OnPaperWings Productions - Linotype The Film - The Eighth Wonder of the World (2012)
Thomas Edison called it the “Eighth Wonder of the World”. Without it, there would be no daily newspapers and few books. Even the internet owes it a debt. In the nineteenth century, typography developed rapidly in which process Linotype played a significant role. The Linotype machine, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884, is a “line casting” machine used in printing. Along with letterpress printing, linotype was the industry standard for newspapers, magazines and posters from the late 1800s to the 1960s and 70s, when it was largely replaced by offset lithography printing and computer typesetting. The machine revolutionized typesetting and with it especially newspaper publishing, making it possible for a relatively small number of operators to set type for many pages on a daily basis. It was indeed a wonder of engineering, allowing an operator sitting at a 90-key keyboard to quickly place letters and spaces into a uniform line. Then, from a reservoir of molten lead held at 288 degrees Celsius, the lines of type were cast by the machine in the desired width, which were then arranged for use on a press. By 1904 there were 10,000 Linotypes in use. By 1954, that number had grown to 100,000, becoming the standard for machine composition until the late 1960's. Around for a century, Linotype machines were made obsolete in the 1970s by changing technologies – but they have not been forgotten. This is the surprisingly emotional tale of one bewildering machine that revolutionized printing and society, and of the people who fight to keep it alive today.
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