Bill wrote:

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       No.  Were any regulated substances involved?

Steve
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Nope, no regulated substances! (Unless you consider the lead and
antimony alloys in cast type as regulated substances.)

Before the advent of computers, newspapers and print shops used to use
a machine called a Linotype. It resembled a typewriter in that it had
old-fashioned manual keys to hit on a keyboard, but there the
resemblance ends.

Hitting a key on the Linotype caused a tiny mold of that letter to drop
into a slot which held it in place. The size of the mold was exactly
the size of the letter to be printed.

Hitting subsequent keys would cause those additional letters' molds to
drop into line after the first mold. The net result after a line of
typing was a line of molds of all the individual letters that had been
typed -- spelling out exactly what had been typed.

When the line was full, the operator would pull a lever which caused
the entire line of tiny molds to be filled with molten typesetting
metal. The metal cooled into one piece, forming a full line of type --
thus the name, Linotype.

Instead of a printer setting type one letter at a time, the way Ben
Franklin had to do it, an operator of this ingenious machine could
obtain a one-piece mold of an entire LINE of type just by typing on the
keyboard.

It was much faster for the printing industry to assemble entire lines
of type instead of handsetting one letter at a time. For most of the
twentieth century, newspapers were printed with type from Linotype
machines. It was the only way to set type quickly and efficiently.

Now for the origin of "etaoin shrdlu."

Unlike the usual layout of typewriters, often known as "qwerty"
keyboards, the Linotype keyboard was laid out according to the
frequency with which letters appear in the English language. In order,
that is e-t-a-o-i-n-s-h-r-d-l-u. If I can remember correctly after so
many years, the "etaoin" was in one column, and the "shrdlu" was in the
next.

So if you just ran your finger down the first two columns of keys, the
Linotype machine would set "etaoin" and then "shrdlu" in the blink of
an eye. In junior high, that was way cool -- just go zip, zip! and you
had a line of genuine, finished metal type in a jiffy. Put it in a
printing press and it read, "etaoin shrdlu."

Webby sent me a link that mentioned that when typesetters (Linotype
machine operators) made a typing mistake, it was faster to finish that
line of type and throw it away, then type the correct line.

But discarding a partial line required hitting the "pour-molten-metal"
lever, and if the line was short, the extra molten metal would splash
on the operator! So if a typing mistake was made, the operator learned
to fill out the line with nonsense before discarding it, so he wouldn't
be burned.

The easiest way to fill out the line was by running a finger along the
keys. That would produce the letters "etaoin shrdlu."

Sometimes these "discarded' lines of type were accidentally left in the
newspaper story and printed on the press, thus puzzling the readers of
the day with news articles interspersed with the message, "etaoin
shrdlu, etaoin shrdlu."

And to think that back in the fifties, I had thought it was just due to
fun and games for curious junior-high kids! Those big industrial
Linotype machines were irresistable toys, when the teacher wasn't
looking.  ;-)

- dentaldoc