THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 2, 1995 TAG: 9503310037
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By RICHARD J. GONDER
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
When I began my journalism career in the early '70s, the newspaper composing room was a wonderfully noisy, dynamic place - filled with compositors, Linotype operators, mechanics and (if we behaved) editors.
The computer age soon silenced that clamor. Today, two decades later, a lone Linotype machine, No. 13, is on display like a museum piece at our Brambleton Avenue office. All newspaper pages are typeset from a computer screen.
That ``machine age'' came to an end here in April 1975. Richard J. Gonder was public editor then and he bid farewell to the composing room of yore in a Report to the Readers headlined, ``Printing Sounds Join Those of Trolleys, Trains.''
We're reprinting that column today, 20 years later, as a sentimental tribute.
- Lynn Feigenbaum, public editor
There's an eerie stillness in the huge composing room on the second floor of this newspaper plant that causes people who have been here for years to pause in wonder.
It settled, unheralded, the night of April 8 (1975), when the linecasting machines, which set type in hot metal, fell silent, never to be heard here again. The printing craft, so far as these newspapers are concerned, had passed another mechanical milestone. Type for papers of Wednesday, April 9, was processed 100 percent by computers and reproduced photographically. It'll be that way from now on until some other magic of science and electronics comes along with a better way - a faster way.
Uncharacteristically for newspaper people, the demise of Linotypes and Intertypes and their giant automatic offspring got by without outward grief. Old friends held no wake, no words were said over the bodies, and there wasn't a line fed into the computers for an obituary notice.
The machines just ceased to function. All that was left was that strange, sad silence for sentimentalists.
Linecasting machines had caused their own technical change in the printing craft. Before them type for the industry had to be set by hand from ``California job cases'' - letter by letter. Ottmar Mergenthaler, an emigrant from Germany, perfected the Linotype in 1886 while working in the Baltimore machine shop of August Hahl, a relative. The machines, by bringing brass matrices (``mats'') in brief contact with molten, fast-cooling lead alloy, rapidly expelled column-width lines of type. They revolutionized printing by eliminating need for the hand-set process. They were operated from keyboards similar to typewriters.
In small towns they became a fascination to small boys who were allowed to watch their operators and sometimes were rewarded with a pocket jewel - a slug of type, still warm, bearing their name in reverse on the silvery stuff.
Old-time operators cherished their machines and kept them in good repair. An excellent operator could set nine lines a minutes - his objective being to ``hang the elevators,'' which meant a nearly continuous flow of metal to mats. There was, operators would tell you, a rhythm in it that developed only after long experience.
Linecasters were never noted for beauty. They are, in fact, ugly brutes - and some are brutish indeed, like balky mules. At their worst, the cantankerous sort produces ``squirts'' of hot metal, often meticulously spat at offending operators. The old ones always were painted black and the newer, tape-fed automatics, always gray. Brass fittings on linecasters look as plumes would on grackles.
At one time this plant had 42 and in the conversion to the computerized process they had dwindled to 16, most of them Intertypes, including the automatics.
To walk the silent rows now is an adventure in recollection. The noise they made was part of the symphonic excitement in the production end of this business when the bunch was busy giving out a tympanic chatter, including the most delicate tinkle of mats as they skidded down channels of ``magazines,'' from which millions of words had been summoned.
These sounds have gone where good sounds go, out there somewhere with the chimes of trolley bells and the long whistles of steam locomotives moving through the night.
Across the room from the dead machines their onetime operators join other printers in putting these newspapers together by the new process.
Machines may come and machines may go, but deadlines go on forever.
ILLUSTRATION: File photo
The only sounds coming out of this old Linotype now are the whispers
of memories.
by CNB