ngton and New York, mainly in the transcription of
stenographic notes taken in law cases and in the proceedings of
legislative committees. A number of these machines was built, but
mechanical difficulties became so frequent that the parties interested
resolved, very wisely, before proceeding to build upon a large scale,
to put the machine into the hands of a thorough mechanical expert, so
that it might be tried out and a determination reached as to whether
or not it was a commercially practical one. At the head of the little
company of men who nurtured this enterprise and contributed most
largely by their labors and means to its development, were James O.
Clephane, a well-known law and convention reporter, and Andrew Devine,
then the Senate reporter of the Associated Press. In their search for
an expert, a Baltimore manufacturer named Hahl, who had constructed
some of these machines, was consulted, and upon his recommendation his
cousin, Ottmar Mergenthaler, was selected to undertake the work, and
thus the future inventor of the Linotype was discovered.

Mergenthaler was born in 1854, in Wuertemberg, Germany, had been a
watchmaker, and at this time was employed upon the finer parts of the
mechanical work done in Hahl's shop. The contract was that
Mergenthaler was to give his services at a rate of wages considerably
beyond what he was then receiving, and Hahl was to charge a reasonable
price for the use of his shop and the cost of material. The task
undertaken, however, proved to be a far larger one than had been
anticipated, and the means of the promoters were exhausted long before
the modifications and improvements continually presented had been
worked out. The circle of contributors was therefore necessarily
widened, and indeed that process went on for years, enough, could they
have been foreseen, to have dismayed and disheartened those who were
there "in the beginning." Mergenthaler and Moore, assisted by the
practical suggestions of Clephane and Devine, continued to work upon
the problem for about two years, by which time the lithographic
printing machine had become one which indented the characters in a
papier-mache strip, and this being cut up and adjusted upon a flat
surface in lines, the way was prepared for casting in type metal. The
next step of importance was the production of the "bar indenting
machine," a machine which carried a series of metal bars, bearing upon
their edges male printing characters, the ba