My Dad worked in the Composing Room. He went through the transition of Letterpress to Offset. He worked for Cincinnati Post. And would sub at the Enquire on his slide day. The Paper closed down when I was a Junior in HS, in Graphic Arts school. It was very sad to see it go. I ran a Meihle vertical Letterpress part time when going to college, for over 2 years. Until it shut down the Cincinnati Branch. (Deluxe Checks Company,). I loved going to see my Dad at work, It was amazing to see all the Linotypes and the huge Web Presses. I still love the smell of ink.
I was raised to do a job like this. I'm in my late 30's from Seattle. Both my parents were factory workers, so were my grandparents in WWII. I was raised to be fascinated by machines. Big, loud, complex and hazardous. I'm amazed by them. Excited by how they look and sound and feel. This film makes my mouth water and my mind buzz with excitement, the idea of working on, around and inside this epic piece of equipment that takes a small city to operate. But when I entered the workforce, 9/11 had already happened, the bubble was bursting (and a few more times after) and everything I was raised to love was gone. Although what we have now is markedly better and I enjoy working in the tech and IT sector as a profession, there are times when I fantasize about the idea of working in a place like this, on equipment I can understand and feel in my DNA. More and more of my career is dominated by management and human resources, lying to the faces of other liars while we all try to read through our mutual corporate bullshit. There are times I wish I could work with these men and just do work while making a good living too.
Is it too much to ask, to be able to just do your job ? It shouldn't be, but it is ! The more you do for the business you work for, the more money they save by not hiring someone else to do the job that isn't yours. So we the worker wind up doing a job that we aren't qualified to do, adding more stress to your work that you shouldn't have to deal with. The list goes on and on but so long as we the workers keep doing "what has to be done to get the job done", in an everlasting effort to please our overlords so as we can keep our job, they will continue to heap more and more duties to our job description so long as there are people willing to put up with it. Every body does whatever they have to do in order to, at all cost, keep their job. So go ahead, use that new credit card that showed up in the mail today. Stop at the car dealership and test drive that new car you've been eyeing, if you like it, buy it ! Or how about a boat, it sure would be nice this summer at the lake, wouldn't it ! This is the problem with America, they will give you just enough money for your labor to get by on, anything extra they will gladly loan the money to you, with interest. Nearly every adult that I've known well enough throughout my life has been burdened with debt to one extent or the other. They spend their days wishing their lives away, wishing for payday to come, or wishing for the day they will have their debts paid off. The problem is, for most that day never comes, because when that day comes they find that they are carrying far more debt than they had back then. This is why everyone does whatever they are told to do at work, they are job scared because they have so much debt that they can't risk anything that might cost them their jobs. If they were to lose their job, and were out of work for awwhile they would loose everything that they own. Their cars their phones, and the most frightening of all, they would lose their home. They would lose their home because even if they had paid it off, you know they would have at least one mortgage on it that they took out to pay off some of their higher interest credit cards.
We don't honor those who have performed drudgery tasks for their lifetimes in order for so many of us to take their toils for granted. Thank you all who came before us.
I'm glad that everybody was well taken care of in the New York Times and most Newspapers actually. We lost so many good jobs with the loss of the Newspaper Industry.
And it's those who owned stakes the business because of inherited wealth that benefitted most of all from all this work, rather than the workers who actually created it and to whom it is owed.
I have an old DVD recording of this film. Excellent that they made this film on the last day with hot metal. (I worked with newspaper production at Berlingske Tidende, Denmark from 1985 (just after the end of hot metal in 1984) until 2017
@MartinFroland I originally posted it because a professor of mine would show it every semester but could only find it on VHS. Figured uploading the archives.org copy would save him from hooking up a VCR.
13:55 This guy's words about being replaced by computers hit me deep. (especially because I am watching this on my smartphone of all things!) I am a 31 year old graphic designer. I have only learned and mastered my trade using a computer where I do everything from typesetting, print and digital image production, photo composition, motion graphics, animation, and video editing. I can only image what my industry will look like when I am 60....
I know this is ten months late, but algorithmic data sets have now started to be able to automatically create what is considered eye catching designs using formulas for that we've repeatedly used in media. People are then used to tweak it to "Maximise the impact on viewers" or so it's said. So I guess there's still a place for people in the industry, just not as prominent as before and maybe not as numerous as before. The idea that machines will eventually replace people in fields we never thought will happen will probably eventually happen anyway.
i was born in the 80's and always had appreciation and fascination for analogue working methods which required pysichal effort and prowess, the workd environments today lacking the social and community aspects i really could not find
I am sure some of the the printing equipment is still intact, they still have to print a bajillion copies of the thing once a day on the same type of paper. The lead cylinders are probably some type of polymer now. I cant imagine a one to one print speed like that using any other mechanical system. Any ideas?
