By: pagda on 2/8/12
Being an old Intertype operator (C4) for some years, I was very interested to read about this movie.

Once the Kentish Gazette (est 1717 in Canterbury, UK) moved away from Intertypes, I was sent up to Leeds in Yorkshire to learn how to maintain these new beasts.

Gone were the cams and disser rail and in their place a whole spread of computer chips!

Whilst on one of my training courses troubleshooting Compugraphic ACM machines at M. H. Whittaker & Sons in Leeds,I was lucky enough to be present when they completed the restoration of one of the original Blower Linotypes – and saw it perform!

This machine can now be found in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. I tried to see it a few years ago...but the particular museum was closed for renovations.

Both Linotype and Intertype tried to improve on their totally mechanical - traditional - machines and brought out their part mechanical/part electronic products - the Linotype Electron and the Intertype Monarch. Neither really took off.

I had experience of the Electron - it was not a good experience with the electronics causing all sorts of headaches.

Pleasant memories however, of 8 hour shifts with my trusty C4! I look forward to perhaps seeing the movie.

By: admin on 2/1/12
Here’s something for starters (writes Peter Coleman): I guess I was nine or ten when the most exciting Linotype, a Fleet 54 ‘with the lot’ turned up… on my birthday.
Probably sourced by my journalist-turned-publisher dad from a trade show, it came with all the trimmings: Mohr saw (for variable line lengths), Hydraquadder (pushbutton quadding), and a paper-tape reader which impressed all concerned before being taken off.
What a ‘birthday present’!
It came on a low loader, but of course, they had to take the two tonnes of technology apart to lug it down the alley and up the stairs to the composing room, where it joined a Model 4 and an amorphous creature which might once have been a One.
The trio were held up by a new steel joist and pillar, up which I had once shinned to earn a single reward of five shillings. But not the second time, I recalled with dismay.
Linotypes were the lifeblood of the local weekly newspaper my father had first managed, and then saved from closure through a complicated deal based on £500 he had borrowed from his uncle.
And they came and went with the highs and lows of a small UK newspaper business which also sustained itself – and kept the ops in overtime earnings – by typesetting books. We were one of a few trade setters with a fount of Caledonia, and I recall the dialect poems of Williams Barnes, not to mention the spiritualist weekly ‘Two Worlds’ – nearly drove the lino ops to distraction.
If the pots of molten lead (four parts tin, 11 antimony?) and their gas heaters didn’t.
In the Sheerness, Kent, printworks, someone had engineered a device in which a lead-filled lever was released by a solenoid to turn the gas on in time to heat the pots for the upcoming shift. It was of course, prone to fail if the pilot blew out, and air quality could be a problem especially on foggy days when ventilation was poor.
Later that Fleet 54 – and one my father bought from another show and had installed in the garage of a country house we were about to buy – were kept busy with the ‘blackleg’ production of classified advertising for a UK daily during the print strike of 1959. Copy arrived by telex (also installed with amazing speed, given the waiting list for that equipment) and the galleys of type were wrapped, packed and accompanied by train to their mystery destination in Bond-like operation.
I did the London leg a few times, and occasionally the bit where ingots of metal – also ‘gift-wrapped’ – were lightly carried out via that main street alley to a car waiting to take them to my father’s rural production site.
Happily the ‘father of the chapel’ – whose eyrie was a flat above a shop on the other side of the road – fancied the idea of a job with the newspaper, and likely turned a blind eye.
Later he helped my father dismantle and rebuild a four-unit Victory Kidder letterpress rotary, and both the press, the Fleet 54 and he were still there when I ‘returned’ to the family business after completing school and a journalistic indentureship (and holidays spent setting headlines on one of the ‘Mickey Mouse’ casters my father created from cut-down linos).
A ‘splash’ – the chastening moment when your own inattention leads to the distribution of molten lead over everything in range – is every lino operator’s nightmare; we had one otherwise well-behaved lino above which lead was found stuck to the four-metre ceiling.
Machine comps – to give them their proper title – were a breed apart: Craftsmen, typographers, engineers and yes, often card-holding prima donnas, our team had a range of skills in which keeping the cams and levers of the mysterious Merganthaler machine turning was as important as the delicate placement of hyphenation, letterspacing or ligature.
Eventually of course, they were overtaken by progress. First the rotary and then the linos went out to make way for a Goss Community and then Compugraphic photocomposing. Etaoinshrdlu gave way to qwertyuiop, and let’s not pretend the retrained ops were as happy as they had been in their hot-metal heyday.
I made plans for the last one – my ‘birthday’ Fleet 54 – to be put on display in the reception office, but neglected to supervise the move personally. In the process, it toppled backwards from a forklift, smashing the row of giant cams… and went to join the others at the scrapyard.