Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

2O6 BRITAIN AT WORK. by hand. The modern composing room, instead of presenting a picture of rows of men standing before great trays and desks of type, is filled with gleaming machinery, working with a skill and certainty that appears more than mechanical. Although in some offices, and notably in that of the Times, separate types are set by machinery, in the vast majority of cases the Linotype machine is in use. hand about two thousand ens an hour, and each piece of type has afterwards to be re- placed in its proper box. The machine under the fingers of a good operator will set 8,000 ens an hour, distributing the matrices, the lines of type being melted again when they have been used. The “ copy ” as it comes from the editorial rooms is distributed sheet by sheet or para- graph by paragraph to the compositors, so rd, almost like that of a typewriter, and he touches the keys, one by one there Photo: Cassell & Co., Ltd. TYPE-SETTING BY HAND, “ MORNING- POST ” OFFICE. drop from separate compartments little pieces of metal, called the matrices, each with the form of a letter of the alphabet on its face. When sufficient of these to make a line have fallen into place, a lever is depressed, the line of matrices is raised and carried along, and after automatic spacing the hot type-metal is forced into the matrices, and in a second, as it were, a solid line of type is formed. Then the machine, as it goes forward with its work, picks up the used matrices, and one by one distributes them to the separate channels of the magazine from which they originally came. Machine setting is several times as speedy as the most expert hand work. A good compositor can set by that frequently a dozen or more men will be engaged upon the same article. When all have completed their “ takes,” as they are called, each block of type has to be arranged in proper sequence, and either then or before the sections are assembled an inked roller is passed over the face of the type, and an impression is taken on a sheet of paper. This is the “ proof,” upon which all errors and corrections are marked by a reader, to be quickly put right by the com- positor. Then upon heavy steel tables, and within a flat steel frame rather larger than the page of a newspaper, the columns of type are placed in position until a complete page is made up, each item of news in the place that it will occupy on the printed sheet.