@@drinksanddice9528 Yes, sir, the link you put up above is about offset lithographic printing, but specifically for commercial use, such as magazines and advertising brochures, etc. Most, if not all, newspapers also use the offset litho process, but the configuration of the press units is different, designed specifically for the multiple webs needed for a full size newspaper. The same cold type process shown in the last section of your video was used to create aluminum litho plates, rather than plastic relief letterpress plates. But the pasting up on page size boards was exactly the same. Then came pagination systems, where an entire page could be designed and created on the computer screen, then sent to a laser printer to create negatives, which were used to make the aluminum plates. Now, negatives have all but been eliminated, and the laser printers are "direct to plate". I am retired from 40 years in commercial printing, and I saw these same changes take place in that sector of the trade. (Mostly, I was an offset press operator, but our shop was small enough that I also worked in pre-press and bindery.) When USA Today made its debut, extensive research showed them that they would need full editorial color if they were to compete with national news magazines. This forced the industry to find better ways to produce high speed color on newspaper presses, which up to that time had not been designed for color. Goss, MAN Roland, Harris and other press manufacturers rose to the challenge, and advancements in automation, remote control of ink and water balance and register of colors is very remarkable today. Newspapers are certainly struggling, but I don't think they will completely disappear, as some folks are saying. Press manufacturers continue to make advancements in technology. Only a few years ago the Buffalo News invested in new reel stand automation, and last month the Spokesman Review (in Spokane, Washington) opened a brand new building, which is off site, and will be used to produce their own paper each night, plus commercial printing jobs and perhaps other publishers' newspapers. These are just two that i happen to know about. There is also research into using ink-jet printing for newspapers, and machines already exist to produce smaller quantity runs of newspapers. They need to improve the quality at higher speeds before it can be used for big city dailies, but I'm guessing that day will probably come. Thank you so much for putting up this video.
Amazing documentary! Type setting was my great grandfathers first (and only) job when he arrived in America. My father told me even 20 years after he retired the tips of his fingers were still black from the lead!
I did it for a while during my masters degree, we had to use this special soap to get the black off. One of the professor's research focus was on early American typesetting, its a strangely interesting profession for sure.
It's amazing how that one guy started working there in the 1920's and used the same process for the next 50 years until he retired. Nowadays with the speed in which technology changes one has to constantly adapt their skills and learn new tools lest they be left in the dust.
I show this video to my university students every term. They’re enthralled. Most have never bought a newspaper but grew up watching their grandparents read them.
My first job as a newspaper reporter was in a weekday PM paper that was still using hot metal in 1965. The most vivid memory I have is the sound of the old linotypes clicking away. It all came back to me watching this
I love this glimpse into our history. I love the advancements that computers have brought to our lives - fewer jobs working in environments with toxic chemicals and heavy equipment and deafening noise. But I also feel like we've lost a lot of knowledge about using complex mechanical devices and the processes to run them efficiently. More importantly, information and knowledge is greatly influenced by its medium. In the age of lead and linotype, more thought was put into the words we wanted to convey and it was more permanent. Today, news and information has little to no permanence and it's assembled like disposable fast food. .
*The documentary is also a case study of obsolescence of a profession. **14:22** He is correct, all that knowledge and image how much effort and money it to aquire that, will be wasted from one day to another.*
I just spent a very short period of my early life at two provincial UK newspapers as a Lino Op. I feel as though I know all these guys in my mind. It was a trade of close friends that no longer exists. I went on to be a pro. musician and magician so I did ok. 🎹
Wow, that brings back memories. I was 15 years old when I started running a Linotype machine. Looks complicated, super impressive in action, but not that difficult to master. That was in 1970, and the shop was transitioning from letterpress to offset printing. I still miss the craftsmanship of letterpress work, the business cards really stood out then.
Yeah, that was an amazing time in printing. I ran a Meihle Vertical press when I was in my early 20s, my Dad was a printer and I took up Graphic Design. That was an amazing process. And, with using lead, it was 100% reusable, melt back down and cast again. Then I went thru transition of the drawing table to the computer in Graphic Design.
Hello from an old Linotype setter (also taught at 2 printing colleges in the UK) . The metal used isnt just lead, (it would be too soft on its own and wouldnt last very long on a printing press) Its made up of 3 metals, Lead, antimony and tin. the 2nd two are to give stength and to fill the letters on the matrix.
I was taught rudimentary linotype in 8th Grade in 1979 in Print Shop. I think I may have been one of the last to have been taught this soon to be obsolete skill.
Your not alone. There is a professor I work with who shows his class every semester. He only had a VHS copy so I found it on the internet archives and threw it up here for convenience.
Do you remember the sound they made? I toured a mainframe facility in the late 80s and remember the noise and cold, like a really slow movie projector.
@@drinksanddice9528 Modern data centres are still typically about as cold... assuming, of course, that they're not stuffed with more equipment than their air conditioning can handle: I remember a DC here in Vancouver, Canada, 15 years ago that had dozens of stand fans and several portable air conditioning units scattered around the place, because they'd installed too much equipment. =D
Back when I was in high school, we had a Linotype machine and an offset press in printing class. This was back in 1967-1968. It was actually fun to run the machine, make the lines of type with molten lead, and place them in a rack, in which we printed the school newspaper. I remember I always had trouble with the keyboard layout as it was completely different than that of a typewriter. If I remember right, the capital letters were on the right side of the keyboard and the small letters were on the left. Number in the middle, I think. I remember being told that we had to fill up a line with blanks, or if the line wasn't full we would have a squirt of hot lead, and the possibility of getting burn't. I'm sure today they would never allow anything like this in a high school, because of the hot lead and the lead poisoning issues.
