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19. Division.—Beyond the editorial rooms is the mechanical department, with which every reporter should be, but rarely ever is, acquainted. Because of the heavy machinery necessary for preparing and printing a paper, the mechanical department is often found in the basement. This department is divisible into three sub-departments, the composing room, the stereotyping room, and the press room.

20. The Copy Cutter.—When a story has been revised by the copy reader and given proper headlines, it is turned over to the head copy reader or the news editor, who glances over it hastily to see that all is rightly done and chutes it in a pneumatic tube to the basket on the copy cutter's table or desk in the composing room. The copy cutter in turn glances at the headlines and the two or three pages of copy, and records the story upon a ruled blank on his desk. Then he clips the headlines and sends them by a copy distributor to the headline machine to be set up. The two or three pages of copy he cuts into three or four or five "takes," puts the slug number or name on each, and sends the "takes" to different compositors, so that the whole story may be set up more quickly than if it were given all to one man. If the time before going to press is very short, the pages may be cut into more takes. The slug names, sometimes called guide or catch lines, are marked on each take to enable the bank-men to assemble readily all the parts after they have been set in type.

21. The Linotype Machine.—Each compositor on receiving his take places it on the copy-holder of his linotype or monotype machine and begins composing it into type. The linotype machine consists of a keyboard not unlike that of the typewriter, which actuates a magazine containing matrices or countersunk letter molds, together with a casting mechanism for producing lines or bars of words. By touching the keys, the compositor releases letter by letter an entire line of matrices, which are mustered automatically into the assembling-stick at the left and above the keyboard, ready to be molded into a line of type. When the assembling-stick is full of matrices, enough to make a full line, the operator is warned, as on the typewriter, by the ringing of a tiny bell. The machinist then pulls a lever, which releases molten lead on the line of matrices and casts a slug of metal representing the letters he has just touched on the keys. The machine cuts and trims this slug of lead to an exact size, conveys it to the receiving galley for finished lines, and returns the matrices to their proper places in the magazine for use in a succeeding line. When the operator has composed twenty or twenty-five of these slugs, his take is completed. He then removes the slugs from their holder, wraps them in the manuscript, and sends them to the bank to be assembled with the other takes of the same story. The proof of the compositor's take looks something like the matter at the top of the next page.

The big three's are the compositor's slug number. This take was set up by the workman operating machine number 3. The Loops is the catch line, or slug name, by which the story is known, every take of the story being named Loops, so that the bank-men may easily get the parts of the story together. The letters at the right of Loops, in the same line, are merely any letters that the compositor has set up at random by tapping the linotype keys to fill out the line.

THREE	THREE
LOOPS … … … …)	rna..8an … . … .
ARMY BIRDMEN BREAK
RECORDS FOR LOOPS

San Diego, Cal., Sept. 25.—Sergt. William Ocher and Corporal Albert Smith, attached to the United States army aviation corps at North Island, made fifteen loops each while engaged in flights, shattering army and navy aviation records. Both officers used the same machine equipped with a ninety horsepower motor, and designed for long distance flying.

This take, which was picked up at random in the editorial rooms of the Milwaukee Journal, was followed by this:

SEVEN	SEVEN
Folo Loops … … … … … … … …	ETAOIN
FALLS 1,000 FEET, UNHURT.

Omaha, Sept. 25.—Francis Hoover, Chicago aviator, fell 1,000 feet at David City, Neb. He alighted in a big tank and was not injured.

The compositor in this case was at machine number 7, and the slug name given the story was Folo Loops: that is, it was a follow story, to come after the one slugged Loops.

22. The Proofs.—On receipt of the different takes by the bank-man, the various parts of the story are assembled, with the proper head, in a long brass receptacle called a galley, and the first, or galley, proof is "pulled" on the proof press, a small hand machine. Three proofs are made. One goes to the managing editor, on whom rests responsibility for every story in the paper; one to the news editor; and one, with the original copy, to the head proofreader, who is responsible for all typographical errors. The head proofreader in turn gives the proof to an assistant and the manuscript to a copyholder, who reads the story to the assistant for the detection of typographical errors. A corrected galley proof will be returned in the form shown in the specimen proof sheet printed on page 276.

23. The Form.—After all corrections have been made and the position of the story in the paper has been determined by the news editor, it is inserted in its proper place among other articles which together make up a page of type, or what printers know as a form. This form is locked in an enveloping steel frame, called a chase, and carried to the stereotyping room, the second department in the mechanical composition of the paper. In the small newspaper offices, the sheet is printed directly from the form. But since the leaden letters begin to blur after 15,000 impressions have been made, and since it has been found impossible to do fast printing from flat surfaces, it is necessary for the larger papers to cast from four to twelve stereotyped plates of each page.

