to obtain means to build machines, and second, how to
persuade printers to use them. The first of these was the easier,
although no slight task; the second was one of great difficulty. The
field for the machine then in sight was the newspaper, and the
newspaper must appear daily. The old method of printing from founder's
type, set for the most part by hand, was doing the work; a
revolutionary method by which the type was to be made and set by
machine, although promising great economies, was a dangerous
innovation and one from which publishers naturally shrank. They could
see the fate which awaited them if they adopted the new system and it
proved unsuccessful. However, a number of newspaper men, after a
careful investigation of the whole subject, determined to make the
trial; and the leaders of these were Whitelaw Reid of the _New York
Tribune_, Melvin Stone of the _Chicago News_ (to whom succeeded Victor
F. Lawson), and Walter N. Haldeman of the _Louisville Courier-Journal_.
Into these offices, then, the Linotype went. To Mr. Reid belongs the
honor of giving the machine a name--line of type--Linotype, and of
first using it to print a daily newspaper. Of the machine last
described, two hundred were built, but before they were half marketed,
the ingenious Mergenthaler presented a new form, which showed so
great an advance that it was perforce adopted, and the machines then
in use, although they gave excellent results, were in course of time
displaced. The new machine did away with the air blast, the matrices
being carried to the assembling point by gravity from magazines to be
hereafter described, and the distributing elevator was displaced by an
"arm" which lifted the lines of matrices, after the casting process,
to the top of the machine to be returned to their places.

The improvements made in the Linotype since Mergenthaler's time (who
died in 1899 at the early age of forty-five) have been very great;
indeed, almost a new machine has been created in doing what was
necessary to adapt it to the more and more exacting work which it was
called upon to perform in the offices of the great American book
publishers. These improvements have been largely the work of, or the
following out of suggestions made by, Philip T. Dodge, the patent
attorney of the parties interested in the enterprise from the
beginning, and later the president of the Mergenthaler Linotype
Company. They went on year after year under the supervision of a