I did an apprenticeship in machine typography - a lost art and a pretty worthless one in terms of job security these days!

Here's a link to a picture of Mk III - I learned on one of these for a couple of months, and this was in 1973. The one I learned on was over 80 years old:

http://www.bacchus-marsh.com/files/linotype.jpg

Pretty snazzy, huh?

Since the lino went the way of the dino, just about the only contact I've had with them is when one has been chattering away in some museum-type situation. Generally the person operating it hasn't got the foggiest idea of how they work and has either front- or back-splashed it (things not lined up properly; molten metal in all directions). On at least three occasions in the past ten years or so I've wound up cleaning up a lino in one of these museum print shops, oiling the damned thing, greasing the cam axle, graphiting the disser bar and the spacebands, tightening up or replacing belts, repairing the magazine, cleaning the pot throat and then spending the rest of the day happily churning out people's names back to front. I'm sure they were backsplashed again the next day ...

They were a really clever piece of kit. The Mergs were always more forgiving than the Intertypes. I've sent lines away on a Merg which cast okay which on the Intertype would have resulted in a bang and a fountain of molten type metal (which is lead, zinc and antimony, not just lead) coming up behind the mold wheel. As an apprentice, I used to have to cast the "pigs", the long skinny ingots of type metal which hung above the pot on a hook and were lowered into the pot by a ballcock arrangement pretty much the same as in your privy's cistern. A piecework operator could get through ten of them in a shift, and that's a lot of metal.

A number of newspapers have one or two of them in operating condition to show visitors, but they are becoming rarer as the people who knew how to operate them retire. It's a shame that it's come to this, but that's the way things go I guess.