The publication of a modern daily newspaper with its many special editions would be well nigh impossible if we still had to depend upon hand setting of type. Tens of thousands of type characters are required to make up a single newspaper page, and although skilled hand compositors work with extreme rapidity it would take a large corps of men to set type for even a small newspaper in the short time available. Speed is of prime importance in newspaper work and the task of handling thousands of little pieces of type metal and arranging them correctly into words and sentences was long recognized as a serious handicap, but the problem of doing this work by machine was by no means simple one and baffled inventors for years. One of the principal difficulties lay in the size and shape of the type and another was that of justifying the lines, that is, providing just the right width of spaces between words to fill out the lines completely so that they would all be of equal length, giving a straight instead of a ragged margin to the column. After that came the problem of redistributing the type. The first really successful composing machine was the invention of Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1888. Mergenthaler overcame the difficulties that had balked other inventors by attacking the problem from a radically new angle. Instead of setting precast type, his machine cast its own type from a set of matrices. By operating a keyboard, the matrices were assembled in a line which was justified automatically after the line was composed and then the whole line of type was cast in a single slug. Hence his machine earned the name “linotype.” Then the matrices were returned automatically distributed to the proper channels of the matrix magazine ready to be used over again for succeeding slugs. THE LINOTYPE MATRIX AND SPACE BAR [Illustration: FIG. 72--A LINOTYPE MATRIX]