Linotype Demonstration

You know you are getting old when your livelihood is in a museum. Good times!

A typewriter crossed with a 750 degree F hot plate, a foundry, a mechanized spark plug gap spacer, and a Tetris-like plate setter, and a Chuck-E-Cheese prize game spitting it all out. Steampunk heaven. Literally "hot" off the presses, every page plate for the morning paper is going to be remelted for the evening paper.

My father learned to linotype at the age of 21. He was an operator for 3 major metro newspapers until 1985. With the advent of the computer, he choose to keep working as a lino operator in small, sweat-shop-like places for non-news printing operations until he retired in 1990. I visited him at work at the Chicago Sun in 1969. Loud, industrial, gritty, and dirty. He loved it.

When I was a kid, I was a Cub Scout, and they took us on a field trip to the Boston Globe, and I was mesmerized by the Linotype Room there. I stood transfixed. A lady sitting before one asked me to spell my name, and a minute later handed me a slug with my name backwards. I'm still astonished.

great explanation, only wish it had no intrusive background music

My dad used to take these machines apart, repair, move them, reassemble them, etc. He knew where every part went and not just for the Linotypes, but for the various versions of the Intertypes too! And Comet's

I was running the Linotype machine at age 12 at the Eaton Rapids Journal office! My great-grandfather bought the paper in the early 1920's after it had been opened in 1879. I learned to type on a manual typewriter, too, and hold my H.S. record for men at 100 wpm.

When I was younger, our county seat had it's own paper and a linotype hid in a back alley. Every time I'd go to town I'd ease back and watch the operator, racked back in a cane-bottomed straight chair, chain smoking and typing like a son-of-a-gun. All the whirring and clunking and lead ingots being slowly dropped into the melter and type slugs whizzing around just astounded me. I'd lean against the door frame in a trance and since it was summer, the door was always open and the afternoon sun always shining inside. Some things you just don't forget!

The biggest leap forward in printing history since Gutenberg.

I'm here because I watched the Twilight Zone episode Printer's Devil and had no idea what a linotype is.

Happy memories. My dad was a Linotype operator for a small newspaper in southern MN.

He forgot to mention that the magazine up top was for one specific font and had to be swapped out to change the font or switch to italics. Those magazines were very heavy and had to be lifted up to install at the top of the machine, after removing the existing one. A storage rack of perhaps a dozen magazines would be located near the Linotype.

Lane Tech - Chicago -had our daily paper and printed our own year book '73 - had 3 rooms linotypes - composing room , light tables - and offset press room

This is amazing - I have never seen one in operation before and I always wondered how this was done!!

Jesus Christ. I can't imagine the maintenance on this thing.

Awesome. Loved the old line-o-type machine. Brings back memories of my bookbinding days.

Thank you so much! This clears up some details in Fredric Brown's "Etaoin Shrdlu" that I've been wondering about since 1975. =)

Very interesting, but the music is really distracting.

Saw this in action at the museum! A wonderful machine in a wonderful place

Hey my dad worked on linotype and would like to educate folks! Alas he is in the ICU. He took a bad fall and he fractured his skull. BUT he wants to teach folks about it. He might die but its life-long ambition. Can you invite him on your show? It would EVERYTHING to him :(