Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/199

Rh hundred working-days. Now, let us see what it would cost to do the same amount of setting by the type-casting machines. These are claimed by their proprietors to work at the rate of three thousand to five thousand ems per hour in regular use. Making allowance for the probability that operators could not keep up such a speed all day, that mistakes have to be corrected, and accidental stoppages might occur, we may admit that the machines can set an average of twenty-five hundred ems per hour during an eight-hour day, or twenty thousand ems per day each, which is little more than half what the inventors claim as practical. Six machines could at this rate set one hundred and twenty thousand ems per day. As already said, to set this by hand would cost $12,000. The cost of the machine work would be—

Or equivalent to a saving of $3,132 on the setting by hand, or over twenty-five per cent. The estimate of $14 per week as a fair rate for operators of the machines is not too low for a Canadian office. First-class compositors certainly do not average more.

As a further illustration, I may give the actual figures of cost of a composing-room with which I am familiar. The setting amounts to about sixty thousand ems in a nine-hour day, done by ten to twelve compositors. A number of the hands are paid by the week, and the straight setting costs only about twenty-five cents per thousand; or, for sixty thousand ems, $15 per day—equal for three hundred days to $4,500 per year. There is also a foreman at $14, an assistant foreman at $12, and a couple of lads at $3 each. These four, costing $32 per week, or $1,664 a year, do all the setting of space advertisements. There is $2,000 worth of type, costing for interest say $140 per year, and requiring renewal at the rate of say $400 per year, or complete renewal once in five years. The cost of the composing-room is therefore somewhat as follows:

To set sixty thousand ems in a nine-hour day, or six thousand seven hundred ems per hour, would require say three type-casting machines, which at $500 rent would cost $1,500 per year, and the composing-room figures would be: