by Vaclav Smil
Although all of these techniques have been instrumental in creating new economies and new social realities of the 20th century, only the American origins of telephone—or at least Bell’s famous imploration, ‘Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you’ (Bell 1876a)—are more widely known. Public knowledge regarding the genesis of other communication techniques is either largely absent or perpetuates various misunderstandings: neither Thomas Edison nor the Lumière brothers invented moving pictures, nor did Marconi make the world’s first radio broadcasts (Garratt 1994). Moreover, even many informed people would not rank sulfate pulp or linotypes along such key innovations of the two pre-WWI generations as internal combustion engines or electricity. Indeed, many people may not be even aware of the existence of the former two innovations and of their importance for modern societies.
Because of its topical sweep, this is inevitably the most heterogeneous chapter of this book. And yet a closer look reveals a number of critical commonalties that qualify all of these achievements as quintessential innovations of the Age of Synergy. All of the techniques examined in this chapter had pre-1860 pedigrees, but these early attempts were not good enough to be translated into commercial realities. Once introduced in their basic functional form during the Age of Synergy, all of them traversed the often formidable distance between a promising patent and commercial success in a matter of years. And immediately after their introduction, nearly all of them became subject to intensive refinement and redesign that boosted their performance and brought them close to technical maturity often in less than a generation after their initial patenting. And all of them deserve attention because of their combined impact on civilization.
Sulfite and sulfate pulp keeps furnishing most of our paper needs, and there are no radical innovations on the papermaking horizon to change that. Before they were displaced by photo typesetting, linotype machines were used to set all books, newspapers, and merchandise catalogs during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Cellular phones are now doing away with wired touch-tone telephones that were introduced in 1963—but until that time the classical rotary telephone, whose diffusion began in the early 1920s, was the standard equipment. Development and commercialization of radio and television, as well as of sonar and radar, were only a matter of time after Hertz demonstrated the generation and reception of high-frequency waves. The age of inexpensive and simple-to-operate cameras using roll film started with the first of George Eastman’s boxy Kodaks in 1888, exactly 75 years before Kodak Instamatics were introduced in 1963.
But before I start the topical surveys of major communication techniques, I must mention one of their forms that has been inexplicably neglected in standard accounts of modern logistics: parcel deliveries. There is no justification for this omission either on commercial or on emotional grounds. Few people are aware of the relatively late origins of postal parcel deliveries. British parcel post began operating in August 1883 (Samuelson 1896). In the United States, where international parcel post has been available since 1887, private companies did very good business by delivering mail orders to millions of rural customers. Not surprisingly, their opposition to postal parcel service delayed its enactment until 1912. The service began on January 1, 1913, and the enthusiastic response translated into impressive economic benefits; for example, during the first five years of parcel post delivery Sears, Roebuck & Co., the second of the two giant mail-order retailers (established in 1893, 21 years after Montgomery Ward), tripled its earnings.
Physical evidence of parcel deliveries (by trucks, vans, and airplanes) is now ubiquitous in all affluent societies. United Parcel Service, the world’s largest parcel delivery company, was established in 1907 in Seattle as the American Messenger Co. and got its present name in 1919 (UPS 2003). In 2003 its capitalization exceeded $70 billion and its annual revenues surpassed $30 billion, the total higher than the gross domestic product of about 120 countries in 2002 (UNDP 2003). With diffusion of the Internet, millions of consumers became new converts to the convenience of receiving goods at home, and their repeat orders have been driving the expansion of on-line shopping.
Printed Word
I will start with the printed word simply because of the longevity of the art. Gutenberg’s movable type (first used in 1452) led to the well-documented explosion of printing. By 1500, more than 1,700 presses were at work across Europe, and they produced more than 40,000 separate titles or editions amounting to more than 15 million incunabula copies (first printed editions) (Johnson 1973). Subsequent centuries brought slow but cumulatively important improvements that resulted in such remarkable typographic achievements as the first comprehensive encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert (1751–1777). Mechanization of printing advanced during the first half of the 19th century with the introduction of high-volume presses.
A new press built in 1812 by Friedrich Kónig still had a flat type bed, but the paper was pressed onto it by a revolving cylinder: when powered by a steam engine, this machine could print more than 1,000 sheets per hour. Introduction of durable and flexible papier-mâche matrix made it possible to cast curved stereos once the cylindrical rollers replaced the flat printing bed and the type itself was locked onto a circular surface. This took some time to accomplish, and Richard Hoe (in 1844) and William Bullock (in 1865) were the two principal designers of practical rotary machines (Sterne 2001). Hoe’s revolving press was fed sheets of paper by hand, and Bullock’s roll-fed rotary could produce 12,000 newspapers per hour. Mechanization of folding, stitching, and binding helped to made progressively larger runs of newspapers and books cheaper.
But there were still obvious and irksome complications and self-evident limits. Setting the text with movable type was a highly time-consuming process that cried for mechanization. And the collecting of rags—to be converted, after sorting and cleaning, by boiling in spherical or cylindrical vessels in alkaline liquor into new paper—was imposing obvious limits on the total mass of printed matter. Societies where used textiles were the only feedstock for papermaking could never hope to become both extensively and deeply literate and well informed. All of these challenges were resolved by new inventions and by their rapid improvement.