As a former pressman, it is fascinating to see how it was done in the past. We used thin aluminum plates, lead plates were before my time. I never got to see the process of how the engraving plates were produced as they were done offsite. Very interesting documentary.
This documentary is an absolute marvel, a witness of a gold age of workshops and real artisan, when people were in the awareness that working with hands was fundamental for humanity, and too much enginery would leads to inhumanity ! Here we are !
I remember in h.s taking a print shop class and learning how to type set and silkscreen.Later on I worked for the Chicago Tribune and got to see how thing's were done from scratch all the way to the newspaper.
That's why the saying was "hot off the press" because they used molten lead! It was nice to see that people who were hard of hearing actually had an advantage here, because they could communicate by sign-language and the loud noise of the machinery didn't bother them. I'd like to know if the readers noticed any difference between the papers produced by the linotype workers and those made using computer technology.
I do too, but... I grew up in the computer age, and as a software engineer, I understand them thoroughly. The _mechanical_ marvels of yesteryear? *Wow!!!*
seeing every single step of process happening in front of our eyes is what makes it amazing. They are artisans. And did it every single day! A computer just does it and ok, ready, Is so boring
This was cool. In college I worked on one of the last compugraphic type setters which exposed photo negatives. It produced way better type then the laser printer that replaced it, but no one had to do manual paste up.
when cut and paste was literal 26:00 I saw this for real back in 1983 .. I was the first person not to write papers or use a secretary on my new IBM PC, wordstar, and a daisy wheel printer ... back then multiple people proofed your copy, the pro proofreader, the lineotypers and editor, at the least. Before computers it was rarer to see a typo get through into print, when it did it was a major source of laughter for all and usually more among the non major newspapers or book publishers.
This video always needs to be bumped. I was a dot etcher before Photoshop existed. Chromacom; Hell. The Klimt camera. The step and repeat machine.. An era that reversed to became "Are" No regrets.
And we went from this where people could (and would proofread) before distribution. Now in the computer age, they use spellcheck, grammarly and make typo mistakes daily and often.
The typesetting case they used holds the minuscule type on the bottom of the type-case, and the large type in the upper section of the type-case. The California case for hand composition keeps them on the right of the case.
I remember doing paste-ups using printed type from Linotypes and eventually graduating to cold computer-generated type. I was lucky (?) to have both feet in both eras.
Ironically, there are a lot of videos about hot metal type since a number of Linotype machines are still in operation (mostly small printers keeping it alive in an "artisanal" way, but operating nonetheless) but there's really no other video on the internet that shows how the first generation of "cold type" worked. There's still a rather interesting page composition process where they literally paste the boxes onto a draft page and it looks like they fed the pasted-up sheets back into the system like a Xerox machine on steroids. After PCs and WYSIWYG displays that process was replaced by software -- one version after another.
This was fascinating. It was filmed in 1978. I wonder. Does the Times still print the newspaper with the "new" process shown hear or did it too get replaced?
It still looks like their first computer system was pretty labour intensive (is that where the term cut and paste comes from today? lol) I bet their computers have been upgraded many times since this. Would be interesting when they decommissioned these computers shown, my guess would be some time in the late 80's
I went to school with someone who was writing their dissertation on early modern print workers. She found out that very few of them died from the lead, most of them died from alcoholism. I bet the two were related.
Spy Magazine (sarcasm): 1. Speaking of predicting the future, in the Jan-Feb 1988 issue, Spy Magazine urges Trump to run for president. “We have come to believe that a Donald Trump candidacy is viable. ” “[T]his is one candidate who will not let you down. After all, we already have Donald Trump’s personal guarantee that if he did run for president, he would win.”
Anyone else wondering how long they used that new cold press tech before it was replaced by a better method? Nowadays the idea of physically cutting and pasting paper articles onto a board seems primitive.
One of my peers wrote her dissertation on early-modern type setters. They worked like gig workers, would jump between jobs during the day, and use the money from the morning job to drink before the afternoon jobs. She actually found that setters dying from lead poisoning was rare because most of them drank themselves to death first.
@@drinksanddice9528 When I said watches, I meant all the watches that people are wearing in the video. This video got to the front of /r/videos on reddit so that's why you're getting so many views
I haven't worn a wristwatch in like ten years now because my last one broke, but I always have a supercomputer in my pocket... and most of what it does for me is tell time. ;3
Newspapers sometimes hired deaf people to work in the composing room because it didn't disturb them. I worked with at a newspaper where some of the deaf compositors were still around in the 1980s-90s, into the beginning of the desktop composition era.
According to one of my peers dissertation, early modern typsetters (movable type set by hand) mostly died of alcoholism. They would set so many pages of a book, get paid per line, spend the money on booze, get drunk, and go to the next printer and do the same thing every day all year round. It's not actually pure lead, its type metal which is antimony, tin, and lead, but I'm sure heavy metal poisoning was still and issue, I bet they rotate work stations once a week or something so they dont kill all of the skilled linotypists.
along with lead poisoning, a lot of the chemicals used to clean the type, the inks, etc lead to lung problems like emphysema and liver problems like cirrhosis as well due to being around it all the time and sometimes elbow deep in chemicals for cleaning type, etc. Most of these problems wouldn't really be known until 20 - 30 years later.
