The Watchmaker and the Printing Press

I spent the past weekend in Baltimore with my 10 year-old daughter. Her third grade class trip in 2020 was supposed to have taken her there, but COVID-19 shut that down.

I could write a lot about the many great things to see in Baltimore, and the things I’d like to go back and spend more time with, but I want to focus on one thing: Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine.? My daughter and I happened upon a tour that was explaining the technology at the Museum of Industry, and it illuminated for me the degree to which an invention I knew next to nothing about had changed so much of the world of print communication.?

Many of you reading this know that while printing press technology improved gradually from Gutenberg’s time to the industrial revolution - increasing print capacity from 240 impressions per hour in 1600 to around 2400 impressions per hour by 1818 - typesetting technology changed little. Letters were meticulously, individually picked from compartments and manually placed for the 1837 Baltimore Sun newspaper just as they were for the c. 1450 Gutenberg bible. And then each letter was manually returned to its case compartment, one by one.

Enter watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant who arrived in Baltimore in 1872, and within 4 years started work on a machine that would provide a quicker way of publishing legal briefs. He succeeded in creating a process and technology for automatically delivering lines of type that could be set much faster than individual letters, and by 1886 his Linotype machine was in commercial use at the New York Tribune.? The Linotype (and follow-ons like Monotype and Intertype) dominated typesetting in the publishing industry for the next century before being largely replaced by computer-driven printing technologies.

By increasing typesetting speed from a maximum of around 2,000 ems per hour to around 10,000 ems per hour with Linotype, and by automating the way in which the letter molds are returned to their chambers for re-use in subsequent lines of type, Mergenthaler revolutionized the publishing industry, ushering in the era of affordable multi-page newspapers and lowering the cost of typesetting across all areas of the publishing industry.? Thomas Edison, no less, called Mergenthaler’s invention the "8th wonder of the world".

All of this Mergenthaler did with little prior knowledge of publishing, printing, or typesetting. What he did have was an understanding of precision mechanics and efficiency in machine operations, and a mindset for tackling complex problems from new directions.?

I found this inspiring, as someone who has been grappling with a set of complex problems in a sector (housing and housing finance in West Africa) where, despite incremental innovations in recent decades, the fundamental problem remains unsolved and, in fact, is growing worse, when viewed in terms of the growing gap between demand and supply of quality affordable housing.

We don’t to my knowledge have any German watchmakers on our team, but I’m optimistic that a Mergenthaler of a different flavor - maybe from Jobomax, maybe from elsewhere - is going to bring the right kind of outside-the-box thinking to our sector.? The potential for life-enhancing change here may be orders of magnitude greater than what became possible by virtue of the Linotype machine’s introduction.