| Show UTAH PRESS ASSOCIATION Little wonder the industrygrowth spurred countless would-be inventors to attempt to devisetypesetting machine As early as 1822 William Church developed in Englandkeyboard-activated machine which assembled pre-cast type fromsupply source It did little to answer the need So did the Pianotype an 1840 French experiment which was plagued withnumbers problem seven men were required to operate it Blessed with 20-20 hindsight those looking back can now seebetter answer wasmachine that could make its own type rather than one which assembled already-existing characters By 1880 James Paige young Hartford Connecticut inventor had createddevice 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 hemigrated to the United States in 1872 at age 18 having completedfour-year apprenticeship aswatchmaker in Bietigheim Germany He found employment in the shop ofrelative in Washington C building models for inventors who were seeking patents One who sought his help had designedpapier 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 Heread aboutmechanical typewriting machine patented in England and his inventive mind led him to work onversion of his own By 1868 hemade 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 intoversion which Remington Sons began to mass-produce Ottmar conceivedcombination of the matrix and the new typewriter thus reproducing characters on the papier mache strip over which hot metal could be poured to make 212 Digital image 2005 Marriott Library University of Utah Al rights reserved |
