On the afternoon of Saturday, February 19, 1870, a young compositor named George Arensberg astonished the printing world when he achieved a feat few thought possible: setting more than two thousand “ems” of solid minion type in a single hour (about 760 words, or 13 words a minute).

As a recent hire at The New York Times, the twenty-year-old Arensberg — nicknamed “The Boy” — soon caught the attention of his colleagues for his remarkable dexterity. His reputation spread quickly around the city’s newspaper composing rooms. That afternoon, a gaggle of fellow compositors from all over town gathered to watch while Times foreman E. A. Donaldson wielded a stopwatch. Working before a standard California job case, Arensberg set his first stick of type in 13 minutes and 55 seconds; his second in 13 minutes and 50 seconds; his third in an even 14 minutes; and his fourth in 14 minutes and 10 seconds. When the tallies were counted, he had averaged just under 15 minutes a stick — four sticks to the hour — bringing him to an unprecedented total of 2,064 ems.¹

At the time, a typical compositor was expected to set roughly 700 ems an hour. Twelve hundred was considered fast; 1,400 was exceptional; breaking the 2,000 mark seemed like a physical impossibility. It was the typesetting equivalent of running a four-minute mile. Arensberg’s peers bestowed him with a new nickname: the “Velocipede”. Soon, Arensberg was the most famous typesetter in the world, and over the decade that followed his record-setting performance, typesetting races became increasingly popular with the broader public.

Once conducted informally in the back rooms of printshops, typesetting races were now public spectacles. Their growing popularity coincided with the rise of “dime museums”, a new breed of amusement halls that had started to spring up across the country alongside vaudeville, circuses, and ballparks.² In the races hosted by these dime museums, the fastest compositors, known as “Swifts”, drew crowds in the thousands and commanded prize purses ranging as high as $1,000 — half a year’s wages for a typical typesetter.

Long before the public took an interest in the 1870s, these races had been a staple of printshop life. Even in small country shops, printers regularly challenged each other to ad hoc contests for beer money or small change. But as larger composing rooms emerged with the rise of the big city dailies, the competition intensified. The races became prevalent enough to warrant a formal set of rules, published in the 1887 booklet Fast Typesetting, along with official competition guidelines and a list of past racing results, promising trophies of silver composing sticks to future winners.³

In the years that followed Arensberg’s record-setting performance, legions of challengers tried — and failed — to topple his record. Competing under colorful monikers — “Kid” DeJarnatt, “Bangs” Levy, and “Young Jack” Fasey — they carved out reputations in what soon became a national touring circuit. A few became minor celebrities, like the Tribune’s star compositor, Thomas Rooker, who took to wearing diamond studs on his shirts.⁴ One particularly gifted compositor, William C. Barnes, stunned onlookers by setting type blindfolded, with his type cases reversed.⁵

In 1877, John Bell of The Cincinnati Enquirer issued a public challenge: he would put his team of fellow printshop compositors, the “Big Ten”, up against any other composing room in the country. The prize money: $1,000. Other newspapers accepted the challenge — and lost. In 1881, the print world took notice when a young type sticker named Harry Cole defeated the legendary Myles Johnson in a dramatic contest in the composing room of The New York Herald. But Arensberg’s record stood untouched until 1886, when another up-and-coming typesetter named Alex Duguid finally took the crown.⁶ His fellow typesetters celebrated his achievement with a banquet at Cincinnati’s Grand Hotel, sponsored by his native Cincinnati Typesetters’ Union.⁷

Although typesetting as a profession was scarcely limited to newspapers — compositors worked across the publishing industry on all kinds of printed matter — books, magazines, posters, pamphlets, and so forth — the type-racing phenomenon was unique to newspaper printers. This was partly a function of a deadline-driven work culture that valued speed over precision: book compositors typically accepted lower wages than their newspaper peers in exchange for cleaner working conditions and a more convivial atmosphere. The competitive spirit of these races also evoked the “sporting life” that characterized life in the newspaper trade in these raucous years. News compositors took enormous pride in their reputation for hard work and even harder living. Most (though not all) were bachelors and enthusiastic participants in a ribald lifestyle that revolved around saloons, boarding houses, and billiard halls. They put in a full day’s work but also often drank heavily, swore, gambled, and pushed the edges of social decorum with a “code of slang”, as one contemporary magazine put it, and a proclivity for “unwarranted familiarity”.⁸ It was, in other words, a boys’ club.

Yet even as type racing started to capture public interest in the 1870s, a new cadre of ambitious outsiders — women — were already knocking on the doors of that club.

