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There is an interesting period video that explained the mechanical inter-workings of a Linotype machine available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRHOPmGUtPA

• Animats 9y ago
  A more detailed one is [1]. The amazing thing about Linotypes is how little they changed through their century long life. One would have expected a few generations of the hardware - machines becoming more compact and simpler. But no. There were various models, but the basic form didn't change. [1] https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_45_00 https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_...
  • dredmorbius 9y ago
    A great many systems and designs reach stability relatively early on. Particularly for mechanical systems. Computers are something of an exceeption so far as scale goes, what with Moore's law, though other principles are vastly more durable. (x86 architecture, Unix, core memory, von Neumann / Turing machines, Boolean logic.) In mechanical systems, it's often some particular breakthrough somewhere which makes for changes. In the case of printing, the period from about 1780 -1920 was profound: from wooden "wine press" designs of perhaps 60-120 impressions/hr to electrically-powered, steel-framed, web-fed, linotype-set, offset-press based systems running 1,000,000 impressions/hr.