Changing Times

Gutenberg printed his first bible in 1492 and Caxton brought printing to England shortly after this. The secret behind the new process was movable type. Small pieces of wood had a reverse letter carved into the end of them and by placing them together you could build up words. Ink and a press meant that you could then turn out hundreds of copies very economically and the type could be reused again and again. It was the first information revolution and ideas spread like wildfire, causing great concern for both the Monarch and the Church. Printers were even imprisoned for disseminating new ideas.

The process remained essentially unchanged for centuries. Metal became the preferred material for making movable type and presses became more sophisticated but otherwise it has been said that Caxton could walk into a modern letterpress factory and pick up the basics in a day.

By the late 1700s news sheets began to be printed and by the 1800s printing firms employed hundreds of typesetters, or 'compositors' as they were known. You can see them in this picture.

But in 1886 a new invention called the Linotype caused great concern. It was named after the fact that it could set a whole line of type at a time by simply typing at a keyboard. There was uproar. The compositors of America were up in arms. They feared they would lose their jobs. After all, if one man could set type as fast as a dozen there would be job losses - and they were very angry.

Here is a Linotype machine. It looks amazing and it is. One man sat at the keyboard which you can see near the bottom of the picture and in close-up on the right. As he typed a line of text this amazing device assembled brass matrices into a row - and when he pressed the carriage return key it poured molten metal into them and produced a complete line of type. The resulting 'line-o'-type' was called a 'slug'.

For the first time in history it was possible to set type very quickly indeed and far more easily than ever before. But here is the important part - and the thing which changes this from a piece of history to a lesson for us all. The compositors did lose their jobs but this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. After all, who would prefer to assemble individual letters one at a time when you could simply sit at a keyboard and type text with great speed? Their anxiety was not with the technology but with fears for their future - for their incomes and for their families.

What happened in the end was this: The linotype machine did not do away with jobs. What it did was reduce the cost of typesetting. Who could have foreseen this? The number of newspapers being produced multiplied dramatically and an entire new industry was created - the magazine industry. It's true that compositing as a job did all but disappear, but the men retrained as linotype operators for which their was a colossal demand. Many were needed and on top of this many new jobs were created - journalists, writer, illustrators, designers, etc. Hundreds of new jobs were created once the new technology had rolled out.

Sounds familiar? At the moment we tend to bemoan the jobs which are disappearing as computerisation rolls out. What we should be doing is trying to identify the underlying change. What is the new industry that will grow as a result of the change which that consequence brings?

It's becoming clearer all the time. The Internet and the world of e-commerce is reshaping the way we do business and there is much talk of retraining and of lifelong learning. These are the signs of the changes that are afoot. The compositors fears were unfounded - their new world was better. I believe that ours will be as well.

But can we manage the change? Can we support those who can't re-train? Can we change the educational system so that the new generation is fitted for life in a world we can only just glimpse at present? These are the real challenges. These are the real questions to be answered.