24. Stereotyping Process.—These stereotyped plates are circular or semicircular in shape, so that they fit snugly on the press cylinders. They are made in the following way: When the form is brought into the stereotyping room, it is placed, face up, on the flat bed of a strongly built press. Over the face of the columns of type are spread several layers of tissue paper pasted together. Upon the paper is laid a damp blanket, and a heavy revolving steel drum subjects the whole to hundreds of pounds of pressure, thus squeezing the face of the type into the texture of the moist paper. Intense heat is then applied by a steam drier, so that within a few seconds the moisture has been baked entirely from the paper, which emerges a stiff flat matrix of the type in the form.

25. The Autoplate.—This matrix in turn is bent to the shape of the impressing cylinder that later stamps the page, and is put into an autoplate, or casting machine, which presses molten metal upon the paper matrix, cools the metal, and turns out in a few moments the finished, cylindrical plates ready to be put on the press for printing. Duplicates follow at intervals of from fifteen to twenty seconds, so that several impressions of the same page may be made at once in the press room and the whole paper printed more quickly than if a single impression of a page were made at one time.

26. The Press Room.—The press room, the third and final stage in the mechanical composition of the paper, is where the printing is done on highly complicated machines. The larger the number of pages of the paper printed, the more complicated the presses, the marvel of them being their adaptability to running full, or half, or third capacity, according to the needed output, or to printing a double or triple number of small sized papers in a third or half the usually required time. The large presses of the great dailies print, fold, cut, paste, and count, according to the size of the sheet, 50,000 to 125,000 papers an hour. A double sextuple press has a limit of 144,000 twelve-page papers an hour.

27. The Printing Press.—It is on the cylinders of these presses that the circular stereotyped plates are fitted, two plates filling nicely the round of the cylinder. All the plates for the inside pages of the paper are stereotyped and screwed on their cylinders a half-hour or more before press time, the pages with the latest news being held until the last possible moment. Usually the last page to come is the title page, and as soon as the last locking lever has been clamped, the wheels of the big press begin to turn. As the cylinders with their plates revolve, raised letters on the surface of the plate come in contact, first with the inked rollers, then with the paper, which is spun from large rolls and drawn through the press, obtaining as it goes the impression of the pages of type. As the printed ribbon of paper issues from beneath the cylinders, it is cut into pages, folded, and counted, ready for the circulation department. The whole period of time elapsing between the chute of the last story from the city room and the delivery of the printed pages to the newsboys will not have exceeded ten minutes.

28. Speed in Printing.—Even this brief time is materially cut when great stories break. The result of the Willard-Johnson fight in 1915 and all the details up to the last few rounds were cried on the streets of New York within two minutes after Johnson had been knocked out in Havana. This was made possible by means of the "fudge," a device especially designed for late news. This is a small printing cylinder, upon which is fitted a diminutive curved chase capable of holding a few linotype slugs. When the fudge is used, a stereotyped front page of the paper is ripped open and a prominent blank space left, so that if the press were to print now, the paper would appear with a large unprinted space on its front page. To this blank space, however, the fudge is keyed, so that as the web of paper passes the main cylinder, the little emergency cylinder makes its impression and the page appears to all appearances printed from a single cylinder.

29. Speed Devices.—The value of the fudge, of course, is that, by printing directly from the linotype slugs, it saves the time expended in stereotyping. Its speed, too, is increased by reason of the fact that every great newspaper has in the press room near the fudge a composing machine to which a special telegraph wire is run, and a special operator to read the news direct from the wire to the compositor. This enables the papers to meet the baseball crowd on its way home with extras giving full details of all the plays, and during the last quarter of the football game to sell in the bleachers a complete account to the end of the first half. But even this speed is not always sufficient. Where the outcome of a big piece of news may be predicted, advance headlines are set up and held ready to be clamped on the press. In the case of the Willard-Johnson fight, two heads were held awaiting the knockout: JESS WILLARD NEW CHAMPION and JACK JOHNSON RETAINS TITLE. When President McKinley died in September, 1901, one prominent Milwaukee newspaper man held locked on his presses from 8:00 a.m. until the President died at midnight the plates that would print the whole story of Mr. McKinley's life, assassination, and death. Then when the flash came announcing the dreaded event, the presses were started, and ten seconds afterward newsboys were crying the death of the President of the United States. Such are some of the devices editors use to publish news in the shortest possible time.