Scientific American Supplement, No. 795, March 28, 1891 | Page 4

type itself
never is put on the press), 11 persons.
In the press room, where the printing, folding, cutting, pasting and
counting of the papers is done, 30 persons.
In the engine and dynamo room, 8 persons.
In the care of the building, 3 persons.
These numbers include only the minimum and always necessary force,
and make an aggregate of 316 persons daily and nightly engaged for
their entire working time, and borne on a pay roll of six thousand
dollars a week for salaries and wages alone.
But this takes no account of special correspondents subject to instant
call in several hundred places throughout the country; of European
correspondents; of 1,900 news agents throughout the West; of 200 city
carriers; of 42 wholesale city dealers, with their horses and wagons; of
200 branch advertisement offices throughout the city, all connected
with the main office by telephone; and of more than 3 000 news
boys--all making their living, in whole or in part, from work upon or
business relations with this one paper--a little army of 6,300 men,
women, and children, producing and distributing but one of the 1,626

daily newspapers in the United States.
The leading material forces in newspaper production are type, paper,
and presses.
Printing types are cast from a composition which is made one-half of
lead, one-fourth of tin, and one-fourth of antimony, though these
proportions are slightly reduced, so as to admit what the chemist calls
of copper "a trace," the sum of these parts aiming at a metal which
"shall be hard, yet not brittle; ductile, yet tough; flowing freely, yet
hardening quickly." Body type, that is, those classes ever seen in
ordinary print, aside from display and fancy styles, is in thirteen classes,
the smallest technically called brilliant and the largest great primer.
In the reading columns of newspapers but four classes are ordinarily
used--agate for the small advertisements; agate, nonpareil, and minion
for news, miscellany, etc., and minion and brevier for editorials--the
minion being used for what are called minor editorials, and the brevier
for leading articles, as to which it may be said that young editorial
writers consider life very real and very earnest until they are promoted
from minion to brevier.
A complete assortment of any one of these classes is called a font, the
average weight of which is about 800 pounds. Whereas our alphabet
has 26 letters, the compositor must really use of letters, spaces, accent
marks, and other characters in an English font 152 distinct types, and in
each font there are 195,000 individual pieces. The largest number of
letters in a font belongs to small _e_--12,000; and the least number to
the _z_--200. The letters, characters, spaces, etc., are distributed by the
printer in a pair of cases, the upper one for capitals, small capitals, and
various characters, having 98 boxes, and the lower one, for the small
letters, punctuation marks, etc., having 54 boxes.
A few newspapers are using typesetting machines for all or part of their
composition. The New York Tribune is using the Linotype machine for
all its typesetting except the displayed advertisements, and other papers
are using it for a portion of their work, while still others are using the
Rogers and various machines, of which there are already six or more. It
seems probable that within the early future newspaper composition will
very generally be done by machinery.
It has been suggested to me that many of my hearers this evening know
little or nothing of the processes of the printer's art, and that some

exposition of it may interest a considerable portion of this audience.
The vast number of these little "messengers of thought" which are
required in a single modern daily newspaper is little known to
newspaper readers. Set in the manner of ordinary reading, a column of
the New York Tribune contains 12,200 pieces, counting head lines,
leads, and so on; while, if set solidly in its medium-sized type, there are
18,800 pieces in one column, or about 113,000 in a page, or about
1,354,000 in one of its ordinary 12-page issues. A 32-page Sunday
issue of the New York Herald contains nearly, if not quite, 2,500,000
distinct types and other pieces of metal, each of which must be
separately handled between thumb and finger twice--once put into the
case and once taken out of it--each issue of the paper. No one
inexperienced in this delicate work has the slightest conception of the
intensity of attention, fixity of eye, deftness of touch, readiness of
intelligence, exhaustion of vitality, and destruction of brain and nerve
which enters into the daily newspaper from type-setters alone.
Each type is marked upon one side by slight nicks, by sight and touch
of which the compositor is guided in rapidly placing them right side up