Some deliveries come by mail truck. This one needed a measuring tape, a lot of nerve, and a doorway wide enough for seven feet of printing history.
A rare Linotype machine — the hot-metal typesetting marvel that revolutionized newspapers in the 1880s — just found a new home at Mergenthaler Vocational Technical High School in northeast Baltimore. The school is named for Ottmar Mergenthaler, the very inventor of the Linotype, so you could say the machine finally came home. Johns Hopkins helped make the delivery happen as part of its community partnership work.
Once inside, it becomes a living history lesson: students can see, touch, and learn from the technology that let newspapers set complete lines of type at speed, a breakthrough so magnificent that Thomas Edison reportedly called it the eighth wonder of the world.
In an age of screens and feeds, Mervo students now get to learn from the machine that started it all. How cool is that? Source: Johns Hopkins Hub