Ottmar Mergenthaler

German-born American inventor

• Born: May 11, 1854
• Birthplace: Hachtel, Württemberg (now in Germany)
• Died: October 28, 1899
• Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland

Mergenthaler invented Linotype, the most widely used automatic typesetting system before the advent of computerized photocomposition, thus revolutionizing the production of printed matter.

Early Life

The third of five children born to Johann George and Rosine (Ackermann) Mergenthaler (MERH-gehn-tah-lehr), Ottmar Mergenthaler grew up in a family of schoolteachers. After an unexceptional grade school education in Ensingen, to which his family had moved, his father attempted to enroll him in a seminary in preparation for a career as a teacher. His early interest in engineering, however, and his skill at repairing all kinds of mechanisms, including the village clock, overcame his father’s desire. Mergenthaler rejected the seminary, opting instead for an apprenticeship with a maker of watches and clocks.

Mergenthaler was fourteen when he began his apprenticeship with Louis Hahl in Bietigheim. He completed his apprenticeship in 1872, having shown himself to be a talented and ambitious mechanic. These were difficult times in Mergenthaler’s homeland. Soldiers returning from the Franco-Prussian War were flooding the labor market. Economic reforms were disrupting established patterns of everyday life. To avoid military service himself and to further his career, he arranged to emigrate to the United States to work for Hahl’s son, August, who was already an established instrument maker in Washington, D.C.

Although Washington was more of a governmental center than a manufacturing city, its skilled mechanics benefited from their proximity to scientific agencies and the patent office. August Hahl’s shop concentrated on making electrical and meteorological apparatus, and Mergenthaler distinguished himself as an ingenious and dexterous mechanic. Curious and sensitive to a fault, he was also anxious to prove his competence and to make a success of himself in his adopted homeland. Bearded, with a high forehead, wavy dark hair, and deep-set eyes, he conveyed an intense, almost brooding presence.

The United States into which Mergenthaler arrived was different in several respects from the Germany he left. Mergenthaler grew up in a society in which precision and pride in craft were highly valued. In the United States, economic gain and productivity were more evident priorities. Germany had a more rigid class system and was developing a strong tradition of centralized state interference in the economy. In the United States, careers tended to be more open to the talented, and there was relatively greater opportunity for individual entrepreneurship. Mergenthaler seemed to be in his element.

Life’s Work

Mergenthaler’s introduction to the printing trade came in 1876, after Hahl’s shop had been moved to Baltimore because it was more of an industrial center than Washington. Ironically, it was a Washington court reporter, James O. Clephane, who envisioned a means of transferring a printed page by means of a new kind of typewriter. He took his idea to an inventor, Charles Moore, who had developed a prototype. Moore brought his device to Hahl’s shop for refinement. Mergenthaler was entrusted with the job of perfecting this machine and determining if it would serve its purposes. After three years of work, he decided that neither this idea nor a subsequent papier-mâché process would ever succeed. He also became obsessed with the idea that he could develop a successful machine to compose type automatically.

Mergenthaler became Hahl’s partner in 1878 and continued there until 1883, when he established his own instrument-making and machine shop in Baltimore. From 1876 until his death in 1899, wherever Mergenthaler worked, it was the perfection of mechanical type composing that held his attention. Clephane continued to encourage him and found financial backing for his early endeavors.

In 1883, Mergenthaler produced a machine that used relief figures on long bands to make a papier-mâché mold of a line of type from which a metal line could be cast. In 1884, he developed a second so-called band machine, which aligned recessed dies on the bands from which a metal type line could be directly cast. Mergenthaler recognized that using individual brass molds for each character would improve the quality of the cast line and the machine’s ability to redistribute molds for reuse. Despite the opposition of his financial backers, organized into the National Typographic Company, Mergenthaler worked on developing this new machine rather than producing the band model.

In 1885, Mergenthaler tested his new machine, and in the summer of 1886 the first one was installed at the New York Tribune. Whitelaw Reid, the New York Tribune editor and a financial backer of the machine, is reputed to have given the machine its name by exclaiming his amazement at the “line o’ type” produced.

Several newspaper publishers formed a syndicate to support Mergenthaler’s device, and they immediately sought to encourage its production for use on their papers. Mergenthaler opposed their efforts to move rapidly into manufacturing because he felt that significant improvements were needed. Nevertheless, the machine went into production, with Mergenthaler making improvements along the way. By 1888, disputes between Mergenthaler and his business partners reached a crisis and he resigned from the company, reorganized in 1885 as the Mergenthaler Printing Company.

Mergenthaler set up his own company to build parts and assemble machines for the syndicate that controlled the rights to the invention. He continued to make dozens of patented improvements on the Linotype. In 1890, he developed a new model Linotype that was more efficient and more reliable. In 1891, he was induced to rejoin the syndicate, renamed this time the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. He resigned in anger again in 1895 after the company president unsuccessfully requested that Mergenthaler’s name be removed from the title.

Struck by tuberculosis in 1894, Mergenthaler spent the last years of his life perfecting his invention, battling for recognition and financial reward, and struggling to regain his health. He moved with his wife and three surviving children to New Mexico in 1897 but soon returned to Baltimore, where he died on October 28, 1899.

As completed, the Linotype combined the processes of composing text, casting type, and redistributing the molds. Type molds, called matrices, were held in a magazine. By working on a keyboard, the operator assembled in sequence individual matrices for letters, numbers, or marks. The line of assembled matrices was automatically spaced to the desired length by expanding wedges. Then it was held in front of a casting mechanism as molten type metal was forced into the molds. The completed line of type, called a slug, was then dropped into a galley, ready to be joined by the next line. Finally, after casting, the matrices were automatically carried back to the magazine and distributed to their original places to be reused. When the galley was full, the slugs were taken away to be prepared and arranged for printing.

