
The last day of linotype at the NYT (1978) [video] - donw
https://vimeo.com/127605643
======
oflannabhra
I restored a small scale letterpress several years ago.

That gave way to learning about hot metal typesetting, manual typesetting, and
other essentially abandoned technologies and skills.

I also got to volunteer at a local university library [0] that has a fully
functional print shop to learn the necessary skills to manually typeset.
Needing several parts, I got to visit a collector who had amassed a warehouse
of type, typesetting materials, presses, and parts. Here are some photos [1]
[2] [3]

Linotype, and this video, represent the pinnacle of mechanical automation for
printing. It took over 500 years to go from Gutenberg to the recording of this
video, but only a couple of years to go from the invention of the microchip to
digital typesetting. What a great reminder of the transforming power of
computers!

[0] -
[http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/KLP/tour/](http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/KLP/tour/)

[1] -
[https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZCKGiPrAy_zXgJslBGhi6rRHkpSu1d...](https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZCKGiPrAy_zXgJslBGhi6rRHkpSu1de4xcU0/)

[2] -
[https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZnFWCPrUTwdRHmwz6hrf_hQzmuWnD5...](https://www.instagram.com/p/KSZnFWCPrUTwdRHmwz6hrf_hQzmuWnD5TnFYs0/)

[3] -
[https://www.instagram.com/p/KSaKYciPrhndq1LVqk1S-iQBvX60FNPD...](https://www.instagram.com/p/KSaKYciPrhndq1LVqk1S-iQBvX60FNPDZKx1M0/)

~~~
raldi
Your Instagram links aren't working.

~~~
oflannabhra
Sorry, here they are on Imgur -
[https://imgur.com/a/Gh7PYp0](https://imgur.com/a/Gh7PYp0)

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raldi
What always amazes me about this video is how on-board the workforce was with
the change -- it was an era of stronger unions, which ensured they'd all keep
their jobs for life and be trained to use the new tools, so of course they
embraced the new way of doing things.

[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/07/29/797...](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1974/07/29/79709965.html?pageNumber=1)

~~~
jbuzbee
My father ran a small-town newspaper and tells me that the printers unions
were very strong. When he finally did away with the linotype machines, the
operators were guaranteed lifetime employment. When my father finally retired
decades later, he still had some of the original linotype operators doing what
he called make-work jobs. Many of these operators were never able to pick up
the new required skills, but he had to find something for them to do because
of the union contract. Not a good situation for anyone.

~~~
rtpg
I mean it sounds like an alright situation in a country without any form of
proper safety net.

It's definitely not ideal, but it's something.

~~~
pg_bot
The United States has a perfectly capable social safety net.[0]

It makes no sense to employ people unproductively. If you believe that your
work should have meaning, this would be the ultimate insult.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_programs_in_the_United_States)

------
Jun8
At 14:40: "All the knowledge I've acquired over these 26 years is all locked
in a little box called the computer. And, I think, probably most jobs will end
up the same way."

~~~
rimliu
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOM5_V5jLAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOM5_V5jLAs)
(this talk also mentions linotype).

------
tysone
The Times's resident historian, David Dunlap, wrote about this wonderful film
in 2014: [https://www.nytimes.com/times-
insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...](https://www.nytimes.com/times-
insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewell-etaoin-shrdlu/)

------
_nato_
As someone who spent the weekend figuring out `flexbox' to align copy around a
webpage, after years of floating divs and pulling my hair out, I can
appreciate this video. Creative destruction is an awe-inspiring, yet wistful
force of nature.

~~~
wil421
I think it’s great to see why web is the way it is. These people were the web
devs of their days desiging lead based layouts. Imagine having to roll back a
change mid print.

------
rmason
Guess because I've reached a certain age I remember things like rotary dial
phones, vacuum tubes and linotype machines. Until quite recently here in
Michigan we still had one weekly paper with handset type.

The last linotype operator retired from the New York Times after fifty years
in 2016:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-
las...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/insider/1966-2016-the-last-hot-
type-printer-puts-down-his-tools.html)

~~~
GeekyBear
There is an interesting period video that explained the mechanical inter-
workings of a Linotype machine available.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHOPmGUtPA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHOPmGUtPA)

~~~
Animats
A more detailed one is [1].

The amazing thing about Linotypes is how little they changed through their
century long life. One would have expected a few generations of the hardware -
machines becoming more compact and simpler. But no. There were various models,
but the basic form didn't change.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_...](https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_45_00)

~~~
dredmorbius
A great many systems and designs reach stability relatively early on.
Particularly for mechanical systems.

