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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

45.   The News Gets Around


Mergenthaler     At the time Mergenthaler was working in Baltimore many people were trying to invent some sort of typesetting machine. One of the early efforts was that of Moore. His machine struck impressions on pieces of paper with a typewriter. The paper was then cut into strips and used much the same as type. A man by the name of Clephane helped finance Moore but the project failed. Mergenthaler, although he had no experience in printing, told Clephane he thought he could produce a typesetting machine that would work.

     Clephane agreed to finance him and then began the long years of cut and try for the young inventor. He started off much the same as Moore but made many mechanical changes. He tried typing on papier-mache and used this as a mold in which to cast the type - something like a waffle iron. But, as in the case of some waffles, the paper stuck to the hot metal and spoiled everything. By this time Mergenthaler was 30 years old and his problem was far from solved.

     The project looked like a failure, but inventors as I know from personal experience, can think fast in an emergency. It was perfectly evident to Mergenthaler that type was cast every day in regular metal type molds. Why not use these instead of paper? Why not set up individual metal type molds in a line and cast type a line at a time?

     At last he had these ideas built into a working model which he tried out in the composing room of the New York Tribune in July 1886 - ten years after he had first started to work on the idea.



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John Wheeler
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Martin Fischer
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Karl Popper
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- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
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Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
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Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
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Johannes Kepler
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Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
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- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
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James Maxwell
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Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
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- 10 -
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