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On February 22, 1886, at Boston’s Austin & Stone’s Dime Museum, Miss L. J. Kenney defeated three female rivals in a typesetting contest held the day after a union-sanctioned male typesetters’ event. The museum had invested heavily in the race beforehand, deploying forty carpenters, gasfitters, and upholsterers to transform its main auditorium into a facsimile of a newspaper composing room. They even hired a military band to play inspirational marches for the thousands of spectators. Distractions abounded, including the museum’s two resident monkeys, Fido and Jack, but Kenney persevered, and set a record of 24,950 ems — besting the times of any of the men who had competed the previous day. Moreover, two of the three women she defeated that day also set type faster than any of the men.

The organizers had no interest in celebrating this remarkable result. Indeed, they worked to keep these record-breaking scores out of the official competition. “Much latitude was allowed the ladies in the matter of time and proofs”, they said as they refused to acknowledge the women’s scores.⁹ There is little evidence that any such latitude was actually given; the women’s contest was identical to the men’s in every important respect — with the possible exception of the monkeys. And many of the estimated eleven thousand visitors who passed through the museum over the course of the contest witnessed with their own eyes the women’s evident skill and dexterity.¹⁰

Nevertheless, the Boston contest marked a watershed moment for women printers, coinciding with a growing movement of women pressing their way into big city composing rooms around the country.¹¹ Women’s share of the printing workforce had more than doubled since the Civil War (from about 4 to more than 10 percent).¹² But they remained largely excluded from the newspaper composing rooms, which were heavily unionized. That exclusion stemmed not just from endemic cultural biases but also from male printers’ sense of economic self-interest. Women were typically paid 25–50 percent less for similar composing work. In an era when unions were pushing hard to increase wages and put other protections in place, the potential availability of a large female labor pool was seen as a growing threat to the union’s bargaining power. There were cultural barriers at work as well. Although women had been working in printshops almost from the beginning — often with a high degree of skill and mastery — the male-dominated culture of the time precluded them from attaining the rank of journeyman or as the decades went on, from joining most of the typesetters’ unions.

Like most local typesetters’ unions, the Boston chapter of the International Typographical Union (ITU) had long refused to admit women. But Kenney and her compatriots had applied and been accepted for membership in the rival Knights of Labor, an upstart union whose ranks had swollen recently partly because of its policy of actively recruiting women. With union cards in hand, the women were able to claim their place in the tournament.¹³

In the wake of Kenney’s unofficial victory in Boston, the ITU organizers took notice. Just a few months later, they reversed course and invited women to join the chapter, but the victory would be pyrrhic.¹⁴ Their hard-won entrance to the composing room came at the very moment when the time-honored craft of hand typesetting was entering its twilight, with the specter of disruptive innovation looming on the horizon.

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The rise of competitive typesetting amid a period of intensifying labor conflict pointed to an uncomfortable truth facing the world’s printshops: while the rest of the printing process had become increasingly automated — with steam powered rotary presses, folding machines, telegraphs, stereotypes, and all manner of other industrial innovations — the final step of sticking type by hand remained stubbornly rooted in the fifteenth century. Human compositors were waging a valiant but ultimately doomed struggle to keep pace with the machines. As industrialization took hold, their work was undergoing a dramatic change. Whereas the printshops of old had relied on printers to function as jacks-of-all-trades — capable of damping the paper, proofreading, composing, treading the pelts, and, not infrequently, slipping their own writing into the pages of the papers they composed — the new breed of workers in the big city composing rooms was hired to perform a single task: setting type. As William C. Barnes, a noted Swift, observed in 1887, a printer had once been “able to perform all the different duties appertaining to the trade”. But now, “he has but to be proficient in one”.¹⁵

Even as compositors pushed their feats of manual dexterity to new heights, many harbored a gnawing sense of foreboding. It seemed almost inevitable that a machine would one day take their place. The world was awash in new inventions — this was the age of Morse, Bell, and Edison — and the enormous business potential of a mechanical typesetting device seemed self-evident. As the authors of Fast Typesetting put it that same year: “The wealth of a Croesus, and a place in the temple of fame, beside Howe and Morse, await the genius who shall invent, and put before the world a mechanical contrivance that will supersede the present system of setting type by hand.”¹⁶ But although the need seemed self-evident, the solution remained maddeningly elusive.

