The basic process of typesetting using movable type—handpicking metal letters to mount them in a rack or plate for printing—developed little in the 400 years following Gutenberg's printing press of 1436. In 1822, William Church of Boston, patented a machine that chose brass-reversed letters from a bank to create a continuous line of text, which had to be finished by hand with spacing, line breaks, and justification. However, it was not commercially successful.
In Baltimore in 1884 German-born Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854-1899) patented designs for the Linotype machine, which used a ninety-character keyboard to select brass molds (called "matrices") for letters and other characters from a font magazine and mounted these into an assembler, creating one short line of text (hence "lin'o'type"). Tapered spacebands, larger than the matrices, were added between words and used to justify the line by wedging words apart. Assembled lines were then used to cast thin slugs of molten lead alloy that was cooled quickly in water, creating lines of text that were mounted into a plate and used for printing. The matrices were notched to identify their characters, so that they could be mechanically sorted and returned to the correct compartment In the magazine. After printing, the alloy slugs were melted down for reuse.
After being installed at the New York Tribune in 1886, the Linotype machine was rapidly adopted by the newspaper industry throughout the world. It speeded up the composition process and reduced the amount of skilled labor required, bringing down costs and accelerating an expansion in newspaper and magazine publishing that continued well into the twentieth century.
