1895 UNITYPE TYPESETTING MACHINE
By the mid-19th century, there had been considerable advances in the field of printing. Christopher Latham Shole’s revolutionary new invention, the typewriter, came on the market in 1860’s and press manufacturers were consistently coming up with ways to make their machinery more efficient. Typesetting, on the other hand, had seen almost no innovation since Gutenberg came up with the idea in the 15th century– that was a 400-year period where no one had come up with a better way to set type than pulling it from a case and organizing it by hand. The need for a faster method of composing type set off a race to create a new machine that would fill this technological void.
One of the first inventions to rise to this challenged was a machine called the Unitype, which was created by Joseph Thorne, who had a background working for Singer Sewing Machines. In theory, the Unitype was a logical solution to the typesetting dilemma– instead of having a group of typesetters gathering metal type by hand, a machine would do the work for you! Thorne called the Unitype the one-man typesetter. It combined the concept of a typewriter and typecase. Metal type was stacked in channels inside a metal cylinder, which were organized by characters, and an operator would use the keyboard to dispense the type. The type would go down a chute and into a galley, where it would already be arranged into words and sentences. Once the galley got too full, someone would take it away and put the type into the press for printing. After the printing was completed, they would take the galley of type to the back of the machine where it could go back inside the cylinder. The Unitype would sort each character back into its respective channel by using a series of notches on the side of the type. The position and number of notches would correspond to a specific letter, number, or other character that the machine could recognize and categorize accordingly.
This of course was Thorne’s pitch for the Unitype, but it did not entirely reflect the reality of using this machine. In actuality, it took at least two people to make the machine work. One person would set the type by operating the keyboard, a second person would proofread and adjust the type as it went into the galley, and a third person would carry the type to the press then put the type back in the machine. This method of typesetting wasn’t much faster than the old system of pulling type from a case and setting it by hand. Another limitation was that each Unitype held one type size so a print shop would need another Unitype for each additional size or font of type.
An interesting facet of the Unitype is that its keyboard is completely different from our modern QWERTY keyboard. It is also distinct from keyboards on similar machines like the Linotype and the Rogers Typograph. There was no standardized keyboard yet, so every machine had a different arrangement. QWERTY only became the standard because it was used on Remington Typewriters, which were the most popular model on the market. Unitype uses a chord theory keyboard- it has letters grouped by words (like A-N-D and T-H-E are in a line) and if you press them all at once it will spell the word in the correct order.
The Unitype was backed by the company American Type Founders, which manufactured machinery but also made foundry type (aka type that goes in the cases). ATF was more inclined to support a typesetting machine than a typecasting machine like the Linotype. Typecasting was bad news for type foundries because it meant that printers would no longer need to buy type from them if they were making lines of type themselves. By comparison, mechanized typesetting wasn’t so bad because type foundries could still sell type for it. In the end though, the Unitype was the underdog in the typesetting race compared to the invention that followed it, which was the Linotype.
Despite its drawbacks, the Unitype still found success with a few audiences. It was half the price of the Linotype, which made it more popular with printers in small country shops. It maintained its success until about 1915, when Linotype completely pushed it off the market. The Linotype company came up with a clever strategy– they would over printers a brand-new Linotype in exchange for their old Unitype, then destroy the Unitype after they look it away. Because of this method of systematically eliminating these machines, the Unitype is very rare nowadays.
The Unitype on display at the Museum came from a small town in Kansas. The Unitype’s previous owner had agreed to trade in his machine with the Linotype company back in the 1920’s. The company gave him a new Linotype, but the salesman never came back to collect the Unitype. He left it in the rafters of his shop until the Museum’s founder, Ernie Lindner, found out about it and picked it up, along with a bucket’s worth of 10-point type. The Unitype is now safely on display in the main gallery of the Museum.