Lead poisoning is most dangerous to those with developing nervous systems. The greatest danger would be to a woman working in that environment who did not yet know she was pregnant. Makes me wonder if there have ever been lawsuits about that.
I have a clearer version of this. See ruclips.net/video/JmwH-KzWd9Q/видео.html (It may not be a lot better, but it does have some amount of processing and a different origin.)
Where are all of those works of human eyes, brains, and hands now ? Did they think, back then, that the automation would stop at the computer taking place of only the Linotype machines, and the "hot type"? They couldn't have even dreamed that only four and a half decades later that we would be looking at a future where artificial intelligence is, more likely than not, going to take the jobs of the writers, artists, and countless others. Who knows what will be next !
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Someone had great foresight to capture and preserve this for future generations.
Very true!
I had a moment when I saw this video, its kinda like the end of a great era
True that! Truly a time capsule.
I think it's wonderful the _New York Times_ had the sense to commission the making of a film about the end of an era.
My Dad worked in the Composing Room. He went through the transition of Letterpress to Offset. He worked for Cincinnati Post. And would sub at the Enquire on his slide day. The Paper closed down when I was a Junior in HS, in Graphic Arts school. It was very sad to see it go. I ran a Meihle vertical Letterpress part time when going to college, for over 2 years. Until it shut down the Cincinnati Branch. (Deluxe Checks Company,). I loved going to see my Dad at work, It was amazing to see all the Linotypes and the huge Web Presses. I still love the smell of ink.
I was raised to do a job like this. I'm in my late 30's from Seattle. Both my parents were factory workers, so were my grandparents in WWII. I was raised to be fascinated by machines. Big, loud, complex and hazardous. I'm amazed by them. Excited by how they look and sound and feel. This film makes my mouth water and my mind buzz with excitement, the idea of working on, around and inside this epic piece of equipment that takes a small city to operate. But when I entered the workforce, 9/11 had already happened, the bubble was bursting (and a few more times after) and everything I was raised to love was gone. Although what we have now is markedly better and I enjoy working in the tech and IT sector as a profession, there are times when I fantasize about the idea of working in a place like this, on equipment I can understand and feel in my DNA. More and more of my career is dominated by management and human resources, lying to the faces of other liars while we all try to read through our mutual corporate bullshit. There are times I wish I could work with these men and just do work while making a good living too.
Splendidly written. Thank you.
Is it too much to ask, to be able to just do your job ?
It shouldn't be, but it is ! The more you do for the business you work for, the more money they save by not hiring someone else to do the job that isn't yours. So we the worker wind up doing a job that we aren't qualified to do, adding more stress to your work that you shouldn't have to deal with. The list goes on and on but so long as we the workers keep doing "what has to be done to get the job done", in an everlasting effort to please our overlords so as we can keep our job, they will continue to heap more and more duties to our job description so long as there are people willing to put up with it. Every body does whatever they have to do in order to, at all cost, keep their job. So go ahead, use that new credit card that showed up in the mail today. Stop at the car dealership and test drive that new car you've been eyeing, if you like it, buy it ! Or how about a boat, it sure would be nice this summer at the lake, wouldn't it ! This is the problem with America, they will give you just enough money for your labor to get by on, anything extra they will gladly loan the money to you, with interest. Nearly every adult that I've known well enough throughout my life has been burdened with debt to one extent or the other. They spend their days wishing their lives away, wishing for payday to come, or wishing for the day they will have their debts paid off. The problem is, for most that day never comes, because when that day comes they find that they are carrying far more debt than they had back then. This is why everyone does whatever they are told to do at work, they are job scared because they have so much debt that they can't risk anything that might cost them their jobs. If they were to lose their job, and were out of work for awwhile they would loose everything that they own. Their cars their phones, and the most frightening of all, they would lose their home. They would lose their home because even if they had paid it off, you know they would have at least one mortgage on it that they took out to pay off some of their higher interest credit cards.
Get into print production
We don't honor those who have performed drudgery tasks for their lifetimes in order for so many of us to take their toils for granted. Thank you all who came before us.
I'm glad that everybody was well taken care of in the New York Times and most Newspapers actually. We lost so many good jobs with the loss of the Newspaper Industry.
And it's those who owned stakes the business because of inherited wealth that benefitted most of all from all this work, rather than the workers who actually created it and to whom it is owed.
I saw Linotype machines still be used for newspapers when I visited Cuba in 1996. The operator set some lines of type for me!
I have an old DVD recording of this film. Excellent that they made this film on the last day with hot metal. (I worked with newspaper production at Berlingske Tidende, Denmark from 1985 (just after the end of hot metal in 1984) until 2017
@MartinFroland I originally posted it because a professor of mine would show it every semester but could only find it on VHS. Figured uploading the archives.org copy would save him from hooking up a VCR.
