The London Times is
printed on American machines.
Hundreds of new inventions and improvements on old inventions
followed hard on the growth of the newspaper, until it seemed
that the last word had been spoken. The newspapers had the
wonderful Hoe presses; they had cheap paper; they had excellent
type, cast by machinery; they had a satisfactory process of
multiplying forms of type by stereotyping; and at length came a
new process of making pictures by photo-engraving, supplanting
the old-fashioned process of engraving on wood. Meanwhile,
however, in one important department of the work, the newspapers
had made no advance whatever. The newspapers of New York in the
year 1885, and later, set up their type by the same method that
Benjamin Franklin used to set up the type for The Pennsylvania
Gazette. The compositor stood or sat at his "case," with his
"copy" before him, and picked the type up letter by letter until
he had filled and correctly spaced a line. Then he would set
another line, and so on, all with his hands. After the job was
completed, the type had to be distributed again, letter by
letter. Typesetting was slow and expensive.
This labor of typesetting was at last generally done away with by
the invention of two intricate and ingenious machines. The
linotype, the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore, came
first; then the monotype of Tolbert Lanston, a native of Ohio.
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