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Actually, no. Replicating the manual process was quite feasible. There were keyboard-driven typesetters that worked well. Here's the Unitype.[1] This sets type by assembling type slugs into a line. It doesn't cast hot metal. It even has an automatic distribution system; it can sort type slugs by letter, so you can reuse the type. That's the same thing the Paige machine did. The Unitype was much simpler.

The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job.

Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era.

The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker.

Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed.

So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough. Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years.

[1] https://youtu.be/5n5JQrN8qx4?t=152

Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics.

They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.

> The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.

If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.

See also: the sewing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine

The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread.

And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.

The counterpoint is that we already exploited a lot of the cases where simplifying the problem helps. We've spent approximately two centuries doing that. That leaves a lot of processes left over where that kind of specialization was either not feasible or not economically attractive

This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is.

The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text.

Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.

If you have a general solution like a robot that can do human tasks, i.e. copying manuscripts with a pen, that is often highly inefficient compared to a specialized solution like a printing press but the R&D effort of applying it is minimal compared to inventing a specialized machine.

It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.

Well, LLMs are a great example of the argument for the power of doing what "humans already do": language, however imperfect for the task, so maybe humanoid robots turn out to be the most natural way to interact with a human environment (broad strokes here, I know, but hopefully you get the gist)

I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience.

Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work.

The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on…

IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)

Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!).

The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.

Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful.

It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.

In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.

Maybe: https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmark...

To see a typecaster which works find a Linotype or Monotype.

As linked in the article, you could read the patent application:

https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...

Yeah wanna write 100k cheques? Better have a net worth of 100M or a way to pool investor money.

That didn’t ruin his life, merely his shorts.

It makes a little sense to me that would be the case. People tend to write things they find relevant for their own life or surrounding. That is, he might be putting into paper a kind of warning to himself.

As the caption says, it's not even a real photo of Twain or Paige, it's from a movie.

When I heard that story, I couldn't help but thing of Steve Jobs "Real Artists Ship." The device was good but the inventor was a perfectionist instead of an entrepreneur.

Linotype machines were revolutionary. The New York Times used them for 127 years until 1978 and this documentary shows them in action for the last time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTiCTFdTd60

Lineotype they use lead letters. They use an alloy. There was a lot of lead, but there's also other metals in it because lead is too soft to be useful in a press. The alloy had the interest stream property that it has very low shrinkage when it cooled.

> It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer ...

It glosses over it and Twains autobiography goes into more detail.

What impressed Twain about it was the demonstration had an operator typing at high speed.

When he got the device, he discovered the operator was typing the same phase over and over. They had memorised it so as to type faster.

So one of the overlooked lessons is don't believe product demos.

The wedge-shaped expander bars you mention are a brilliant bit of engineering: they deliver perfectly equal spacing across the entire line without any calculation or measurement needed.

Mid cap and large cap mutual funds are pretty safe right?

LLM sycophancy