13:55 This guy's words about being replaced by computers hit me deep. (especially because I am watching this on my smartphone of all things!) I am a 31 year old graphic designer. I have only learned and mastered my trade using a computer where I do everything from typesetting, print and digital image production, photo composition, motion graphics, animation, and video editing. I can only image what my industry will look like when I am 60....
I know this is ten months late, but algorithmic data sets have now started to be able to automatically create what is considered eye catching designs using formulas for that we've repeatedly used in media.
People are then used to tweak it to "Maximise the impact on viewers" or so it's said.
So I guess there's still a place for people in the industry, just not as prominent as before and maybe not as numerous as before.
The idea that machines will eventually replace people in fields we never thought will happen will probably eventually happen anyway.
Not to worry. When you're 60 years old, the literacy rate in America will be a rounding error.
No ear protection, no eye protection. Molten lead fumes.
Good times.
and a tobacco pipe
think of all the lead they absorb through their skin handling all of those lead.. holy cow I just realized lino type is "line of type"
@@bellehart3276 LOL!
8:18 - "Sign language is used among the paper's many deaf printers."
i was born in the 80's and always had appreciation and fascination for analogue working methods which required pysichal effort and prowess, the workd environments today lacking the social and community aspects i really could not find
Holy crap they unintentionally documented two old previous generations of print shop.
Well... Halfway unintentionally.
I am sure some of the the printing equipment is still intact, they still have to print a bajillion copies of the thing once a day on the same type of paper. The lead cylinders are probably some type of polymer now. I cant imagine a one to one print speed like that using any other mechanical system. Any ideas?
@@drinksanddice9528 it's still all roller printing, but I imagine machines have been changed out to run even faster.
@@wyattroncin941 I found this ruclips.net/video/avXkRLoSta8/видео.html web offset printing seems to be the way they do it now.
@@drinksanddice9528 Yes, sir, the link you put up above is about offset lithographic printing, but specifically for commercial use, such as magazines and advertising brochures, etc. Most, if not all, newspapers also use the offset litho process, but the configuration of the press units is different, designed specifically for the multiple webs needed for a full size newspaper.
The same cold type process shown in the last section of your video was used to create aluminum litho plates, rather than plastic relief letterpress plates. But the pasting up on page size boards was exactly the same. Then came pagination systems, where an entire page could be designed and created on the computer screen, then sent to a laser printer to create negatives, which were used to make the aluminum plates. Now, negatives have all but been eliminated, and the laser printers are "direct to plate". I am retired from 40 years in commercial printing, and I saw these same changes take place in that sector of the trade. (Mostly, I was an offset press operator, but our shop was small enough that I also worked in pre-press and bindery.)
When USA Today made its debut, extensive research showed them that they would need full editorial color if they were to compete with national news magazines. This forced the industry to find better ways to produce high speed color on newspaper presses, which up to that time had not been designed for color. Goss, MAN Roland, Harris and other press manufacturers rose to the challenge, and advancements in automation, remote control of ink and water balance and register of colors is very remarkable today.
Newspapers are certainly struggling, but I don't think they will completely disappear, as some folks are saying. Press manufacturers continue to make advancements in technology. Only a few years ago the Buffalo News invested in new reel stand automation, and last month the Spokesman Review (in Spokane, Washington) opened a brand new building, which is off site, and will be used to produce their own paper each night, plus commercial printing jobs and perhaps other publishers' newspapers. These are just two that i happen to know about.
There is also research into using ink-jet printing for newspapers, and machines already exist to produce smaller quantity runs of newspapers. They need to improve the quality at higher speeds before it can be used for big city dailies, but I'm guessing that day will probably come.
Thank you so much for putting up this video.
Amazing documentary! Type setting was my great grandfathers first (and only) job when he arrived in America. My father told me even 20 years after he retired the tips of his fingers were still black from the lead!
I did it for a while during my masters degree, we had to use this special soap to get the black off. One of the professor's research focus was on early American typesetting, its a strangely interesting profession for sure.
It's amazing how that one guy started working there in the 1920's and used the same process for the next 50 years until he retired. Nowadays with the speed in which technology changes one has to constantly adapt their skills and learn new tools lest they be left in the dust.
Ive watched this so many times now. Intoxicating: the subject, the way its filmed, the narrator, the old guys in the shop. Love it
I show this video to my university students every term. They’re enthralled. Most have never bought a newspaper but grew up watching their grandparents read them.
@divetank I uploaded it because a faculty member was showing a vhs copy of it everyear and I thought this would be an easier way to access it.
My first job as a newspaper reporter was in a weekday PM paper that was still using hot metal in 1965. The most vivid memory I have is the sound of the old linotypes clicking away. It all came back to me watching this
I love this glimpse into our history. I love the advancements that computers have brought to our lives - fewer jobs working in environments with toxic chemicals and heavy equipment and deafening noise. But I also feel like we've lost a lot of knowledge about using complex mechanical devices and the processes to run them efficiently. More importantly, information and knowledge is greatly influenced by its medium. In the age of lead and linotype, more thought was put into the words we wanted to convey and it was more permanent. Today, news and information has little to no permanence and it's assembled like disposable fast food. .
