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Hot Type, Hard Times 1900-1910
The Post Register's exhibit at the entrance to Eagle Rock, USA
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Click Picture to Zoom In | Linotypes revolutionized the Register
A row of linotypes in the Post-Register's offices on Capital Avenue, about 1935. The multi-faceted Intertype model in the foreground is now owned by Terry Phippen of Idaho Falls.
About 400 years after Johann Gutenberg invented moveable type, German-American Ottmar Merganthaler perfected the Linotype, a giant typewriter that cast whole lines of type in molten lead.
Because the Gutenberg process of setting each letter by hand was so slow, most newspapers consisted of no more than eight pages. But Merganthaler's Simplex Linotype typesetter could set about 8 lines of type per minute. Newspapers got bigger almost immediately, and thousands of hand-compositors were put out of work. Meanwhile, Idaho Register publisher William Wheeler was having so much labor trouble that he complained about it in the newspaper. His wife, Elizabeth, insisted that she and her husband learn how to hand-set type, just in case.
That all changed when Wheeler bought the newspaper's first Simplex typesetter. Announcing the purchase in the Jan. 8, 1904 edition, the paper's front-page story claimed the new machine "will enable us to set much more type for each issue ... and to do it at less expense, and much faster." Later Linotypes could set about 16 lines per minute. The one displayed here has a last-patent date of 1908, but Linotypes lasted into the 1960s, when a new typesetting system called photocomposition arrived. Today, most newspapers are paginated by computer. |
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