The forgotten contraption that gave birth to mass media

How the steam- and gas-powered Linotype sparked a cultural revolution

Hot Type. By Jeff Jarvis. Bloomsbury Academic; 384 pages; $25 and £17.99

A century-and-a-half ago, a news revolution was under way. Information travelled at the speed of electricity, via telegraph. Steam-powered presses churned out books and newspapers. Railways distributed them farther and faster. Paper made of wood pulp was much cheaper than the old type made of rags (once so in demand that several European countries classed used bloomers as a strategic asset, banning their export).

One piece of the mass-media puzzle was missing. Almost every part of publishing was mechanised, but typesetting was as slow and expensive as ever. Each lead letter had to be manually placed, little differently from when Gutenberg invented the press four centuries earlier. Laying out a single page of a book took two hours; spectators paid to watch speed-typesetting tournaments, with stars such as a New York Times man known as the Velocipede.

“Hot Type” is the story of the Linotype, a steam- and gas-powered machine that mechanised typesetting and thereby enabled the mass-media revolution of the following century. Jeff Jarvis, a journalist-turned-academic, has written a perceptive and entertaining history of a device whose name is unknown to many, but which changed the world.

Ottmar Mergenthaler, the Linotype’s inventor, arrived in Baltimore in 1872 with a single suitcase, $30 and a silver watch. Short and pallid with ginger whiskers, the young German had trained as a watchmaker and knew nothing of printing. This may have helped: whereas others had tried to mechanise the arrangement of the fiddly letters, the Linotype bypassed the job by moulding whole lines of type on the fly, in hot metal. A molten soup of lead, antimony and tin was poured into letter matrices selected by the operator via a keyboard. The process—accompanied by a “bewitching industrial jazz of clicks, pings, whirrs and thumps”, as Mr Jarvis puts it—was four times faster than composing by hand.

Others had tried and failed, with gadgets resembling “pianos, organs, harps, looms, lyres, carousels, and Gatling guns”. Thomas Edison invented an electric pen to perforate paper and create stencils; it did not catch on but was adapted to be the first electric tattoo needle. Mark Twain, who started out as a typesetter, invested millions in today’s terms into a rival machine, the Paige Compositor. With more than 18,000 parts, the Paige was delicate and temperamental; its failure contributed to the eventual bankruptcy of Twain, who described it as “a monument of human ingenuity and stupidity”.

The Linotype spread quickly. The New York Tribune winched its first one up to its ninth-floor office in 1886, and by 1900 the machine was in use in practically all large newspapers in America. For most of the 20th century it set the type in the majority of books and newspapers around the world. It made media truly massive. In the latter half of the 19th century, the number of newspapers and periodicals in America grew from 2,526 to 18,226; New York alone had 46 dailies in 1900. The four-page newspapers of the hand-press days ballooned into 48-pagers, stuffed with supplements.

Mass media meant different media. Rollo Ogden, who became editor of the New York Times, observed in 1906 how the scale of investment required for modernisation made newspapers “more of an institution” and less the creature of their proprietor: “No single personality can stamp itself upon the whole organism. It is too vast.” Whereas 19th-century newspapers were partisan, those in the 20th century sought the attention of the masses, which meant cultivating at least an air of objectivity—though chasing audiences also encouraged sensationalism. Scale led to more advertising and, with it, national brands like Kodak and Campbell’s.

Mergenthaler died in 1899, aged just 45. But his Linotype remained in use (with some modifications) for a century. In Britain powerful, stubborn unions kept it around until Rupert Murdoch’s digital revolution in 1986.

Mr Jarvis’s history helps illuminate the present moment. Scepticism of technology is not new. Early print media were mistrusted because their provenance was less certain than voice or written manuscript. A contributor to the Atlantic Monthly in 1904 worried that the typewriter’s “indiscriminate use [may lead] to a degeneration in literary style”. The Atlanta Constitution argued that “You can’t turn out thought by machinery.” Some detected in early mechanised typesetters a kind of artificial intelligence. “Like a living being,” marvelled the New York Herald, in 1862. “Like brain turned into brass.” ■