Typesetting and Typewriting
Setting texts with movable type was a highly repetitive, monotonous job but also one that required a high degree of alertness, combining persistence and patience. Every character had to be individually selected from a distribution box and lined up backward (as if seen in a mirror) with appropriate spacing (achieved by inserting faceless pieces of type) in a composing stick. Once a stick was filled, the type was lifted onto a shallow tray (galley); finished galleys were used to produce proofs, marked proofs were used to correct any typesetting errors, and pages were then imposed (arranged in numerical sequence) and fastened into a forme that could be easily moved around, inked, and printed. When the printing was done, the type had to be disassembled, laboriously cleaned, and returned to distribution boxes.
There were many attempts to mechanize this task, and many typesetting machines were invented and patented during the course of the 19th century. John Southward, writing in the late 1880s for the 9th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, noted that less than half a dozen of these machines had stood the test of practical experience, that a few relatively successful designs were confined to special classes of work, and that
it is open to doubt whether the nimble fingers of a good compositor, aided by the brains which no machinery can supply, do not favourably compare on the ground of economy with any possible mechanical arrangement (Southward 1890:700–701).
But even as Southward was expressing his doubts about the future of practical typesetting machines, their tentative and limited success was turning into a commercial triumph. Indeed, his very words (and more than 10,000 pages of the 9th edition of the world’s most famous encyclopedia) were actually typeset by an improved version of a relatively simple machine introduced in 1872 by Charles Kastenbein. Interestingly, So
uthward’s encyclopedic entry does not contain any mention of the machine whose basic design was completed by 1884, that had been used to set newspapers since 1886, and that eventually proved the superiority of mechanical arrangement over nimble fingers. Fingers, and the brains, were still needed—not to pick, place, and space the letters but simply to type: the machine was Mergenthaler’s linotype.
Ottmar Mergenthaler (1854–1899; figure 5.1) belonged to that large group of German craftsmen who made up a notable part of the multimillion emigration from Western Europe’s largest nation to the New World and whose mechanical skills were behind many innovations introduced in the United States during the two pre-WWI generations. He was apprenticed to a watchmaker, and after his arrival in the United States he began working in his cousin’s engineering workshop in Washington, D.C. Among other things, the shop produced models to accompany patent applications, and that is how Mergenthaler met in 1876 Charles T. Moore, who brought in plans of a machine designed to transfer a page for printing by lithography. Building its model led Mergenthaler to the idea of designing a composing machine, a task that preoccupied him for the next 15 years (Mengel 1954; Kahan 2000).
FIGURE 5.1. Ottmar Mergenthaler, the designer of the most successful commercial linotype. Reproduced from Coraglia (2003)..
Technical requirements for a successful composing machine were very demanding. The tasks of composing, justifying, casting, and distributing the type had to be automated; the machine had to be operated by a single person and perform at a rate sufficiently faster than hand composing in order to justify its cost. Mergenthaler’s solution was first demonstrated in a prototype in 1884, and it was patented in 1885 (figure 5.2). The operation began when a keystroke let a small thin bar (matrix) containing the female mold of a character descend from a vertical storage bin (magazine). Matrices, and appropriate space bands, were then placed in alignment in a line, a task that required accuracy of 1/100 of a millimeter and uniform depth in order to print every letter and number clearly (Scott 1951).
Mergenthaler had to solve first an unprecedented problem of precision manufacturing of the matrices: the process had to be relatively inexpensive in order to produce 1,200 matrices needed for every machine, and they had to be strong in order to withstand repeated gripping, lifting, pushing, pressing, and spacing. This required building a matrix factory and designing complex machines to mill, grind, emboss, cut, stamp, and finish the blanks punched from sheets of brass. At least one critical task could use an already commercialized process: cutting of characters was done by a punch machine invented by Linn Boyd Benton (1844–1932). And Mergenthaler used another already available invention, by J. D. Schuckers, for automated spacing of matrices.
FIGURE 5.2. Basic design of Mergenthaler’s linotype patented in 1885 (U.S. Patent 317,828). A few notable parts include matrix magazines (B), matrix distributor (U), separable mold (N), and melting pot (O).
Completed matrices were released from the assembler, so the operator could proceed to set the next line, and were transferred by the first elevator for justification and casting with hot (285°C) metal (an alloy of 85% lead and 12% antimony). After casting, the matrix line was carried upward by the second elevator, space bands were separated first and returned to the appropriate box for reuse, and then the matrix was lifted to the level of the distributor bar that was suspended over the magazine and passed along it until their unique combinations of keys caused them to fall into their original compartments to be ready for forming new matrix lines. Cast slugs were pushed into trays or galleys to be used for direct printing or for making a stereotype for a rotary press; afterward they could be melted and the metal could be reused. The first production version of linotype was used to set New York Tribune on July 3, 1886. More than 50 machines were at work the very next year, and in a fashion emblematic of the period’s innovation, the invention became almost immediately subject of numerous improvements; eventually there were more than 1,500 patents related to its design and operation.
