Composer – Wikipedia

In printing, a dialing machine is a machine that assembles lead characters intended to print a text, by replacing the traditional manual composition. Some of these machines can ensure the justification of the lines and the distribution of characters after printing. We sometimes find the term “composer”, while “composer” designates a woman typographer “traditional ^{[ first ]} ».

The typographic composition can be summed up at three stages:

• The actual composition: the typographer takes the characters (including letters, punctuation signs and spaces) in the breakage, each being stored in his Cassetin. He does not need to see the character, but he can read and therefore instantly check the result of his work in the composter he holds in hand. A machine can “call” each character, previously stored in a clean compartment, by the action of a key.

• The justification consists in adding uniformly distributed spaces, so that the line is filled, without any game, with the desired length. The mechanization of this operation is more difficult.
• The distribution consists, after use, in taking up the characters one by one and putting them back in their original breakage. The worker must see each character to identify him. To mechanically identify a character, it must be provided with distinctive material elements which differentiate it from the others, like notches: the manufacture of the character is complicated and weakens it. Otherwise, it is a worker who recognizes the character and sends him in his place by a touch: we gain relatively little compared to the manual distribution.

The various inventions of composing machines have all emerged during the XIX ^{It is} century, when the typographic press knew great upheavals and the edition and the press were booming. Only the composition remained practically unchanged from Gutenberg: the typographer worker “raised” the letter in a breakage, placed it on his composter, justified the line, then placed all of the lines on a height before proceeding. Then, it was necessary to do the opposite operation, the distribution: take up each character and replace it in his Cassetin. The typographers had great dexterity in these movements, but these manual operations still required a lot of time and the mechanizes became the objective of printers or mechanics, so that between 1820 and 1925, nearly 300 patents were deposited ^{[ 2 ]} .

Experiences take place periodically to accelerate the composition, starting with “rational breakages”, then logotypes , blocks comprising several characters depending on the frequency of association of letters in the language (double letters, triple or quadruple). But these innovations weigh little before the long experience of a traditional worker. The trend will therefore be to “piano” type machines, with a keyboard which controls the selection of the character by action of a key: the character is put in place in a composter either by gravity or by the action of a mechanism , from a spring or even, as in one of the first versions of the linotype, the Linotype Blower, by a compressed airbase.

First attempts (1815-1850) [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The first machines, of the “piano” type, were imagined, in 1815 by the Englishman Benjamin Forster, then by the future publisher and philosopher Pierre Leroux in 1820, but remained in the state of projects.

Overall, the characters are stored in a store, the action of a touch brings them down into a composter, the justification remains manual and the distribution ignored or complicated by the fact that each character must be provided with notches or d ‘notches.

• Follow the essays of the writer, philosopher and future French academician Pierre-Simon Ballanche, son of the director of the printing of Lyon, between 1819 and 1833: touches activated a spring which ejecting the character of the Cassetin. His ideas may have influenced William Church.

• Gaubert, in 1826, was ruined in the development of a complicated machine, the gerotype, where the operator must activate keyboard and crankset, and where the characters provided with all their faces are agitated in all directions to be distributed : placed in the right direction, then “recognized” and stored.

• Napoleon Chaix (around 1844) developed a composer that works with a single worker, manual justification, distribution by a separate machine.

• Adrien Delcambre, associated with English James Hedden Young, offers the pianotype (patented in 1840). A composing machine, and a distributing machine, awarded at the 1855 international exhibition, presented as being used by female staff.

• Captain Rosenborg, for his part, announces a faster machine than that of Young and Delcambre, including a “composer” where the characters are sent to the composter by an endless screw, and a “distributor”, quickly fell into the oversight ^{[ 3 ]} .

• The poet Gérard de Nerval, keen on typography, filed in 1845 a patent for a stereographer machine, where a series of juxtaposed wheels on the same axis each bear all the characters in relief. By rotating them, we compose a line, which can be printed in hollow in a plastic form forming mold, or print on autographic paper to be postponed on a lithographic stone ^{[ 4 ]} .

• From 1851, the Danish Soërensen, installed in Paris, offered a machine, the taskyp, equipped with a double cylinder acting as a composer and a distributor, a great mechanical ingenuity. After dissolution of his company, Soërensen returned to Denmark and dies before his invention knew success.

Composing machines in the second half of the XIX ^{It is} century [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Kastenbein machine. On the left, the keyboard and the store. The seated character is justification. On the right, the distributing machine.

In the second half of the century appeared machines which are effectively used by large printing works, and others which are failures:

