(This story originally appeared in the June 2026 issue of the South Baltimore Peninsula Post.)
By Robert Hardy
In the back of the Print Shop at the Baltimore Museum of Industry on Key Highway lurks a hulking yet oddly delicate-looking machine that might be mistaken for a giant typewriter on steroids. It’s as wide as an upright piano, with a small office chair pulled up close in front of a large central keyboard mounted on an iron frame reaching seven feet high and sprouting tendrils of cables, pulleys, and springs and appendages of chutes, levers, and cranks.
It is a rare surviving, working example of the now-obsolete machine that Thomas Edison once referred to as “the eighth wonder of the world” – the Linotype.
“Outside of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, no other single machine has had the impact on printing as has the Linotype,” according to the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Mass.
The BMI’s Linotype machine (Model 8, No. 50958) turns 90 years old this year, and the museum is preparing a birthday celebration on July 11. The machine dates from 1936 and was donated to the museum by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing’s Office of Stamp Production in Washington, DC.
“To see the machine working is really incredible,” says Maze Turner, a BMI volunteer who recently learned how to maintain and operate the Linotype. “It’s wickedly precise – not just regular manufacturing precise, but clock-making precise.”
Invented in Baltimore by the German immigrant watchmaker Ottmar Mergenthaler in the 1880s, the Linotype – essentially an automated typecasting and typesetting machine – revolutionized the printing industry. Printers and publishers were able to replace the slow, manual, letter-by-letter method of typesetting that Gutenberg had introduced in the fifteenth century with a mechanized, line-by-line process that was significantly faster and cheaper. The Linotype dominated publishing worldwide until the dawn of the era of photocomposition and offset printing in the 1970s.
With the Linotype machine, under the control of the keyboard operator, molten lead flows into small type molds, a mold for each letter of the alphabet and for each number, character, and punctuation mark. That type is cast into “slugs” corresponding to a line of text, one by one forming a column of type. Once a line is typeset, a conveyor system carries the molds back into their original positions in a container above the keyboard.
Mergenthaler made the first workable Linotype machines at his workshop at Camden and South Howard streets in downtown Baltimore. After a successful demonstration of the invention at the offices of the New York Herald Tribune, the Linotype Company began limited distribution of the machines to newspaper and book publishers who agreed to help finance production.
On July 3, 1886, the Herald Tribune became the first newspaper to use the Linotype to compose and print a newspaper. Shortly thereafter, the Friedenwald Company, a Baltimore lithography and printing firm that Mergenthaler had consulted while developing his machine, became the first book printer to acquire and use a Linotype.
In the mid-nineteenth century, typesetting was a very common occupation in America. It was a skilled job that required the ability to read and write and the patience and dexterity to pick out small slivers of metal type to spell out words. The process of typesetting with movable type was a very slow process. But the Linotype changed that.
According to an early accounting done at the Tribune, it took several manual typesetters more than 3,000 hours to do the work that it took a single Linotype operator only about 1,500 hours to do – more than doubling workers’ capacity and reducing the cost of labor by one third. With the Linotype, more (and bigger) newspapers and books could be printed and sold to more people, making that content available to a wider audience and increasing profits for printers and publishers.
The Linotype Company moved operations to a large factory complex in Brooklyn, New York, in 1888, while Mergenthaler, who was in poor health, remained in Baltimore making improvements to his machine. By 1890, the new “Model 1” was ready for production, and Mergenthaler opened a small factory in Locust Point to produce some of the first machines.
A 1906 map of Baltimore shows the factory’s location at the long-vanished Claggett and Allen streets. In 2015, BMI volunteers armed with geographic information system software and a GPS app were able to pinpoint the location of Mergenthaler’s factory. It stood along Key Highway on the site now occupied by the McHenry Row parking garage, just south of the water tower on Whetstone Way.
Between 1891 and 1894, Mergenthaler’s Locust Point factory produced more than 500 Linotype machines that were shipped to and used by publishers across the country. In 1894, Mergenthaler’s failing health forced him to end his active involvement with the Baltimore operation. By 1954, it was estimated that more than 200,000 machines had been produced and were in use around the world. BMI’s 1936 Linotype has been churning out “lines o’ type” for visitors since 1997. The museum opened its first printing industry exhibit in 1988 as “a recreation of an early twentieth century letterpress shop,” complete with a 1905 Model 5 Linotype that was not in working condition. One of the volunteers who worked on the new gallery was Ray Loomis, a Baltimore native who worked for many years as a Linotype operator.
When BMI opened an expanded Graphic Arts Exhibit in 1997, it featured the working 1936 Linotype machine donated by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Loomis was on hand at the opening reception to demonstrate the Linotype. According to the museum’s “Nuts & Bolts” newsletter: “Guests were intrigued with Ray’s expert demonstration of the Linotype… They watched with fascination as a few keystrokes on this now antique machine quickly turned out a ‘line of type’ with the guest’s name on it, ready for the printing press.”
Loomis volunteered at the Print Shop for nearly three decades until retiring in 2019 at the age of 90. He was able to pass his Linotype knowledge on to current BMI volunteer Steve Cole (age 71), editor of the South Baltimore Peninsula Post. Cole has now passed that knowledge on to Turner (28). Cole and Turner continue Loomis’ legacy of demonstrating the Linotype to museum visitors on Saturdays.
Turner recalls a recent impactful interaction with a museum visitor. “I was at the Linotype and a guy and his father came in and were fascinated by it. There was a language barrier between me and the father, so the son was sort of translating, but there was no barrier to his amazement. He was absolutely in awe. I realized that I had started to become a little desensitized to that. Seeing his amazement reminded me of my first time seeing the machine, and how much it captured me. I love the machine, but I really love sharing it, seeing the awe on people’s faces and the fascination as they see the details and hear the story. Being able to keep that fascination living on is why I come back every week.”
The Baltimore Museum of Industry hopes to share that fascination with more visitors on Saturday, July 11, as it celebrates the 90th birthday of its Model 8 Linotype machine. A daylong series of events are planned during regular museum hours (9am-4pm), including a special Linotype workshop, a screening of a rarely seen episode of The Twilight Zone starring the Linotype (“The Printer’s Devil”), and a birthday cake. BMI volunteers Cole and Turner will be on hand giving Linotype demonstrations throughout the day. The full schedule of activities is online.
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