Mergenthaler put his Simplex linotype in production by 1890 (figure 5.3), and two years later came Model 1, the first truly successful design. But for some time it appeared that Mergenthaler’s linotype would have a superior competitor in a typesetting machine designed by James W. Paige, who began to work on his design in 1873. After years of designing setbacks and delays in raising the necessary capital—Mark Twain was among the investors who lost large sums in this venture—the first machine was finally built in 1894. The entire assembly was made of 18,000 parts; it stood nearly 2 m tall and weighed about 2.3 t (Legros and Grant 1916). Chicago Herald agreed to test it; its verdict was favorable, but by that time Mergenthaler linotypes dominated the typesetting market and there was no enthusiasm to manufacture a machine whose chronically delayed development had already cost close to $1 million.
FIGURE 5.3. Mergenthaler’s 1890 Simplex linotype design (reproduced from Scientific American, August 9, 1890) and composing room of the New York Times full of linotype machines (this photograph was taken in 1942 by Marjory Collins).
Eventually Philip T. Dodge, the president of the Linotype Co., purchased the patent and Cornell and Columbia universities were presented with the only two machines ever built. By 1895 there were already more than 1,000 Mergenthaler linotypes around the world, and about 6,000 copies of Model 1 were made before more reliable and more complex designs took over. The machine, whose invention has been called the second greatest event in the history of printing, and which admiring Edison saw as the eighth wonder of the world, was used to set the news of defeats and victories of the two world wars, of economic expansion and crisis of 1920s and 1930s, and of the first decade of the Cold War (figure 5.3).
During the 1950s, photo typesetting and photo-offset printing began a new trend, and the last of the Linotype company’s nearly 90,000 machines was produced in 1971. But thousands of linotypes were still used during the 1980s, and many survived into the 1990s. As linotypes began disappearing, the typesetters, while appreciative of the abilities of new computerized equipment, missed the sound, smell, and feel of those complex, clanging, heat-radiating machines. I also remember them fondly, from Prague of the 1960s, and I agree with a retired Italian linotype operator that there is something magic about l’arte di fondere i pensieri in piombo (Coraglia 2003).
The letters of the two leftmost vertical rows of keys on the Linotype console that were used to test the machine spell a magical “etaoin shrdlu.” Those on the top row of typewriters give another enigmatic line: “qwertyuiop”—but the first successful machine could type it only in capitals. This machine had an even more extensive pedigree of failed designs than did practical incandescent light. The first real breakthrough came in 1867, when Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule filed a patent for a type writing machine, which was granted in June of the following year (figure 5.4). The trio sold the rights for $12,000 to James Densmore and George W. N. Yost, who in turn arranged for production of the machine by E. Remington & Sons, a renowned maker of guns and sewing machines (Zellers 1948).
Design of the first commercial typewriter betrays its origins: it was done by William Jenne from Remington’s sewing machine division, and this treadle typewriter of 1874 clearly resembled a sewing machine. Its sturdy upright body decorated with gold and bold flower decals sat on a four-legged table with a foot treadle used to advance the paper. The platen was made of vulcanized rubber; there was a wooden space bar and a four-line keyboard of capital letters starting with the QWERTY sequence. The type bars with raised-relief letters and numbers hit the inked ribbon against the underside of the platen (up-strike) so the typist could not see the text. About 5,000 treadle machines were sold, and changes, small as well as major ones, followed rapidly. A design that made it possible to print both capital and small letters by depressing the same key was patented (U.S. Patent 202,923) by Byron A. Brooks in 1878.
But the so-called visible machines, where the typist could see the text, became common only by the late 1890s, and
portable typewriters (led by 1906 Corona) appeared before WWI, when standard machines acquired many noise-reducing features and other mechanical improvements (Typewriter Topics 1924; figure 5.5). On such machines were most of the 20th century great novels and stories written. Of the three great American Nobel Prize winners in literature, both Hemingway and Faulkner used Underwoods (Hemingway also had Royals, both desk and portable models); Steinbeck wrote a clear longhand on yellow legal pads. But the typewriter became more than an indispensable tool of trade for novelists and journalists. During WWII, typewriters came under the control of the War Production Board as tens of thousands of them were taken by armies to battle (a ship sunk off Normandy during the D-Day carried 20,000 Royals and Underwoods) together with tripod stands, and as thousands of them were fitted with non-Latin alphabets and special characters to be used in different theaters of war (Frazier 1997).
FIGURE 5.4. Patent illustration (U.S. Patent 79,265) of a “type-writing” machine designed in 1867 by Sholes, Glidden, and Soule..
FIGURE 5.5. Four notable early typewriters: Remington’s Standard No. 6, an “invisible” design of 1894 (upper left); a Remington-Sholes Visible from 1908 (upper right); a portable Senta, which came out first in 1912 (lower left); and a standard Royal from the early 1920s (lower right). Reproduced from Typewriter Topics (1924).