The Old Days of the Linotype Machine
By Robert R. Pell
(He played a MEAN keyboard)
It was in February, 1948 that I got my first feel of printers' ink. I was hired by the Elk Printing Company in Clay, West Virginia, as an apprentice ... incidentally, my pay at the beginning was $5.00 per week and the work consisted of sweeping the floors, cleaning the stones, putting the spacing and furniture back in it's proper place and distributing type back to the California job case.
The Linotype machine was something that you just moved on to when you had the time and one was unused. Fortunately for me, one of our operators took a job with a Charleston daily paper and that left a Linotype machine free. It was mostly self learning.
The operator in a small shop had to do everything. The distributor was a bar across the top of the machine that had a number of combinations that matched the combination of the
matrixes (mats) that cast the letters. After the assembled line went through the machine and the line was cast, the mats were carried back to the top of the machine and slid along the distributor bar until the combination matched the mat's, then it fell into it's proper channel ... or it was supposed to.Sometimes they would get crossed and jammed up and stop the distributor. The operator then had to climb up and clear all of the mats out of the way and slide them onto the bar to get it going again. The metal (lead) pot had to be kept at a certain level and temperature. It was up to the operator to see that lead was added when needed. He also had to clean the space bands and do most of the maintenance that was required on the machines.
When the small shop operator arrived at the Beacon Journal, it was like a different world. If anything went wrong with the machine all he had to do was push a button and that rang a bell in the machinist's cage which told them which machine was having trouble and someone came out and fixed it. If the pot was too hot, they adjusted it, if the pot was too cold, they adjusted it, if the distributor stopped, they started it. All that was required of the operator was to set type.
Each operator had to put a "slug line" with his name on it at the beginning of each galley of type that he set to identify who had set that particular galley.
When a new operator came in, he was naturally nervous so occasionally one of the "old timers" would pick up the a couple of the new guy's slug lines and give him credit for a couple of galleys of type because the new operator's lines were being counted. If I remember correctly, you had to produce 300 lines in a 7-1/2 hour shift. There were "market operators" who started later in the day and stayed for the Stock Market report.
When the markets started coming in, apprentice boys would carry them to the operators and the type back to the bank to be proofed and read. When the operator had finished the three or four pages of markets that were left for him, he would yell "BOY", and an apprentice would bring more pages and pick up the type for
proofing.
In the early '70's the change was made from the Linotype keyboard to the Typewriter keyboard with the introduction of the Tele-Type Setter (TTS). Most of the operators had gone to typing school to learn the keyboard, so we made the shift and started punching paper tape for the tts machines. The tape, with it's series of holes in different combinations for each letter, were then put on the Linotype machines and the type was automatically set with an operator overseeing two or three machines.
By the end of the '70's, the Linotype machine was nearly phased out and replaced by what we called "cold type". The Beacon Journal kept one machine for display purposes and it was in the Composing Room for quite a few years. Before I retired they had moved it out and I don't know where it went. I hope they still have it.
And in case you haven't guessed already, that's a young, young Bob Pell plying the magic fingers to get the lead out.
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