*The documentary is also a case study of obsolescence of a profession. **14:22** He is correct, all that knowledge and image how much effort and money it to aquire that, will be wasted from one day to another.*
It's not wasted. It's codified into the design of the machine that will perform the automated process.
Absolutely loving how industrial this is shot especially the intro with closeups of the equipment.
Thank you so much to whoever preserved this information for posterity. Absolutely fascinating. And thank you to Drinks and Dice for posting this.
Tremendous documentary. Thanks for sharing.
I just spent a very short period of my early life at two provincial UK newspapers as a Lino Op. I feel as though I know all these guys in my mind. It was a trade of close friends that no longer exists. I went on to be a pro. musician and magician so I did ok. 🎹
Using deaf people in the print shop makes sense since the only way to communicate amid all that noise is through sign language.
They also work with a lot of lead, and deafness can be a symptom of lead poisoning. I'm willing to bet this was the more likely reason.
Wow, that brings back memories. I was 15 years old when I started running a Linotype machine. Looks complicated, super impressive in action, but not that difficult to master. That was in 1970, and the shop was transitioning from letterpress to offset printing. I still miss the craftsmanship of letterpress work, the business cards really stood out then.
Wish I could pick your brain on what it was like. Thank you for your comments and insight!
This may seem like an obvious question but did you guys have any issues with lead poisoning? Seems like a hazard of the job.
Yeah, that was an amazing time in printing. I ran a Meihle Vertical press when I was in my early 20s, my Dad was a printer and I took up Graphic Design. That was an amazing process. And, with using lead, it was 100% reusable, melt back down and cast again. Then I went thru transition of the drawing table to the computer in Graphic Design.
I knew my dad was a genius to run this type of business. The smartest men would come to him on how to properly word manuscripts and books.
How I miss Hot Metal, skill, comradeship and a part of my life gone now.
Thanks! Me too :
Ex Linotye operator (1953 - 1980)
I was born 2 months after this was filmed. As a software engineer, it's amazing to contemplate the state of automation I was born into.
Coax it, Cajole to make it fit! Awesome!
Hello from an old Linotype setter (also taught at 2 printing colleges in the UK)
. The metal used isnt just lead, (it would be too soft on its own and wouldnt last very long on a printing press) Its made up of 3 metals, Lead, antimony and tin. the 2nd two are to give stength and to fill the letters on the matrix.
I was taught rudimentary linotype in 8th Grade in 1979 in Print Shop. I think I may have been one of the last to have been taught this soon to be obsolete skill.
Yet another viewing. One of the best docs ever made
Your not alone. There is a professor I work with who shows his class every semester. He only had a VHS copy so I found it on the internet archives and threw it up here for convenience.
My grandfather was a typesetter, my dad a printer... and me? bindery and machinist. Good times.
This is nothing short of an amazing film of the process and evolution.
8MB disk packs. Yup. That was a thing.
Now we have portable phones with 128GB of storage.
Do you remember the sound they made? I toured a mainframe facility in the late 80s and remember the noise and cold, like a really slow movie projector.
@@drinksanddice9528 Modern data centres are still typically about as cold... assuming, of course, that they're not stuffed with more equipment than their air conditioning can handle: I remember a DC here in Vancouver, Canada, 15 years ago that had dozens of stand fans and several portable air conditioning units scattered around the place, because they'd installed too much equipment. =D
I remember my college professors had those disk packs in their office, full of tests.
8mb was huge back then! Even 720k was state of the art in the late 70s. I bought a new PC in 2003 that still rocked a 1.44mb floppy drive!
Back when I was in high school, we had a Linotype machine and an offset press in printing class. This was back in 1967-1968. It was actually fun to run the machine, make the lines of type with molten lead, and place them in a rack, in which we printed the school newspaper. I remember I always had trouble with the keyboard layout as it was completely different than that of a typewriter. If I remember right, the capital letters were on the right side of the keyboard and the small letters were on the left. Number in the middle, I think. I remember being told that we had to fill up a line with blanks, or if the line wasn't full we would have a squirt of hot lead, and the possibility of getting burn't. I'm sure today they would never allow anything like this in a high school, because of the hot lead and the lead poisoning issues.
The march of progress is ever forward. Now in the Internet era, the newspaper itself is now obsolete.
As a former pressman, it is fascinating to see how it was done in the past. We used thin aluminum plates, lead plates were before my time. I never got to see the process of how the engraving plates were produced as they were done offsite. Very interesting documentary.
David Weiss, born either in 1911 or 1912; d. 2005 (NYT obit, 08/16/05 Margalit Fox).
Excellent. As relevant today as it was 42 years ago when it was made. Wait, 42? This is the answer to everything!
This documentary is an absolute marvel, a witness of a gold age of workshops and real artisan, when people were in the awareness that working with hands was fundamental for humanity, and too much enginery would leads to inhumanity ! Here we are !
I remember in h.s taking a print shop class and learning how to type set and silkscreen.Later on I worked for the Chicago Tribune and got to see how thing's were done from scratch all the way to the newspaper.
That's why the saying was "hot off the press" because they used molten lead! It was nice to see that people who were hard of hearing actually had an advantage here, because they could communicate by sign-language and the loud noise of the machinery didn't bother them. I'd like to know if the readers noticed any difference between the papers produced by the linotype workers and those made using computer technology.
