(This story was originally written and recorded for Retrocast 41, released on February 26, 2026.)

On January 16, 1886, stockholders of the National Typographic Company gathered in Washington, D.C., to review their $200,000 investment—more than $7 million today—in a new typesetting device known as the Washington Machine.

At the meeting, they learned that patents for the technology had already been secured in eight foreign countries and that the first units were being manufactured by the Mergenthaler Printing Company.

An article in the October 9, 1887, edition of the Kansas City Journal attempted to explain to its readers how the machine – now renamed the Linotype – worked.

“It looks as much like an old-fashioned square cooking stove, with an upright piano attachment in front and a force pump at the left-hand corner, with an elevated railway across the top and a locomotive arrangement at the bottom, [unlike] any machine I ever saw.  One would think, at first glance, that it was made to run upon a railway track.

A closer inspection would convince one that some where or other there must be an oven for baking the ideas of writers into solid type. There is a bank of keys, like the typewriter, and so far as the typesetting is concerned, the machine is operated in a similar manner.

It is unfortunate that the letters upon the keys are not arranged in the same relative position which they occupy in the printer’s case.”

The keyboard layout was indeed unusual. Not only did it differ from the traditional printer’s case, but it also bore no resemblance to the QWERTY arrangement we use today. While it might have appeared random, the letters were actually organized by frequency of use in the English language.

There’s a good chance that you’ve never seen a Linotype machine operate – but there are videos on YouTube, should you be curious – so I’m going to attempt to give you a brief overview.

Basically, an operator would sit at a keyboard and press a key, releasing a small metal mold, called a matrix, which slid down a chute. This process continued letter by letter until an entire line was assembled. The completed line – hence the name “Linotype” – was then transferred to a casting chamber, where molten metal (typically lead) was poured to create a solid line of type.

Once the line was cast, the individual matrices were no longer needed and were sent back to their storage channels for reuse.

This is where the machine’s true brilliance lay. Before its invention, printers had to manually sort each individual letter back into its proper place – a tedious and time-consuming task. The Linotype automated this step. Because each matrix was uniquely keyed – similar to how every door key is notched differently – the machine could return them to the correct slots without human intervention, saving an enormous amount of labor.

Those early investors had chosen wisely. The Linotype revolutionized printing, making it faster, more efficient, and far more affordable. The result was an explosion in print media – more newspapers, more magazines, and more books than ever before.

It also gave rise to a curious phrase: “ETAOIN SHRDLU.” When an operator made a mistake, he – almost always a man at the time – would often run his fingers down the keyboard to fill the rest of the line with characters, then retype it correctly. Although the incorrect line was supposed to be discarded, some slipped through, and “ETAOIN SHRDLU” occasionally appeared in print.

Like all technologies, the Linotype eventually became obsolete. After World War II, it was gradually replaced by phototypesetting, and by the mid-1980s, desktop publishing brought the entire process onto our computer screens. On a personal note, some of my favorite classes in high school were in printing. I spent two and a half years learning how to set type by hand, producing things like business cards and stationery. That included memorizing the location of each letter in a printer’s case – a skill I never really had the chance to use. Just six years later, after graduating from college, I was designing brochures on a computer using Ventura Publisher, as the old methods quickly gave way to the new.