The improvements made in the Linotype since Mergenthaler's time (who
died in 1899 at the early age of forty-five) have been very great;
indeed, almost a new machine has been created in doing what was
necessary to adapt it to the more and more exacting work which it was
called upon to perform in the offices of the great American book
publishers. These improvements have been largely the work of, or the
following out of suggestions made by, Philip T. Dodge, the patent
attorney of the parties interested in the enterprise from the
beginning, and later the president of the Mergenthaler Linotype
Company. They went on year after year under the supervision of a corps
of gifted mechanical experts, the chief of whom was John R. Rogers,
the inventor of the Typograph, until from the machine of Mergenthaler,
supplying through its ninety keys as many characters, a machine
appeared yielding three hundred and sixty different characters from
the like keyboard. The magazines, too, were capable of being charged
with matrices representing any face from Agate (5-point) to English
(14-point), and even larger faces for display advertising and for
initial letters, by special contrivances which cannot be described
without carrying this article beyond reasonable limits. Among the
ingenious devices added are: the Rogers systems of setting rule and
figure tables, box heads, etc.; the reversal of the line so as to set
Hebrew characters in their proper relation; the production of
printers' rules of any pattern; the making of ornamental borders; a
device for the casting of the same line an indefinite number of times
from one setting. The machine was also greatly simplified in its
construction.