The Printer’s Panic: Will the Type-Setting Machine Steal Your Job?

All the big dailies in this city use three, four and some of them IT' nrf kind.* of type in printing the news. Then the ability to punctuate with the machine is extremely limited, and while this is not necessarily imperative, it is none the ie«* useful. But it is not alone in these respects that the machine falls below the work ot the average compositor.

Practical tests have proved that t.heir have not even these merits, as to speed and cheapness, which their makers claim for them. A newspaper in this city which has used the machines for some time, and which is not beautiful, typographically, is not enthusiastic in support of the ma-chines. There is inside information to the effect that they have not come up to an ticipations by any means, either in point of cheapness or speed.

Even should its adoption become possi-ble there will still be plenty of work for compositors. Advertisements and market reports, headlines and tables of every de-scription will still be required to be set up by hand. The telephone has not replaced the telegraph operator, nor has the ppono-graph or any other mechanical deviee of taking notes driven tbe stenographer to the wail. It is just possible that the intro-duction of a successful type-retting ma-chine would increase rather than diminish the demand for compositors.

In the other branches of the trade the effect should be much the same. The idea is incorrect that anvone not having a tech-nical knowledge of the printer's art can operate the type-setting machine, so that if the change should come all the compositor will have to do to prepare himself for the new order of things is to learn the key-board of the machine, as he did the loca-tion of the letters in the "case" before. If the work can be done cheaper, more books will be published, and people who have never patronized the printer before will be forced to do so in order to comply with the new order of things. It would not be sur-prising to find a compositor with his ma-chine m every large mercantile and bank-ing-house and lawyer's office in the city, where anv considerable amount of print-ing is to be done.

But if this change is to come it will be by slow degrees. Time will be given to every one to adapt himself to the new or-der of things. In this age of progress and invention nothing seems impossible, and if the improvements on the typesetting machine during the next few years keep pace with rrhai has been accomplished within tlie past ten years, it is more than likely that the apprentice in the compos-ing-room will be learning the keyboard in stead of the "case." Then we shall have cheaper newspapers mid books, perhaps. The poor printers will be pushed out of the business and only the good men re-tained.

Davii> Wkciislee.