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Linotype machine
Spotted at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia: an old Linotype machine, a high-tech device in its day, that helped create newspapers. The keyboard helped put metal rods in the right place for inking text; metal plates were used to create half-tone images with variable-width dots - an early version of pixels.
Information was hard to distribute back in the old days (fifty years ago), so it was a big deal for newspapers to offer both morning and afternoon versions.
See also: Wikipedia entry on the Linotype machine, which includes this gem:
The Linotype may be best remembered for the layout of its keyboard, which had letters arranged in decreasing order of frequency in everyday English. The first two vertical rows were usually ETAOIN SHRDLU, a phrase that occasionally appeared in print because Linotype operators who made mistakes would run their fingers down the keyboard to fill out the line with nonsense, and sometimes the slug of type would accidentally get used. This phrase is in the Oxford English Dictionary and has been used as a character name by a number of authors.
