No Hands

Typesetters used to assure gullible visitors to the composing room that twelve men went crazy before the Linotype machine was perfected. Last week a Florida weekly had a printing process so simple that any girl who could chew gum and pound a typewriter could easily master it. For three months, the Leesburg Commercial & Ledger had been printed from engraved magnesium plates, without the use of linotypers, compositors or stereotypers.

Instead of typesetters the paper employed typists, using special proportional spacing typewriters which made all lines come out even. Typed copy, pictures and headlines were pasted on sheets and photographed. The etched, featherweight (1 lb.) plates fitted a rotary press as neatly as 46-lb. stereotype plates. The end product was a cheaper printed page, although somewhat slower to produce.

An industrial engineer named William J. Higgins developed the process, backed by crafty old John H. Perry, boiler-plate king of the U.S. and owner of a string of Florida dailies and weeklies. As head of Western Newspaper Union, Perry made a fortune by selling canned editorial matter to shorthanded editors (TIME, June 24, 1946). Now he proposed to show them how to do without printers, as well as editorial staffs. "The unions may fight it," Perry conceded, "but it's a development that has to come."

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