Inventors had been trying for decades. As far back as 1810, a Vermont doctor named William Church patented a machine with a primitive keyboard for dropping type into a stick. Three decades later in Paris, James Hedden Young and Adrien Delcambre unveiled their “pianotype”, an improbable-looking contraption with piano-like keys and metal chutes; but it proved too delicate for regular use. In the 1850s, US inventor William Mitchell produced an ingenious “compositor” machine, but it failed to solve the thorny technical problem of justification. Around the same time, a former printer named Timothy Alden designed a promising machine with a composing wheel spinning on a horseshoe-shaped table, with a series of levers connected to a keyboard to compose type; its ingenious design allowed the operator to compose type even faster than the machine could complete the operation. But though promising in principle, the machine was never fully built. In the 1870s, James Mackie, a Scotsman, developed a composing machine that was briefly deployed in a few commercial printshops but proved too complex to maintain. Over the course of the century, no fewer than three hundred other patents were issued for similar machines and methods in America and Europe.¹⁷ None proved sufficiently reliable or economical to supplant the legions of compositors still sticking type by hand.

And so the ancient arts of setting, justifying, and redistributing type remained the province of human hands, even as every other phase of newspaper production underwent a mechanical transformation. As the volume of printed material continued to balloon, compositors found themselves under mounting pressure to keep increasing their output. And while the fastest among them achieved a moment of fame as Swifts, deep down most knew the days of their profession were numbered.

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In the meantime, printers had become one of the most heavily unionized trades in the country. The International Typographical Union, founded in 1852, grew into one of the nation’s most powerful labor organizations. Local typographical societies, some dating back to the 1830s, had already begun securing minimum wages and resisting the relentless pressures of larger news publishers pushing for longer hours and increased output. By the 1870s, union printers enjoyed remarkable levels of autonomy; they often worked for days on end with little management oversight, answering only to their foreman. They could also move freely from one shop to another with their wages intact. Compositors called these itinerant stints their “sits”, and many — like George Arensberg — cycled their way through a succession of printshops up and down the East Coast, the best of them continuing to engage in competitions along the way.¹⁸

The ITU even took steps to legitimize type racing as a sanctioned activity for its members, issuing formal rules and furnishing referees to judge the contests — and ensuring that only union typesetters could compete for the prize money. This mix of industrial innovation, rising labor costs, and assertive trade unionism created mounting tensions between printshop workers and their employers. While some publishers, like Horace Greeley, remained deeply sympathetic to the craft (Greeley, after all, had come of age as a printer’s devil), others viewed compositors as a costly obstacle to modernization and efficiency. None more so than Whitelaw Reid, the publisher who would play a central role in orchestrating the Swifts’ undoing, when he assumed control of New York’s Tribune in 1872.

Styling himself a modernizer, Reid embraced the new gospel of business efficiency that would later come to be known as scientific management.¹⁹ By then, the Tribune employed nearly a hundred compositors,making its composing room one of the largest — and most expensive — in the country. Labor costs consumed a sizable chunk of the paper’s operating budget, rivaling the expense of gathering news itself. To Reid, the composing room looked less like the beating heart of a storied enterprise and more like an overstaffed bottleneck of coddled workers. He was keen to limit labor costs, introduce operational improvements, and make strategic investments that would help grow the company’s bottom line. With a staff of close to a hundred compositors, the Tribune’s composing room constituted an enormous operational expense — one that seemed ripe for a dose of corrective managerial medicine. His impatience with labor-intensive typesetting led him in 1881 to gamble on a new machine called the Burr typesetter, used to set portions of the page — the first newspaper in the country to attempt such a feat. But the machines broke down frequently and produced only marginal gains.²⁰

As he led the newspaper into its period of most dramatic growth, in the 1880s, Reid continued to cast about in search of mechanical solutions to the age-old problem of typesetting, convinced that such a machine would transform the economics of news publishing once and for all. Small wonder, then, that when he first got wind of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s new mechanical typecasting machine— soon to be dubbed the Linotype — he seized on the opportunity. On July 3, 1886, Reid orchestrated the first public demonstration of the Linotype on the composing room floor of the Tribune. Three weeks later, on July 28, 1886, George Arensberg passed away at the age of thirty-six. His former employer, The New York Times, honored him with a brief obituary that described him as “one of the most rapid and skillful compositors in the world”, lauding his achievements and numerous victories in the world of fast typesetting. “As a general printer he had few equals.”²¹

The Velocipede was no more. The heyday of the Swifts was coming to a close, and with it the era of hand compositors — men and women alike. The age of the mechanical compositor was about to begin.