Forty-two years ago, the computer killed the linotypist.
Today, the computer is killing the whole paper.
On the other hand, newspapers killing fewer trees now
Gnome de Plume And more trees are killing CO2
Stop using the word "kill" for everything its annoying as hell
As an Englishman I think I can recognise Brooklyn accents there....🇬🇧❤️🇺🇲
So many steps and tiny parts! I can't believe it was still like this in 1978
Also, I wonder how many times the cold type workers cut themselves!
One of them had a bandage around one of his fingers so you can just imagine.
I am thinking lead poisoning lead was not that big of a seal in 1978. Afterall, interior house paint had lead dust in it.
I find the mechanics of the old way much more fascinating than the computer age.
I do too, but... I grew up in the computer age, and as a software engineer, I understand them thoroughly. The _mechanical_ marvels of yesteryear? *Wow!!!*
seeing every single step of process happening in front of our eyes is what makes it amazing. They are artisans. And did it every single day! A computer just does it and ok, ready, Is so boring
I wonder what the neurological disease and cancer rates were with these guys. It seems like there would be lead contamination absolutely everywhere.
This was cool. In college I worked on one of the last compugraphic type setters which exposed photo negatives. It produced way better type then the laser printer that replaced it, but no one had to do manual paste up.
*Thank you very much! I saw one of these machines live in my early Graphic Design student days.*
when cut and paste was literal 26:00 I saw this for real back in 1983 .. I was the first person not to write papers or use a secretary on my new IBM PC, wordstar, and a daisy wheel printer ... back then multiple people proofed your copy, the pro proofreader, the lineotypers and editor, at the least. Before computers it was rarer to see a typo get through into print, when it did it was a major source of laughter for all and usually more among the non major newspapers or book publishers.
Geez.... I'm old but this was before my time... when I got into production pretty much from the first day was when they went into full pagination ...
It must have been exciting to produce the printed page "hot off the press"!
This video always needs to be bumped.
I was a dot etcher before Photoshop existed. Chromacom; Hell.
The Klimt camera. The step and repeat machine.. An era that reversed to became "Are"
No regrets.
14:25
wow this man really saw in the future
that's incredible how much work this was to make a single page and how much cheap the selling price was
Yeah but thing about how many they were selling.
And we went from this where people could (and would proofread) before distribution. Now in the computer age, they use spellcheck, grammarly and make typo mistakes daily and often.
Now it's qaz wsx and plm okn who have taken over
Now you can figure out why we call them Upper Case and Lower Case.
I still don't get it. I must have zoned out during that part or something. Can you explain?
The typesetting case they used holds the minuscule type on the bottom of the type-case, and the large type in the upper section of the type-case. The California case for hand composition keeps them on the right of the case.
Also, in the new cold type process, figure out the REAL "cut and paste" job.
Linotype is one of the best bullet casting alloys. I bet a majority of that lead ended up cast into bullets once the machines were scrapped
Beautiful!😢
27:29 he’s viewing his paper. And he is pleased
I remember doing paste-ups using printed type from Linotypes and eventually graduating to cold computer-generated type. I was lucky (?) to have both feet in both eras.
I'd love to take apart one of those linotype machines, the mechanical clockwork stuff is cool.
Wonderful document, very didactic.
Great video. I'm still trying to understand how the 520 deg lead alloy didn't burn the cardstock when the half round plates were cast.
The cardboard was damp. It had to be so they could roll out the type impression into it. The dampness also kept it from burning.
it was asbestos based paper, as far as I know
This breaks my heart.
ofg
I was mid meltdown and then he fixed it. whew!
"the work of human eyes, the work of human hands" how long will this be true? Ai is surely going to take over press and that's not good
Thank you for sharing!
sad truth is that, likely, most who appear in this documentary has already passed away or is close to it...
15:23 the warden from Shawshank Redemption?
Ironically, there are a lot of videos about hot metal type since a number of Linotype machines are still in operation (mostly small printers keeping it alive in an "artisanal" way, but operating nonetheless) but there's really no other video on the internet that shows how the first generation of "cold type" worked. There's still a rather interesting page composition process where they literally paste the boxes onto a draft page and it looks like they fed the pasted-up sheets back into the system like a Xerox machine on steroids. After PCs and WYSIWYG displays that process was replaced by software -- one version after another.
1:43 an old Louis Rossmann
This was fascinating. It was filmed in 1978. I wonder. Does the Times still print the newspaper with the "new" process shown hear or did it too get replaced?
The newfangled photographic 'cold comp' technology is obsolete and gone as well (except for the terms 'copy' and 'paste'). Oh, the humanity.
fascinating ! Thanks for the upload
This was fascinating!!!!
Wow, back when news companies still proofread their stories.
It still looks like their first computer system was pretty labour intensive (is that where the term cut and paste comes from today? lol) I bet their computers have been upgraded many times since this. Would be interesting when they decommissioned these computers shown, my guess would be some time in the late 80's
Thank you for this
The replacement has been replaced.
ruclips.net/video/4h4GMhVz5qg/видео.html
No PPE for lead, lol
I went to school with someone who was writing their dissertation on early modern print workers. She found out that very few of them died from the lead, most of them died from alcoholism. I bet the two were related.
