Hot Type: The Magnificent Machine That Gave Birth to Mass Media and Drove Mark Twain Mad (Hardcover)

Description

Hot Type is the epic story of the magnificent 19th-century machine that rendered Gutenberg s movable type obsolete and opened the portal to the long century of mass media. The Linotype mechanized the 400-year-old process of setting type one laborious letter at a time and thus ignited an explosion of newspaper book and magazine empires. This is a tale populated with wondrous characters: tragic inventors malign media moguls hand-typesetters called the Swifts who turned their craft into a spectator sport and authors and journalists who chronicled the turmoil of their time their every word molded into metal type by what some viewed as a thinking machine. This revolution in media technology helped to propel Mark Twain into literary celebrity but it also cost him his fortune – as well as his sense of humor and optimism. The era of the Linotype was a bridge between Twain s Gilded Age with its tycoons of steam steel and wire and today s Gilded Age with its barons of bits and AI. Its history provides an opportunity to reflect on how technology changes culture just as new technologies – the internet and artificial intelligence -manufacture their endless streams of words today.