Learning and growth
The Last Hot-Metal Edition
A trade erased
The Last Hot-Metal Edition (New York · 1978) — A trade erased.
What actually happened?
Read down the first two vertical columns of a Linotype keyboard and you get etaoin shrdlu, the letters arranged by how often English uses them. When an operator fluffed a line, the quickest repair was to run a finger down those two columns, fill the line with nonsense, and throw the slug away. Now and then one escaped into the printed paper. Every compositor knew the string on sight and nobody outside the trade had ever heard of it, which is why the film of that last night is called Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu. A private vocabulary is the surest sign of a real craft, and it goes out with the craft.
Replacement is a switch, not a decline
Once the equipment is installed and the workflow cuts over, the old roles stop as a block rather than thinning year by year. People counting on a few years of cushion in which to adjust usually do not get one.
It is not that orders shrink each year. It is that from one month on, the whole line is run a different way.
The most skilled took the hardest hit
Lines set per minute was the trade's public scoreboard, and the machine voided the whole board at once. The people near the top lost most, because every chip was on a position that could be lifted away whole. And every year until then, another hour on the main skill had been the best available move.
Fastest, most accurate, most practised. Those are precisely the measures a tool catches up with first.
Being able to say why is what travels
How it is done belongs to the tool; why it is done that way belongs to judgement. The first expires with the equipment, the second travels with the person. What tools match is the half of a craft that can be stated, which is why the unstated half needs stating most urgently of all.
That looks wrong has to break down into three specific reasons before anyone can carry it anywhere.
How do I use it today?
List the five things you are best at in your work, and mark each one with the tool it is attached to. Anything welded to one specific system is on a clock you do not control. Then take the part of the job you do by feel, the part where you can see something is wrong but cannot say why, and force three specific reasons out of it this month. That is the half a tool cannot match yet, and it is also the half you cannot hand to anyone until it is in words.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Inside an industry, replacement is rarely gradual.
A skill welded to one machine retires when the machine does.
Touch the new tool while the old work still pays.