The machine provided several advantages over handset type. First, it was about four to five times as fast as hand composition. Second, it allowed each publication to be printed from what was, in essence, new, unworn type. Third, composed matter could be stored for later printing without tying up expensive foundry type and depriving compositors of type to use on other jobs.

The Linotype faced a number of competitors, a few of which had been in limited use for years while others were introduced almost simultaneously with Mergenthaler’s invention. In 1891, the American Newspaper Publishers Association invited the makers of fourteen machines to compete in a typesetting machine contest. Only four machines were eventually tested and, although not considered the best, the Linotype performed well enough to encourage several newspaper publishers to place orders.

Not surprisingly, the Linotype caused concern among skilled printing workers. During the 1890’s, no fewer than twelve thousand journeymen printers, most often older men or those without a permanent job, lost their positions. Their union, the International Typographical Union, developed a set of policies to bring the machine predominantly under the control of the union rather than attempting to oppose its introduction. It thus set a precedent followed by many other American trade unions in response to technological innovations.

The Linotype’s influence spread beyond the printing office itself. Newspaper publishers began to insist that reporters and editors use typewriters so that Linotype operators would not be slowed by unreadable manuscript. American type founders quickly learned that the Linotype was cutting into orders for new type. A group of them responded in 1892 by forming a new corporation, the American Type Founders Company, to benefit from economies of scale, reduced competition, and promotional activities.

The Linotype rapidly overwhelmed its competition in machine typesetting. About two hundred of the initial model, the Blower, were manufactured by 1890; between 1890 and 1892, more than 350 of the improved model were made; and more than seven thousand of the perfected Model 1 were in use by 1901. More than ninety thousand of the machines had been produced in the United States by 1971, when domestic production ended, and another forty thousand had been produced in foreign factories. Nearly all American daily and even weekly newspapers were produced on Linotypes during the early 1960’s, when the shift to computer-based technologies began in earnest.

Significance

Ottmar Mergenthaler’s single contribution to American, indeed world, culture came in the form of a perfected machine for automatically composing printing type. This invention transformed the printing trade and contributed to increasing the amount and speed with which printed material reached the public. It reduced the labor costs of employing printers and increased their ability to produce large quantities of text in a short time. This was particularly important in the newspaper trade, where time was of the essence. Although initially more appropriate for producing text than advertisements, the Linotype increased the total size of papers and encouraged more advertising. Although it imposed some limits on typefaces and page design, it was sufficiently flexible to meet the aesthetic needs of most publishers.

In some ways, Mergenthaler epitomized the ironies of American industrial history. An immigrant who saw the United States as a land of opportunity, Mergenthaler achieved a significant level of success and acclaim, having contributed materially to his adopted homeland, yet he was unwilling to compromise his craftsperson’s principles in the face of economic pressures and was unable to create a practical balance between technical and business affairs.

Bibliography

Barnett, George E. Chapters on Machinery and Labor. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926. Includes Barnett’s seminal essay on the economic and labor aspects of the Linotype’s introduction. Provides the best conceptual discussion of the pace of introduction and its impact.

Chappel, Warren. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970. An accessible, generally reliable history of printing in world context. Covers intellectual, aesthetic, and technical aspects of printing. Places the mechanization of typesetting into the context of other nineteenth century changes in the book trades.

Huss, Richard E. The Development of Printers’ Mechanical Typesetting Methods: 1822-1925. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973. A chronological survey of typesetting devices, particularly strong on technical descriptions of their mechanisms. Includes 294 individual items with illustrations of most.

Jennett, Sean. Pioneers in Printing. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. A series of biographies of influential individuals in the book trades. Places Mergenthaler’s work in the context of others working on mechanical typesetting. Gives a good, brief introduction to the complex business arrangements surrounding the Linotype.

Kahan, Basil. Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine: A Biographical Appreciation of the Inventor on His Centennial. New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 2000. Recounts Mergenthaler’s efforts to find appreciation for his Linotype, and his battles with typographical unions and financiers.

Kelber, Harry, and Carl Schlesinger. Union Printers and Controlled Automation. New York: Free Press, 1967. A thorough discussion of the impact of the Linotype and subsequent technological changes on printing labor. Contains a complete analysis of the development of attitudes toward technology by the International Typographical Union.

Mengel, Willi. Ottmar Mergenthaler and the Printing Revolution. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Mergenthaler Linotype, 1954. Produced for the centenary anniversary of Mergenthaler’s birth, this volume relies heavily upon Mergenthaler’s autobiography for its discussion of the Linotype. Also includes helpful material on earlier efforts to mechanize typesetting.

Mergenthaler, Ottmar. Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler and History of the Linotype. Baltimore: Author, 1898. Written in the third person, this publication was pulled together by Mergenthaler just before his death after an original manuscript and notes were destroyed in a fire. The biography is an indispensable source, full of information and insights unavailable elsewhere. It is marred, however, by an understandably one-sided and frequently bitter perspective.

Thompson, John S. The Mechanism of the Linotype; History of Composing Machines. 2 vols. Chicago: Inland Printer, 1902-1904. Reprint. New York: Garland, 1980. Originally published as serials in a trade journal, these two works constitute a basic source written by a former Mergenthaler employee. Contains a complete technical description of the Linotype and its operation and maintenance, as well as comparisons with other typesetting devices.