Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/193

Rh —Before describing the type-casting principle, allow me to review briefly the process of type-setting by hand.

In this process the operator, technically called a compositor, has before him an oblong frame (or "case") divided into a number of small open boxes. One box contains the a's, another the b's, another the numeral 1's, another the numeral 2's, and so on. In his left hand the compositor holds a little steel receiving box, called a "stick." With his right hand he picks out from the "case" the letters he requires to form a word, and puts them one by one in his "stick." The stick is the same width as the column of his newspaper. Toward the end of each line in his stick he has to pad out the line with lead slugs so as to exactly fill the width of the stick; this is called "justifying." When he has a certain quantity of reading matter in his stick, say one tenth of a column in length, he transfers the type to a "galley" or long stick. By and by, when the galley is filled up, the type in it is transferred to the large receiving form called a "chase," in which the columns of the newspaper are made up to be placed on the printing-press. Such, very roughly described, is the process of type-setting by hand. After the paper is printed the compositor must pick out all the separate letters and numerals from the columns of type, and put them back in the proper boxes in his "case." This is called "distributing." The "distribution" occupies about one fifth of a compositor's whole working-time.

In all this, civilization is to-day where it was five hundred years ago, and almost where the Chinese were two thousand years ago. Alone of all the great inventions of man, type-setting has stood still from its birth until now. In war and in commerce, on our farms and in our workshops, in travel and in our homes, almost every mechanical process, once slowly and laboriously effected by manual or animal labor, has been quickened generation after generation by new appliances or inventions, save and except the work of type-setting. That is as slow now as when Coster or Gutenberg did the first European type-setting early in the fifteenth century. Printing has otherwise moved with the rest of the world. Our printing-presses, our power, our folding and pasting machines, all are wonderfully improved. Nothing in all the world has developed more marvelously than the printing-press. But type-setting has stood still. The ordinary composing-room of to-day can work no faster and no better than the composing-room of the fifteenth century.

With the type-casting machine should come a new era. The operator needs only the intelligence which is required in a good compositor. He does not require more than one tenth the