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What do you think of when you imagine the eighth wonder of the world?
A beautiful historical site like the Roman Colosseum or Machu Picchu that attracts many tourists to compliment natural beauties? Wrong. According to Thomas Edison, the eighth wonder of the world was the Linotype machine.
A couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know what the Linotype machine was. But when I visited the Baltimore Museum of Industry, I learned that the Linotype changed the world, and especially changed the printing industry. Ottmar Mergenthaler, the inventor of the Linotype machine, revolutionized printing. The linotype made printing presses more convenient by setting complete lines of type.
In 1876, the young German machinist was approached by a court reporter who sought a faster way to publish legal briefs. Charles T. Moore had a patent on typewriters for newspapers. Mergenthaler was hesitant at first, but then eight years later, came up with a genius idea to use one machine for both casting and stamping letters. He constructed a machine that could do both based on brass matrices, the molds used to cast letters onto machines. The Linotype became an invention that revolutionized…
