aug. 1,2,3,4); they have a working Linotype in the print shop along with hand-set type and several presses. Wayne and Nancy will give you a very informative demo - he took 4 years of print shop classes in school. Also check out the line-shaft driven machine shop and operating stationary and traction engines. www.portersvillesteamshow.org

The history of the printing is a fascinating journey right from when in around 1445 the German Goldsmith Gutenberg invented the first printing press that worked in the Western World. In fact it worked so well that the technology lasted virtually unchanged for 350 years. That was until 1796 when a frenchman Alois Senefelder in invented Lithography. Initially this worked on limestone plates and using oil and water. The recognition of oleophilic properties (eg. Attract oil) of some materials was a very important advancement in the industry.

Around 100 years later, the Harris brothers accidently invented offset printing when they observed a reversed image on the back of a sheet of paper that misfed in their lithographic press. In 1903, the released the offset press. The trusty Heidelberg platten became obsolete but lingered on to the present day (generally devoid of ink) because it could also be also set up to do diecutting, perforating and scoring and with the addition of a heated platten, could apply foil embellishments.

The next significant development (or step backwards) was the invention of the electrostatic paper plate which spawned the birth of the Quick Printing seqmnet of the market, eg. Sir Speedy, Pronto Print in the US and Snap Printing in Australia. This was later enhanced by the Silvermaster plate maker which used a more photographic development process but both took a photograph of camera ready artwork and imaged it on the plate material instead of exposing to negative film and making a contact print onto a sensitised metal plate.

In around 1992, close to the birth of the Internet, computer to plate systems emerged which have rendered obsolete the trade prepress bureaus and the compositors trade. At the same time, Xerox introduced the Docutech digital publishing system which rendered obsolete many small offset presses over time.

Since then, the printing industry is been at the centre of communication channel convergence and moving from an environment of making exact copies of camera ready artwork to rendering an image from a computerised markup language and rendering that onto paper or another substrate. This is a significant step in the evolution of communication channels which is all merging onto TCP/Ip based distribution channels. We printers have had 450 years to perfect our craft and the science of typography. This electronic screen based upstart is still trying to fathom how to transfer knowledge as efficiently as print does. Microsoft and Apple have spent Millions on screen based fonts which the designer himself says are "devoid and lifeless without a soul" when placed on paper.

There are powerful forces against print at every turn as the economies of screen based delivery are seized upon by the bean counters without measuring the effectiveness of their move to on line delivery.

Today, the offset print world is shrinking and moving to shorter and shorter runs. The modern printing press is an amazingly complex piece of engineering which combines press chemistry and awesome mechanical systems, precision timing and incredible accuracy to place small dots of ink on the page. Air systems to separate sheets, vacuum systems to pick up a single sheet, registration systems to correctly register every sheet of paper so it is in the exact same place all at some 20,000 impressions per hour. Rubber rollers, ink and water loaded with additives, probably refrigerated and at a perfect pH courses through the system and the sheet is hit with an Infrared drier as exits but often today it is also coated with a UV cured varnish. a few puffs of white vegetable based spray powder might be added to keep the sheets apart when stacked on top of each other for further drying to occur. (vegetable based starch is used so the body can absorb it without causing cancer or some other malady.) Gone are the skilled craftsmen that members like Rockytime rubbed shoulders with who could simply tweak one of the many ink duct keys on an ink tower to bring a dull skin tone to life. Their skill has been replaced by electronic systems that set the ink keys on a press perfectly every time based on the appropriate ICC color profile.

Linotype did well to weather the storm, protect their Intellectual Property embedded in the moulds for each font they sold and still be riding this digital tidal wave. If we think back to this time, we can understand why fonts are so expensive today and how the IP within has remained something to value.

In Australia we have a major industry trade show every 4 years which sets the standards and fills the order books in the southern hemisphere. This year, for the first time, Heidelberg left their big iron at home so the organisers did not need to shore up the flooring below their stand...

As I sit here writing this I can hear the hum of our digital presses in the background churning out 170 copies per minute, and sometimes think about the good old days breathing air permeated by the smell of ink and the solvents we used in an offset printing world. I also sometimes wonder what the future will hold for me personally and am resigned to the fact that I will not retire at a time of my choosing...

I am certain many printers and manufacturers who do not ride this tide of change as well as Linotype will sit prematurely on the scrap heap beside me....

Ooops I got a bit carried away....

I thought Gutenburg invented movable type not a printing press .

One interesting note about linotype. There model one (Square Base) was produced from 1896 to 1906 IIRC 3000 of them . Linotype made parts until 1956.
talk about product service.
Also interesting that the letterpress technology and lithography/offset technology developed and thrived together for so many years.
Linotype was good for the printed works and lithography more suited to graphics.


The art and craft of printing 1902

Tin

Tin Falcon said:

I thought Gutenburg invented movable type not a printing press .

Tin

Click to expand...

Yes an amazing chapter in the evolution of mankind. The Chinese and other Eastern countries were well ahead by many hundreds of years but did not want to take on the monks.... And were hampered by the number of characters required which were generally carved in wood. It's been a while since I joined the early pre Gutenberg dots so I have forgotten the details but 1400 characters spring to mind.

Gutenbergs' contribution was definitely moveable type which needed his expertise in metallurgy to resolve. However, he also put the whole package together hence I said invented the first printing press in the Western World that worked... What did Gutenberg print first? The bible of course. In the end his invention put the monks out of business and saw printers (and librarians if you must) become the custodians of intellectual property which was locked up in the monestaries in hand written manuscripts.

In my mind Lithography was an important milestone as it made the connection to the oleophyillic properties of oil based inks and water which formed the basis of the offset printing process which uses oil based inks and a water based fountain solution to get the image onto the plate, transferred onto the rubber blanket and if the press chemistry is correctly balanced, allows the ink film on the blanket to peel off onto the substrate (usually paper). In non technical terms, the ink is washed away from the parts of the plates that bear no image and the ink sticks to the image areas of the plate but the chemists will have a slightly different (more correct) explanation.

Really Linotype's reign was short in comparison to Gutenberg's. For the most part of the 20th century the printer's technology horizon was about 30 years, now it is around 18 months.... Yes, letterpress has survived for a long time. I remember in about 1995 I had to get another printer to print a single print of a logo for a hotel cast in metal so we could scan it.... The publican knew his metal plate was important but like so many media it had had its day by then except in specialist markets.

http://archive.org/details/ashorthistorypr01hoegoog

Another interesting book.
Tin

Yes, a lot of the old compositors at the newspaper I worked at in the 1990s had come off Linotype machines. They still talked fondly of "flongs" a phenolic resin cast made from the Linotype in later years. The Linotypes were gone but the old press from those days was still in daily use putting out the paper. All painted up in dark green with red and white hand-done pinstripes, brass lever knobs and brass lubricators etc everywhere. It was like an old steam engine. And the whole building shook when it started up.

Funny those old printers terms like Flong. Even after we went to computerized layout that output paper page dummies that had to be cut up and pasted on boards to be used to photo etch the aluminium printing plates, the chipboard paste-up tables were still called the "stone" after the granite surface plates that had once long ago been used to make sure the moveable type was set dead flat before casting a plate.

There aren't even any compositors at that paper anymore. All done by computers and a couple of graphic artists fresh out of TAFE, in another city, and output at another city again direct as printing plates.