27:20 "REAGAN CAN'T WIN" lol
Spy Magazine (sarcasm):
1. Speaking of predicting the future, in the Jan-Feb 1988 issue, Spy Magazine urges Trump to run for president.
“We have come to believe that a Donald Trump candidacy is viable. ”
“[T]his is one candidate who will not let you down. After all, we already have Donald Trump’s personal guarantee that if he did run for president, he would win.”
All I can say is 😢😢😢
How did they do those pictures with gray tints??
Cuando llego la modernidad ... que tristeza ... casi un siglo de utilidad brindaron la maquinas de lynotipo
Anyone else wondering how long they used that new cold press tech before it was replaced by a better method? Nowadays the idea of physically cutting and pasting paper articles onto a board seems primitive.
I would guess about 10 years or so as the late 1980's was when electronic desktop publishing was introduced and popularized.
I thought this was going to be about an Israeli guy who was retiring.
Donald Knuth took this personally.
11 hot metal typesetters disliked this video
That lead poisoning tho
One of my peers wrote her dissertation on early-modern type setters. They worked like gig workers, would jump between jobs during the day, and use the money from the morning job to drink before the afternoon jobs. She actually found that setters dying from lead poisoning was rare because most of them drank themselves to death first.
so many watches
I know, I wonder why. Typesetting must be having a Renascence as of yesterday or something.
@@drinksanddice9528 When I said watches, I meant all the watches that people are wearing in the video. This video got to the front of /r/videos on reddit so that's why you're getting so many views
@@enigmaticennui Oh ok I was wondering, appreciate the info.
@@drinksanddice9528 No problem, great quality upload. Thank you
I haven't worn a wristwatch in like ten years now because my last one broke, but I always have a supercomputer in my pocket... and most of what it does for me is tell time. ;3
The moment when you realize you took the wrong major.
Are the guys all deaf because of the constant noise?
Definitely not
Some were deaf to start with and communicated by sign language - an advantage to know how to sign in such a noisy environment.
@@zappawoman5183
They hire deaf people to work in a noisy room. Makes only sense.
Hua? Can't hear you. I worked in printing for 40 years.
Newspapers sometimes hired deaf people to work in the composing room because it didn't disturb them. I worked with at a newspaper where some of the deaf compositors were still around in the 1980s-90s, into the beginning of the desktop composition era.
See this film in high-resolution along with many more printing and journalism films here: printingfilms.com/
why would we need to watch it twice?
@@drinksanddice9528
Because Hight Resolution...! Hello...?!
@@potatosalad5355 Yeah I had never considered high resolution
Dude, I've watched this like four times over the years
How did these guys not suffer from lead poisoning?
According to one of my peers dissertation, early modern typsetters (movable type set by hand) mostly died of alcoholism. They would set so many pages of a book, get paid per line, spend the money on booze, get drunk, and go to the next printer and do the same thing every day all year round. It's not actually pure lead, its type metal which is antimony, tin, and lead, but I'm sure heavy metal poisoning was still and issue, I bet they rotate work stations once a week or something so they dont kill all of the skilled linotypists.
along with lead poisoning, a lot of the chemicals used to clean the type, the inks, etc lead to lung problems like emphysema and liver problems like cirrhosis as well due to being around it all the time and sometimes elbow deep in chemicals for cleaning type, etc. Most of these problems wouldn't really be known until 20 - 30 years later.
Lead will melt at a temperature lower than the temperature at which it emits toxic fumes.
yeah, but don't lick your fingers. (from someone who spent years casting his own bullets.)
Lead poisoning is most dangerous to those with developing nervous systems. The greatest danger would be to a woman working in that environment who did not yet know she was pregnant.
Makes me wonder if there have ever been lawsuits about that.
respect to our parents. they pass school without google
I have a clearer version of this. See ruclips.net/video/JmwH-KzWd9Q/видео.html (It may not be a lot better, but it does have some amount of processing and a different origin.)
Please do.
Thanks for reminding me.
Submit it to archive.org !
Did you upload it?
Have you had a chance to upload it yet?
Where are all of those works of human eyes, brains, and hands now ? Did they think, back then, that the automation would stop at the computer taking place of only the Linotype machines, and the "hot type"?
They couldn't have even dreamed that only four and a half decades later that we would be looking at a future where artificial intelligence is, more likely than not, going to take the jobs of the writers, artists, and countless others. Who knows what will be next !
People were dreaming about AI back then...
No one’s wearing gloves or masks when handling all that lead
Can't imagine, the lazy ass generation of now, doing that kind of work..
I work 12 hours a day 6 days a week and have a family I support, I also do all the cooking. Does that make me lazy?
Yeah dude, fuck speed and efficiency. Let's go back to printing 14 lines of text a minute!
Do people even think before typing this kind of reactionary bullshit?
Yes, lazy af, what are you doing on the internet?
You're fucking stupid.
Time traveler from 2024. Human brain is not going to be needed in 40 years.