| Subject: Intertype chit-chat |
Author:
Tom Dunn
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Date Posted: 06:25:43 05/27/02 Mon
In reply to:
Frank Netherton
's message, "My Experience" on 18:52:36 07/23/01 Mon
I was an apprentice in the printing industry from 1957 to 1962 and served the last year learning the Intertype C4. At that time we were typesetting weekly and monthly magazines. We also had a Ludlow for display type purposes and as an apprentice one of my jobs was to weekly clean the swarf and oil the Ludlow, every Friday afternoon. One Friday, I was unlucky enough to trap my right Index finger in the machine, and nearly lost the top of this finger, which put paid to further Intertype keyboard training for 3 months. However, the finger healed and I was able to resume.
I well remember returning after one lunch hour and the very first line to enter the mould there was an almighty bang. I quickly pushed in the stop lever and a small crowd gathered around the machine. One of them pointed to a nearly sheared piece of metal lying on the floor under the cams, which had me dead worried. After some minutes, it was revealed this piece of metal was a ‘plant’ and the bang was a row of children’s toy gun caps which had been affixed to one of the cams so that they went off when the cams began to turn.
After my apprenticeship, I entered the newspaper industry, transferring to Linotypes. My first paper was a weekly which I enjoyed greatly. I progressed to advertisement display setting, using side magazine machines. This was considered the best job in the composing room. When I married and moved home, I changed to a local daily paper, but did not enjoy this so much, eventually changing jobs to a magazine printer using a very modern Intertype C4. I have to say I preferred operating Intertypes to Linotypes, they seemed more robust machines and gave very few problems. On a good Linotype, I could probably achieve a higher speed of output than an Intertype, but they seemed to break down more.
For me, hot metal went out in the mid seventies and I learned a little of the litho side of the business, transferring to customer services, which is where I am today in print, using a computer with its QWERTY layout, not a patch on ETAOIN!
I do still have some old Intertype literature if anyone out there is interested? I live in Exeter, Devon, my e-mail is tomdunn@eurobell.co.uk.
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