Computers are something of an exceeption so far as _scale_ goes, what with
Moore's law, though other principles are vastly more durable.

(x86 architecture, Unix, core memory, von Neumann / Turing machines, Boolean
logic.)

In mechanical systems, it's often some particular breakthrough somewhere which
makes for changes. In the case of printing, the period from about 1780 -1920
was profound: from wooden "wine press" designs of perhaps 60-120
impressions/hr to electrically-powered, steel-framed, web-fed, linotype-set,
offset-press based systems running 1,000,000 impressions/hr.

------
lolc
My favourite is how they could set spaces that were springs that would adjust
to the width of the column.

------
RichardCA
I was fortunate enough to have a school field trip to the NY Times in the
70's. If you were a nerdy kid the word "shrdlu" showed up a few times, mostly
in PBS documentaries about AI, as it was at the time. If you grew up in the
tri-state area, everything important was on Channel 13. Except for Star Trek
which had moved into syndication by that time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJz4YKUwqw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJz4YKUwqw)

~~~
robotresearcher
SHRDLU was a natural language interface program by Terry Winograd at MIT.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHRDLU)

------
InclinedPlane
On the one hand, it's fascinating to see how (overly) complicated the process
of printing used to be. On the other hand, it looks much simpler now because
we gloss over all the complexity in the silicon. Back then there were
thousands of components, today there are billions and they all operate at
millions or billions of actions per second. But it all happens inside tiny
little packages about the size of a sugar cube.

------
Analemma_
This is extremely cool, although it's a little unnerving to see people working
with so much lead with bare hands, especially considering a lot of them had
the job for decades. Was lead poisoning an occupational hazard among
typesetters?

~~~
opencl
Solid lead is not really a problem if you wash your hands before eating after
handling it because it doesn't absorb through the skin. Whether or not these
people actually did that, I have no idea. But to this day there's still plenty
of solid lead stuff that hasn't been banned: fishing weights, bullets, etc.
The main causes of lead poisoning back in the day were all from inhalation:
soldering results in inhaling lead fumes, machining/sanding lead resulted in
inhaling lead dust, exhaust from cars using leaded gas (this was the big one
that affected basically everyone), etc.

~~~
biggieshellz
The amount of lead fumes you'll inhale from soldering is minimal -- the
temperature at which the work is done is almost always below the temperature
at which the lead will vaporize. See
[https://diamondenv.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/lead-exposure-
du...](https://diamondenv.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/lead-exposure-during-
soldering/) \-- low-temperature melting of lead (below 500 degrees Celsius)
"is not liable to result in significant exposure to lead".

~~~
azinman2
There is no safe amount of lead.

------
gregsadetsky
Thank you, great video!

This 30 minute movie from 1960 explaining mechanical typesetting is absolutely
fascinating if you're curious:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzilaRwoMus)

------
oflannabhra
Anyone interested in Linotype would greatly enjoy Linotype: The Film [0], a
full length documentary that interviews several of the people that made this
film.

[0] - [https://vimeo.com/15032988](https://vimeo.com/15032988)

~~~
jiveturkey
Link is to a trailer, not the actual film. The actual film is at
[https://shop.linotypefilm.com/](https://shop.linotypefilm.com/) and is $20
for blu-ray or $8 on itunes or $8 on amazon video.

I loved the movie Helvetica, I'm sure I'll love Linotype!

------
dwighttk
Look at the computers that replaced them and then imagine how often those have
been replaced since then. Of course they did get less expensive pretty quickly
(and I'm sure that even though the guy who invented the linotype could sit
down at that machine and use it, that doesn't mean those are the _same_
machines from when the NYT started using linotype, which was my initial silly
assumption)

------
jrockway
I'm somewhat fascinated by the technical aspects of the videography here.
Solid chunks of color "shimmer" as though random noise was added by a digital
sensor. Then there are lines, presumably on the original film, that appear
light green instead of white. I can't think of anything to account for either
of these effects.

