Typewriter Printing

The Nov. 15, 1919 issue of the late Literary Digest was a strange looking creation. Due to a compositors' strike, the magazine used typewriters to prepare its columns of editorial matter, photographed the final copy, made line-cuts from the photographs and went to press on schedule. The appearance of the magazine was ragged because the right-hand edge of the typewritten copy could not be evenly aligned. The Literary Digest, at this time, was offering a prize of $100,000 to anybody who would figure out a way to make typewritten copy square up like printed matter.

This put a bee in the cap of an Annapolis midshipman named Joseph SpielVogel. He left Annapolis and one day, while studying engineering in Newark, N. J., he found himself fingering some crepe paper in a 5-c- & 10-c- store. The result was the Vogel-type aligning paper which he put on the market in 1934. It is a finely corrugated paper, ruled so that it can be torn in narrow horizontal strips and cemented to a backing sheet. The typist writes on the corrugated side and, when finished, takes a pair of tweezers, lifts the strips loose, stretches them so that the lines typewritten on them conform to a standard length, presses them back in place on the cemented backing. The typing shows practically no distortion as a result of stretching, unless the strips are pulled to extremes.

A considerable improvement on printing from a typewritten sheet was made possible last week by International Business Machines Corp. I. B. M. has a new electric typewriter which uses 12-point Roman type and whose carriage automatically advances different spacings to allow each letter in the alphabet the width required by good type design. (Each typewriter letter is the same width.) Thus, capital W gets eight units of space, lower-case i or I only two units. The machine uses a 300-ft. paper ribbon, which runs through only once, thus keeping the copy uniform in blackness. There is also a stroke control lever which, when advanced, produces bold-face copy. With a new typewriter* and Mr. SpielVogel's aligning paper, copy can be turned out that looks like typeset.

The goal of all inventors interested in the publishing business is a typewriter like I. B. M.'s which automatically "justifies" (spaces out) each line while the words are being typed, so that all lines come out even on the right-hand side. It would make I. B. M.'s electric typewriter and Mr. SpielVogel's elastic paper as outdated as celluloid collars. Undismayed, inventive Mr. SpielVogel announced last week that he has one called a Typrinter, which will be ready for manufacture as soon as he gets his patents, fills the bill.

*Not yet on sale, but estimated to be priced around $500.

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