EXTRA BITS - Printing and Typesetting History - Computerphile

This man is a living Wikipedia!

Great stuff! A related video on the development of TeX and LaTeX would be equally awesome.

0:06 "Just step back a bit" Zooms in

One of my favourite typographic experiments comes out of someone trying to re-conceptualize type to benefit from the limitations of the era instead of working around them - Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet.  I like it so much, I've re-created my own variant in OpenType with several different feature variants for my own use.

I absolutely love listening to this man.

As a typographer & graphic designer I loved this! Thank you!

The type is probably made from a lead-antimony alloy, which has the peculiar property that when it cools and sets, it expands slightly so that the metal squeezes into all the corners of the mould and makes nice sharp edges.

The Caslon italic ampersand is the most beautiful piece of typography in existence.

I don't think this should be relegated to an "Extra Bit", I think it should be up with the other videos on the channel. Fascinating stuff!

Every "Desktop Publisher" needs to see this. I learned some of it through my undergrad, but there's a ton of interesting info toward the end! Thanks Brady!

So, I looked up on Youtube how the Linotype worked and found an old 1960s educational video on how it operates. Genius, pure genius. That guy who developed that was brilliant. I dont know why, maybe because I have grown up in the computer/digital age but Mechanical engineering seems so much more amazing to me than computer engineering. When I see things like the Linotype I am awe struck and think "Man, thats so awesome somebody thought up all those mechanical pieces working together to create that machine". When I use a computer program like a game or something I'm just like "yeah, whatever, a bunch of people spent a few years and wrote the code for this game". It's weird.

I was training on PDP-11's in the 70s in Massachusetts at DEC, and seem to remember there was a lot of push back from the printing unions about this new typesetting method replacing workers.

I could listen to him talk about anything. He has a very soothing delivery :-)

What never fails to blow my mind is how utterly fascinating and interesting any imaginable subject becomes when explored in depth, and even more so when beautifully explained by a knowledgeable and intelligent person like Professor Brailsford. Keep up the good work providing the best entertainment for high(and sober, whatever floats everyone's boats) people!

I love all of your videos brady, and this old guy is one of my favorites

Very interesting! Thanks for making this! Its great to not have a video that's rushing to finish!!!

Metal movable type printing using bronze was invented in Korea in 1230. Gutenbeg's greatest invention, the hand mould, could rapidly cast letters using a low melting point (~250C°) alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that is used to this day. He was helped along by preexisting inventions like the olive press and the fact that the Latin alphabet needed only around 100 characters. The 3000+ symbols needed for the Chinese language (or even the ~1800 Chinese characters used to represent Korean at the time) continued to make large scale woodblock printing more practical in both countries for centuries.

On the theme of typesetting, is a LaTeX episode in the works? I would like to learn more about LaTeX's history.

This kind of history is so important to remember.  Thanks for making these videos, Brady!

I did a bit of type-setting when I was younger. The characters were read upside-down and back-to-front (so you could read left to right). Everything had to fit perfectly, otherwise any loose characters would just fall out. There are still a few printers' terms in use today, such as 'mind your p's and q's'. And apparently, though we never used it, the term 'dog's bollocks' which referred to the dash and colon    :- A little video on printers would be nice -- daisy-wheel, ink-jet, laser. 3-D  How they work etc. Just a thought.