~~~
dylan604
Film scratches are not all equal. Some scratches would go all the way through
the emulsion resulting in solid white or black lines depending on if it was a
print or a negative. However, if the scratch as not that deep, then the
scratch would have a color tint depending on its depth.

Maybe this is what you are seeing? If you provide a time reference to a
specific example, I can take a look to see if that matches what I'm
describing. I used to work in film post in transferring and restoration. The
restoration software is pretty magical. The scanning software/hardware has
also come a long way, but the really nice equipment is still $150k-$250k(US)
depending on the options.

~~~
jrockway
2:37 is one. There are others that are green in dark areas and pink in light
areas, however. That's what's so weird about it.

I will think more but scratching the emulsion only partially sounds like a
really good explanation to me. Where the image is dark, though, there should
be very little dye left in the emulsion, so I'm not 100% convinced. Still
thinking about it though :)

------
dylan604
I wonder how many Quark users would dream of going back to the manual ways?
Quark is still my number one of "least favorite to use programs". I could just
never think the way Quark wanted me to thing. I took to PageMaker in a
heartbeat, but just never got Quark.

~~~
ahemphill
Quark 4 was definitely full of quirks and there were plenty of things it just
couldn't do. It featured decent keyboard shortcuts, though, which I once
relied on daily for newspaper layout — and which proved quite difficult to
teach to my successor as, ultimately, I knew them only by feel!

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supernova87a
Sigh, almost makes you wish for the days when it really cost something to
publish words, and not every moron with a wifi connection could tweet to the
world one more banal opinion adding to the noise saturating everyone's
attention spans.

~~~
fzzzy
This is a very interesting observation. The decrease in the difficulty of
publishing vastly increased the noise. I think I understood that this was
happening but hadn’t consciously made the connection.

------
sharpercoder
"Headlines are still set by hand."

I now understand where the word "typesetting" comes from.

~~~
windwake12
Alot of font terms comes from that time, like leading and kerning:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning)

~~~
oflannabhra
Interestingly, the term "font" itself came from the fact that typefaces were
cast.

"Font" originally described a size, weight, and face. It no longer includes a
concept of size, because digital typesetting allows sizes to be changed so
easily. What we refer to as a "font" today was originally referred to as a
"typeface," that is, the general style of the lettering.

~~~
0xCMP
This explains too how sometimes you see a list of _every combination of every
"font"_ in a list and other times you see every font and can configure them.

Likely some confusion around this in the documentation and in programmers who
implement these features.

------
tome
Wow, I saw one of these at the Bristol Industrial Museum. A very impressive
piece of kit.

------
EdSharkey
Are there any PDF's available of this last manual typeset edition of the NYT
for viewing online?

~~~
elemenopy
Apparently[1] it was the July 1, 1978 edition:
[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/01/iss...](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/01/issue.html)
(NYT subscription reqd)

1\. [https://www.nytimes.com/times-
insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewe...](https://www.nytimes.com/times-
insider/2014/11/13/1978-farewell-etaoin-shrdlu/)

~~~
syncsynchalt
It's actually July 2nd 1978, which was produced the night of July 1st.

[https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/02/iss...](https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1978/07/02/issue.html)

~~~
kw71
After about the 11 minute mark the footage shows them working on the front
page of the July 1 issue. Looks like they didn't shoot it all in one evening.

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azinman2
Curious to know how the photos got turned into casts. Does anyone know?

~~~
grzm
Photoengraving:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoengraving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoengraving)

------
tempodox
This is a great docu, too bad there is no download button in vimeo.

~~~
xmmrm
[https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/)

