Vintage work crew photos

[techcollect]

There are a few places (museums) that have kept various lead typesetters functional for demonstration purposes.
I was recently in a up-cycle store that had an actual full type font storage cabinet (no type) the ones in large newspapers like this would have been had to be serviced with a rolling ladder.

Over the past 5 decades, many font job case drawers where scrapped and many of the 2" deep drawers were turned into wall mounted what-not displays.

The cases holding the drawers are categorized by font, size and upper and lower case letters. (upper case was on top, lower case on bottom.)
You might imagine how many pieces were needed for a large edition newspaper.
Linotype machines were extremely complex machines and had an enormous network of parts once described
to me by a former newspaper typesetter as "a manual typewriter met a concert organ".

One of the downsides was working long-term with molten lead and it's fumes.

The dreaded fail of a typesetter was 'pieing'.
The machine had a metal framed 'chase' which the metal mirror reversed type was placed in to have molten lead form the casting to mount in the printing press. Once the type was in place, it was locked into the chase with quoin locks which placed lateral pressure to the chase sides.
There is no bottom. After the chase was full, it was locked and removed from the machine.
If the type is not locked well or if one piece is askew, the entire set can be lost due to 'Pieing'. All of the metal hits the floor in thousands of pieces which have to be swept up, dusted off and re-cased into the correct font drawers and the typesetter starting over at the first letter.

The were a few makers of equipment, Merganthaler being the maker of 'Lino-Type' equipment and was market dominant.
Another was Monotype. Monotype is still in business and largely produces intellectual property licensed as computer type fonts.
Monotype bought out the Linotype catalog of fonts.
Merganthaler proceeded into the early computer typesetting era and saw the transformation of most new typesetters were women.
Merganthaler was purchased by and became a division of Heidelberg (printing press manufacturer.

Another common, smaller machine was made by Ludlow. They made smaller units that cast lead into type set by hand.
These were single type line machines known as 'Headliners' and typically used for very large font sizes above 24 point type.

There are still shops turning out work on Ludlow machines for custom work. (expensive work)