Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/196

184 the speed of the operator at the key-board. It can work as fast as he can.

When a line of matrices has been utilized, the matrices must be returned to their channels ready for use again. This is accomplished by ingenious contrivances as soon as the cast has been made. The matrices being thus promptly returned, there is only need for a few of each letter. Thus a few dozen of the little brass molds do the work which in type-setting by hand needs a stock of from forty to fifty pounds of type.

—There are two type-casting machines on the market. These are the Mergenthaler or Linotype, and the Rogers or Typograph. The Linotype weighs a ton, covers floor space about six feet by six, stands seven feet high, and is sold for $3,000, or rented for $500 a year. I have seen an expert operator set at the rate of nearly eight thousand ems per hour on it from a phonograph communicating with his ear. The proprietors claim a regular practical speed of over four thousand ems an hour, which is four times the speed a good compositor averages by hand, if we include the time he must take for distributing. On the Linotype, the first time I ever touched a key-board, I set one hundred and fourteen ems of strange copy in six minutes, or at the rate of eleven hundred and forty ems an hour.

The Typograph weighs four hundred and fifty pounds, covers floor space four feet by four, is four feet six inches high, sells for $2,500, and rents for $365 a year. The proprietors claim a regular practical speed of three thousand to thirty-five hundred ems per hour. I have set one hundred and fourteen ems by the Typograph in nine minutes. At the end of each line the operator at the Typograph must stop to throw back the cap of the machine, a movement which restores the matrices to their magazines. The proprietors of the Typograph claim that it can work as fast as will ever be practically possible on any machine. In other words, they think that human beings will not be physically capable throughout a whole working day of requiring as great a steady speed as the Typograph can give.

The Typograph was submitted to a severe practical test in September, 1890, by the New York World. An eight-page section of the Sunday World, September 28th, was set by one machine working continuously day and night for one hundred and nineteen hours and thirty-five minutes, or nearly a week. The object of the test was to ascertain how the machine would bear a continuous steady strain. Three operators took eight-hour shifts at the work. The machine—I was informed both by the business manager of The World, Mr. Turner, and by one of the operators, the foreman of The World composing-room—stood the test almost perfectly. I measured the amount of setting done. It came to