I had the opportunity to use a linotype when I was 13. The man who owned it said that speed is great, but accuracy was more important. When I took typing in high school the teacher was all about speed, speed, speed, where I concentrated on accuracy, so my grade wasn't that good. Later in life I became a technical writer and was assigned a film typesetter ... it was a beast! If you missed a mistake while watching a small line of type go by, you had to do the entire paragraph over.

Then one day the boss came in and said. "We're switching over to computers. Do you have a problem with that?" I replied that I didn't know as I never had sat down with one. Once I discovered it was a matter of highlighting and retyping something, I had a new love affair with ... a machine!

Seems most everyone had a regular chair with a straight back, and no lumbar back support. Except the second man on the left, he has visible lumbar support. Perhaps he had a bad back already, so needed that support, while the others didn't have bad backs yet, but perhaps later.

I learned to use a Linotype machine in a graphics-arts course in college during the 1970s. When I cast my first line, the lead type slid down the chute, and I eagerly grabbed it -- forgetting that only moments before it was molten lead. I screamed in pain and hurled the type across the room.

Said the instructor, "Yeah, those things are hot when they first come out."

Since it's been a while since I posted an olfactory exploration of an old factory. Let's take a deep breath while staring at the photo. I smell:

Cigarette smoke. The first guy on the right has a heater lit and second on the left has a tin of Union Leader in abeyance.

Sweaty male bodies. The average daily high temperature in Dallas in April 1943 was 79.7 F, but there were a couple days above 90, according to www.extremeweatherwatch.com

Hot lead, antimony, and tin. See above. Linotype machines used natural gas to heat a crucible containing the molten metals. Fourteen machines each with a reservoir of 44 pounds of liquid must have made that brick vault a very warm place to work.

Machine oil. Lots of clickety-clackety moving parts in those machines. They had to keep them lubed. I wonder if the individual operators maintained their own machines, or if the Morning News had a dedicated maintenance staff? From the looks of their shirts, these guys must have been in close contact with their machines.

Hair oil. The third guy on the left has a handsome haircut slicked down with Vitalis, Wildroot, Brylcreem, Dapper Dan, or some such perfumed hair treatment.

Limburger cheese and onion sandwich. I suspect the fifth guy on the right. Can't really say why -- just strikes me as a Limburger and onion man.

I looked back at some of my Shorpy history to see when I started the Smell-O-Vision posts and was *shocked* to discover that I have been a member here for 17 years, 42 weeks. I'm sure I lurked around the site for a while before I joined.

I've had one marriage (out of 2) and zero dogs (out of 4) that have lasted that long.

Exhale.

In the mid 1970s, after I left university, I worked as a technician in the Daily Mirror research department in London's Fleet Street. We were working on what would become modern desktop publishing. We had one of the fastest computers in the country, the size of three broom cupboards and it had a 5 MB hard disk the size of a dustbin. Through the window, looking across the street, I could see all these typesetters producing the newspaper on the their Linotype machines (1880's technology).

We did get to visit that side of the street once. It was dangerous. The lead type all had to be melted down again. We went into a workroom where there was a big pot of molten lead and a man with a big leather apron. The pot started making a loud gurgling noise. The workman calmly said 'I think that you gentlemen should leave the room' and a jet of molten lead then shot out of it.

And -- for wonderful words -- once the lead type has been set, it was pressed into a matrix of fine paper mache to make a mould for the metal used on the actual rotary presses. The paper mache was called (at least in London) 'Flong'.

I figured his age from the time he told me about his girlfriend. "She's a '26 model, I'm a '25 model." He was a retired locksmith, machinist, and jack-of-all-trades. I asked him how long he had owned the house, and he said since 1968. I knew it was built in 1970, but close enough. He owned at least ten garage door openers, yet his garage door was walled in so it couldn't open. He held a moving sale, and expressed consternation that no one would buy his dozen or so perfectly good vacuum cleaners, and I always figured that any survivor of the Great Depression could relate. (I used to think that all hoarders were Depression survivors; I now know better.) His entire back fence concealed a stealth shed filled with parts that he would turn into projects, someday.

He gave me a tour of the stealth shed, full of moldy books and magazines, and used tires with good tread, but way past their date codes. He showed me a black cast iron open-frame electric motor, and lamented that his attempt to convert it to a ceiling fan didn't work out. I said that the motor looked like it came out of an old wringer washing machine, in which case the RPM would be all wrong for a ceiling fan.

He said, "Actually, it came out of a Linotype machine."

Burgess Meredith played a reporter and linotype operator (among other endeavors) in the 1963 season 4 Twilight Zone episode "Printer's Devil."

How do they know what to type? They don't appear to be copying from any visible text. Are they typing by memory or making stuff up as they go along?

[Their copy is right in front of them. - Dave]

Despite their imposing appearance, Linotypes are rather quiet.

A fractional horsepower motor, quiet little clicks as the individual type molds (matrices) slide down the sloping trough from the type magazine, and an entertaining series of quiet clicks and clunks as the type elevator lifts the line of type up to the caster, which then goes through its casting sequence. Then more little clicks as the used type pieces are sorted back into the top of the magazine. The columns in the type magazines are not arranged alphabetically, but by letter frequency, with lower case "e" being nearest the caster. The top to bottom sequence for the leftmost 2 keyboard columns is thus "ETAOIN SHRDLU".

There is a steam show in Portersville PA that has a print shop, with several old letterpresses, many cases of type, and a running Linotype. Fun to watch.

I worked at a printing company back in the 70's that had a linotype on the shop floor. It was an amazingly intricate piece of machinery.

I can only imagine the noise of 13 possibly 14 operators.

Etaoin shrdlu, fellow Linotype fans.

Interesting to see a whole room of typists from 1943 who are exclusively male. I realize they’re linotype operators, not stenographers, but even so. Also, I’m intrigued by the shape of the lamps in the row on the right. And I do like old smoker dude, far right.

In the olden days, a typo first had to get past the writer. Then past the (copy) editor. Then past the typesetter. Then past the person who did the page layout. Then past the proof reader.

These days?