Who Was Ottmar Mergenthaler?

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Today we take so much for granted when it comes to typing out an article on Microsoft Word, or some other feature on the computer and just printing it out. So convenient! It didn’t used to be that easy. Just to produce a printed page was quite a task, involving assembling metal letters into words by hand, one letter at a time and this wasn’t even available until about the fifth century. Ottmar Mergenthaler worked in a machine shop in Baltimore, Maryland, after arriving from Germany in 1872. He invented a better system which involved a keyboard. Trays of type were positioned on a tray above the keyboard and when the typist struck the keys, a mold for each letter dropped into place. Then, after a line was complete, it was cast with hot metal. Then, the metal hardened and these lines of type, called “slugs,” were easy to handle. Entire pages could be composed very quickly. This new invention was called a Linotype machine. “The New York Tribune” installed this Linotype machine in 1886 in its newsroom and after that, Mergenthaler’s invention began to be used all over the world, up until the 1960s. At that time, an electronic typesetting system called photocomposition replaced the Linotype. After that we had typewriters and then Word Processors. Today, we have even better and faster ways to TYPE what we want to write. But, we need to be thankful to Mergenthaler for starting the process to better typing and printing.