110 year-old Linotype roars back to life
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David Seat from Tennessee brings the Linotype located at the Diagonal Printing Museum back to life during a demonstration last Saturday.
A Linotype originally built in 1914, rebuilt and brought from New York to Diagonal in 1924, was up and running this past Saturday.
The last time the 110 year old Linotype machine in Diagonal ran was roughly 36 years ago.
David Seat from Juliet, TN came for the Centennial Celebration in 1988, and returned for a working demonstration held on Saturday, August 3.
“Today it was much better than when I got here the first time. It wouldn’t do hardly anything,” said Seat.
He and his friend Mike Herbert replaced or fixed a lot of tilts and little bent parts and broken parts.
“The belts were all dry rotted and the temperatures were off when we set that,” said Seat, “So just a lot of little things had to be done to it to get it back to do like it did today.”
Seat has traveled to Diagonal a total of four times to clean the Linotype machine and demonstrate how it works over the 100 year span the machine has been in the county.
“This one is in surprisingly good condition for being over 100 years old,” claimed Seat, “But it needed a lot of TLC.”
The pair of maintenance technicians and operators spent 12 hours working on it a couple days leading up to the demonstration Saturday.
“They’re pretty hardy machines” said Seat, “These were made to maintain. Oil it, grease it, keep it clean,” says Seat.
Cleanliness is important to keep the Linotype in good order.
“They had a maintenance sheet at the newspapers,” explained Seat, “There was something to be done to a machine every day while they were running the newspapers. That’s just the way it was.”
Originally invented in Baltimore, the operation was moved to New York City in 1886. Most Linotype machines were built in Brooklyn, New York.
Then operations were expanded and they were built all over the world, including Italy and Australia.
The Linotype was famous in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most moving parts in the 1950’s.
Seat estimates he’s on the road 200-250 days a year to help maintain these types of machines all over the country.
“This is what I do,” said Seat, “We don’t only fix these, we fix other things too. We go in, work on the machine, go to our next job,” says Seat.
They just got back from Oregon, Washington, and Nevada. They plan to go to a museum in Guthrie in October, and then go up to North Dakota to visit two places there.
Seat and Herbert are heading to Akley, IA next to help establish a printing museum there.
Jim Daggs, who ran Ackley Publishing Company, passed away during COVID.
“Mike’s boss bought the building and all the equipment in it, and he’s trying to preserve it and make a museum of sorts out of it.”
They’ve got six Intertype machines, a bunch of presses and Ludlow machines and a lot of type.
At the end of August, first of September, Mount Pleasant is hosting an Old Threshers event with big steam tractors, trains and other attractions.
A big print shop located in Prentice Hall will also be up and running a press during the event.
“You can watch a guy run it and get a newspaper off of it and all that,” Seat says. “So, actually, we set the type for every paper and send it down to them because they don’t have a working machine.”
A partner of theirs travels from Washington every year to set ten galleys of type.
“It’s about 100 lines on a galley per day. So we set 1,000 lines per day on their machine,” explains Seat.
He began learning how to operate and fix these types of machines in 1971.
“I didn’t get to go to the schools,” Seat said, “I kept wanting to, but they shut them all down.”
Schools stopped offering training programs in the 1970’s, so he learned from people that had completed a six-year apprenticeship program.
“They had probably eight different people that had gone to the schools come in and work with me while I was working at a tech firm,” Seat explained.
He plans to return to Diagonal over Labor Day Weekend to demonstrate how it works again.
