History of the Linotype Company

5. The Logotype and Other Competitors

115 THE LOGOTYPE AND OTHER COMPETITORS 5 THE LOGOTYPE Ottmar Mergenthaler was very sensitive to criticism regarding his inventions. When the Monotype was introduced in 1890, he heard that its ability to correct one character at a time was superior to the Linotype’s one line at a time capability. During his last years, Mergenthaler proposed another composing machine. However, his biography does not mention this large and complicated device that he and Emil Lawrenz worked on. Mergenthaler died in 1899, leaving Lawrenz to continue developing this unusual composing machine. Only a few sources contain information about this machine: the illustration and brief description in Milestones of Machine Typesetting, published by Mergenthaler Linotype in 1944,1 and the letters patent No. 794,628, issued by the United States Patent Office four years after application. Richard Huss produced a small book, Mergenthaler’s Last Invention: A Study of the Logotype Casting and Composing Machine of 1901, which summarized this information, and it is the only documented source.2 Other treatises or biographical items on Mergenthaler fail to mention his work on this machine , and the only extant example is with the Henry Ford Museum at Dearborn, MI. The machine was, and is, a real curiosity. It was never advertised or offered for sale by the company. The patent (No. 794,628) was assigned to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company of New York by Emil Lawrenz in 1901. As late as 1959 the Logotype Machine remained in the “Milestones Room” in the Mergenthaler factory at 29 Ryerson Street in Brooklyn, with a collection of 13 other early typesetting and composing machines. The company disposed of these machines, offering them to various educational institutions and museums. MERGENTHALER LINOTYPE COMPANY MUSEUM LABEL FOR THE LOGOTYPE, ITEM NO. 61 (1901): LOGOTYPE CASTING AND COMPOSING MACHINE (O. MERGENTHALER AND E. LAWRENZ, INVENTORS) 1901 The product of this machine was a line of logotypes, all but the final one of which, in each line, had cast thereon at its outer end a justifying space, and the final one had cast on its inner end a “correcting” space for exact justification of the line. The matrices were quite different from Linotype matrices, though serving the same purpose, having both font notches and teeth for distribution. Assembling, justification and distribution were also different from Linotype. The magazine was divided into eight sections and might contain as many as four fonts or any other combination of matrices of the same point size. Normally, the four forward sections contained the lower-case and the four rear contained the uppercase matrices. The method of distribution required that Font No. 1 be contained in sections 1 and 5, Font No. 2 in sections 2 and 6, Font No. 3 in sections 3 and 7, Font No. 4 in sections 4 and 8. For distribution, the matrices, after being separated into four fonts or groups, dropped into a series of carriers, each having four rows of pockets and each holding one matrix. These carriers transported the matrices step by step over the magazine sections and under feelers containing tooth combinations serving to release the various matrices to drop into their correct channels. Museum No. 61, 56” x 52” x 84”, 4,200 lbs. The Logotype Machine 116 The use of ligatures and logotypes is very old, dating back to Gutenberg, who used many “tied” or joined letters that were intended to imitate manuscript texts. Logotypes of the late nineteenth century were not tied together with ligatures (a true ligature is the little curved line that ties together letters such as st or ct, and in particular the tied-letter combinations in German, ft, fz) but were much-used combinations of letters cast on one body, such as ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl, and others. Logotype cases of special design were large and inconvenient. In the context of this machine, the word “logotype ” derives from “logos,” meaning “the word.” Mergenthaler’s idea was that a machine could make corrections by correcting only words in a line and their accompanying word spaces, as opposed to having to correct the entire line. Making corrections is not discussed in the patent. One can only assume that the corrections were to be made in groups and inserted later, and if the new logotypes differed in word-length, the spacing in the whole line would be affected—in fact, the whole line would have to be reset and recast, the very situation that the Logotype machine was attempting to obviate. The...