• Hattersley: Robert Hattersley, from Manchester, offers a machine (1857) where the composer is seated in front of a keyboard and must manually justify; The distribution is done with another machine where the operator must visually recognize each character. Hattersley was used by the Newcastle Daily Journal , The new free press and the Tag -Latt , in Vienna.
• Kastenbein: Charles or Karl Kastenbein was a bookbinder in Paris. He returned to Germany with a machine manufactured by an unknown French printer, who died before he was carried out his invention. Kastenbein develops it himself. The machine, patented in 1869, requires two operators, a composer and a justifier. A vertical character store overcomes the keyboard, the machine can be activated by steam or a pedal. It has the disadvantage of breaking almost half of the characters. At Times , the question is resolved by sending the characters used to the melting and providing new characters with each use. A separate machine ensures the distribution: each character, thrown in bulk in a store, comes in front of the operator who sends it to his store by pressing the corresponding key ^{[ 5 ]} .
• Paige Compositor: Around 1885, James Paige built a perfected machine (according to him) which can automatically justify and distribute, which obtains no success, except that it was supported by the writer Mark Twain who invested and lost in the adventure a large part of his property (300,000 $ , or 7 million current dollars). On two machines built, one was sold by scrap, the other is at the house-museum of Mark Twain.
• Empire: Among the composers who had had some success, is the Empire. According to a patent filed in 1857 by W. H. Houston, who sold him to Gray and Green, major printers from New York, the machine expressed at a M. Burr, then to Henry Trush, who baptized her empire: 175 copies would have been sold between 1890 and 1904. The Empire consists of two machines: the composer, whose characters are provided with two notches, which is served by two operators , one that composes, one that justifies; The second, the distributor, distributes the characters by separating the standard characters (devoid of the two notches) which could have been used simultaneously.
• Thorne: The Thorne, the first patent of which dates from 1869, takes up the principles of Soërensen. It is the one that is very successful, to the point of competing with the linotype, thanks to its robustness and its simplicity, although it still requires three operators.

Composers-founders [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

The principle that ultimately prevails in terms of mechanized composition is that of machines that found the characters, eliminating the use of traditional characters. For this, you have to go back, and go back to the idea of ​​Louis-Étienne Herhan. In 1797, this printer, faced with the problem of the blocks obtained by casts which quickly lost their qualities, proposed to melt not from the characters, but of the hollow matrices: there was only one molding, instead of three. The matrices simply had to be sized to be assembled in lines like the usual characters. The melting of an entire page was melted, from “paginaire matrices”. Herhan called his “monotypia” system. Because of minor drawbacks, this process did not go any further. But the principle of the matrix and the melting of blocks was going to be the key to the new composing machines ^{[ 6 ]} .

• The Machine Material (1897) by M. Wicks, succeeding a simple composer machine, background of mobile characters. A Wicks replaces the Kastenbein distributors at Times .
• The typograph of Rogers (1890), by its simplicity of construction, had some success despite competition from the linotype. It was made in Germany until the 1960s.
• The Linotype of Mergenthaler represents the culmination of the process, thousands of copies were produced and used between 1885 and the 1970s where the photocomposition won, before IT. In these machines, these are copper or brass matrices, provided with notches allowing distribution, which circulate and constitute the essential of the system, the melted lead generating a block of characters with each line.

• The monotype, developed significantly at the same time (1887), composed unique characters instead of block lines, which facilitates correction. The keyboard strike generates a coded perforated strip which is then “read” by the character founder, an independent machine. This division of the process into two separate positions has the advantage of putting the operator (or operator) in the shelter of toxic lead vapors. On the other hand, the perforated band, a real “memory” before the letter, allows to keep compound text, without immobilizing bulky lead shapes and without having to grasp the text again.

• Monoline, developed in 1892 by an old Linotype employee, W. S. Scudder, is a simpler design line founder. It is made in Canada and Germany to escape the linotype patents.

Photocomposition [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

1965 Lumithype photocompose.

The use of photography to compose texts arises from the XIX ^{It is} A century, but it was the fact of isolated research, photographic techniques are logically directed towards the reproduction of images. The typographic impression, which is then the only possibility, requires the types in relief. Things change with the appearance of offset. The printer shape is no longer a block of characters and shots, but a plaque where texts and images are transferred photographically. However, to compose the texts, we are always forced to compose in lead, manually or mechanically. It is this fact, totally part of the routine of the profession, which surprises the neophyte René Higonnet, visiting for the first time in his life a printing, in Lyon, in 1944. This telephony engineer, amateur photographer, takes himself Imagine a machine that would make up texts from negative matrices. He works on the project with his collaborator Louis Moyroud; After years of development, the Lumithype was manufactured and marketed under the Photon brand until the 1960s. Other manufacturers follow and gradually, photocomposers replace the ancient linotypes and monotypes. In the 1980s, IT is replacing photocomposition.

Like all innovations that increase productivity, composing machines cause loss of use and changes. This phenomenon is sensitive with the appearance of linotypes. Previous machines, not very widespread, still require two to three operators. Overall, the composers cause less social disturbances than the arrival of mechanical presses in the 1830s. But from the start, and it is an argument frequently put forward by manufacturers, we can now entrust the work to women or even children. We highlight the ease of work, the little arduousness (we can now work seated). In fact, the undeclared, but perfectly understood argument is that the wages of women or children are far below those of men. The profession is, in general, very misogynistic ^{[ 7 ]} And the typots, if they exist, are rather poorly considered. The place of women with keyboards is slowly ^{[ 8 ]} . At the beginning of XX ^{It is} century, a judgment on appeal released a print of the Grenoble of the accusation of having employed seven women for the conduct of linotypes, in defiance of an article of 1897 intended to protect them from intoxications by lead (it is argued that It’s not about lead, but an alloy!) ^{[ 9 ]} .

• Maurice Audin, History of printing , A. and J. Picard, 1972.
• Pierre Cuchet, Studies on composing machines and the aesthetics of the book , Paris, 1908, 96 p. ; repi. Presented and annotated by Alan Marshall, Editions Jérôme Millon, 1986.
• Alan Marshall, From lead to light. The Lumithype-Photon and the birth of modern graphic industries , MSH, 2003.