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UTAH PRESS ASSOCIATION Little wonder the industry's growth spurred countless would-be inventors to attempt to devise a typesetting machine. As early as 1822, William Church developed in England a keyboard-activated machine which assembled pre-cast type from a supply source. It did little to answer the need. So did the Piano type, an 1840 French experiment which was plagued with a numbers problem -- seven men were required to operate it. Blessed with 20-20 hindsight, those looking back can now see a better answer was a machine that could make its own type rather than one which assembled already-existing characters. By 1880, James Paige, a young Hartford, Connecticut inventor, had created a device which, when properly operating, quadrupled the speed of hand compositors. Unfortunately, it consisted of more than 20,000 separate parts, any one or all of which could fail when needed. It never materialized into what its inventor had dreamed of and was finally abandoned. The man with the right answer, Ottmar Mergenthaler, came into the picture by sheer accident. German-born, he'd migrated to the United States in 1872 at age 18, having completed a four-year apprenticeship as a watchmaker in Bietigheim, Germany. He found employment in the shop of a relative in Washington, D.C., building models for inventors who were seeking patents. One who sought his help had designed a papier mache matrix for casting type. It was fortunate coincidence that Christopher Sholes was simultaneously working on another type-related machine -one to replace handwriting. Sholes, Pennsylvania-born, was one of three brothers who were newspapering in Kenosha, Green Bay and Madison, Wisconsin. He'd read about a mechanical typewriting machine patented in England and his inventive mind led him to work on a version of his own. By 1868 he'd made an operating model which so impressed his onetime Kenosha newspaper partner, James Denmore, that he bought it for $12,000. By 1874 it had been refined into a version which E. Remington & Sons began to mass-produce. Ottmar conceived a combination of the matrix and the new "typewriter," thus reproducing characters on the papier mache strip over which hot metal could be poured to make a 212 |
