Hot Metal Transforms the Speed of Information
From 1450 to the mid-1880s, nearly every printed word was set one tedious letter at a time. Then the machine age grabbed hold.
In front of you are two drawers, called cases. They’re full of letters, split between a case you place higher — an upper case — full of capitals, and a lower case of minuscules, or small, literal “lowercase” letters. In the dim light, you glance at a piece of paper covered with handwritten words and notations and, with a practiced motion, rapidly grab pieces of metal from compartments in each case and stack them successively, left to right, in a metal stick in your hand, forming lines. To justify a line—making the left and right edges fill the width of a column—you recursively add ever-smaller spaces between each word until the line is firmly packed. When the stick fills with lines, you slide its contents onto a metal tray and start to fill the stick again.
You work at this repetitive task for hours on end. If you’re good at your job, you’ve composed what amounts to a few pages of a book by the end of your shift. Exhausted, you stumble out of the asphyxiating gaslit air toward your favorite typesetters’ saloon to gather with union mates and drink heavily. At some point after dawn, you stagger onto a streetcar or train and head home…
