Oklahoma's newspapers - yesterday, today, tomorrow and the next century
THE HISTORY OF OKLAHOMA NEWSPAPERS:  The revolution begins
Part 4: The revolution begins

By M. Scott Carter

The third revolution began about a year before statehood. 
Sometime in 1906, two men - Ira A. Rubel, a paper manufacturer, and A.F. Harris, a printer - discovered, quite by accident, offset printing. 
Both men noticed that a type impression was accidentally printed from a press cylinder directly on the rubber blanket of the press's impression cylinder. After running a sheet of paper through the press, each man witnessed a sharp image printed from the "offset" of the rubber impression cylinder blanket onto the paper. 
A new type of printing was quickly born. 
While it's ironic that Rubel and Harris discovered the process separately, it's also telling that their accidental discovery would start a third, monumental change in the newspaper industry - an industry that, up until the first part of the 20th Century, had taken full advantage of Johannes Gutenberg's movable type.
Developed in the mid-14th Century, Gutenberg's movable type process unleashed a cultural hurricane and created the modern printing industry. 
Books, containing new and possibly dangerous thoughts were easier to reproduce and, thus, cheaper to purchase. 
Gutenberg's first published work, the Bible, took issues of faith directly to the masses and threw a body blow to an already struggling church.
Movable type's revolutionary fire burned brightly. 
And because of Gutenberg's invention, the foundation for the modern newspaper was laid. 
Four decades later, the first newspaper would be born. 
In Germany, The Zeitung (newspaper) was published in 1502. Eleven years later, Trewe Encountre is printed, making it the earliest known English-language news sheet in 1513.
Later, the German publication, Relation aller Fürnemmen und gedenckwürdigen Historien (Collection of all distinguished and commemorable news) began printing in 1605 and becomes the first regularly published newspaper in Europe. 
Forty-four years later, in 1649, the first issue of England's Oxford Gazette is pulled from the press; this paper is notable, historians say, because it's the first newspaper to use the double column format. 
Eighty-one years after the Oxford Gazette, Richard Pierce and Benjamin Harris' Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, was published in Boston. 
From there, newspapers spread quickly. 
By the early 1800s, the modern newspaper had become the information source for the globe. Newer printing technology reduced costs and improved printing techniques sped up delivery, bringing more newspapers to the masses.
Shipping routes, roads and rail quickly moved printing equipment across the country and, in 1844, brought the first newspaper to what is now Oklahoma. 
Born on Sept. 26, 1844, Oklahoma's first true newspaper was the Cherokee Advocate, which is unique on two fronts. It was the first newspaper published in Oklahoma and the first Oklahoma newspaper printed in two languages - English and Cherokee. 
More newspapers would follow in the late 1800s, popping up all over Oklahoma and Indian Territory.
Yet technology would change again, and newspapers would undergo their second revolution in 1867. 
With the patent of the typewriter that year, the tools needed for mass communication evolved quickly. 
But the newspaper printing process itself remained cumbersome. Stories were written - usually in longhand or, if the publication was successful, on a typewriter - then sent to newspaper's "composing room." 
In the composing room, printers would individually place each letter of type together to form words and sentences; when the story was complete, (or "set") the type was placed in a large metal frame. 
Once the frame was filled with type, it was placed in the press where the type was inked and then forced against individual sheets of paper, creating that day's (or week's) edition. 
After the printing was finished, the type would be removed from the frame, taken apart, cleaned and placed, individually, back into a large, wooden drawer, known as a type tray. 
Then the process would start all over. 
And while the letterpress method allowed the individual pieces of type to be reused over and over, "composing" a page of a newspaper required a great deal of labor, skill and the unique ability to be able to read upside down and backward. 
In fact, the newspaper printing process was so difficult that prior to 1884 no newspaper in the world had more than eight pages. 
Enter James Ogilvie Clephane. 
An attorney by trade, Clephane needed a way to transcribe his legal notes quickly, and in multiple forms, for court hearings. 
Seeking help, Clephane sought the aid of a friend, Charles Moore. Moore, an inventor, struggled to refine a machine that could be used by Clephane. After several failed attempts, Moore went to August Hahl, a Baltimore printer, seeking advice. There, he met Ottmar Mergenthaler. 
Mergenthaler, a German inventor, believed he could do what Moore could not and the following summer delivered what he felt was "the prefect machine." 
Mergenthaler succeeded. Instead of individual pieces, Mergethaler's machine produced lines of type using a process that injected a molten mixture of tin and lead into brass molds  containing the shapes of letters. 
The machine was called a 
Linotype and it would do as much to change the newspaper industry as Gutenberg's original invention of movable type. 
With a Linotype, an operator sat in front of a large keyboard and by pressing the keys retrieved letter molds - also known as a matrices - from a large, metal magazine that sat atop the machine. 
Once an entire line of matrices and spacebands - used to create 
spaces between words - was assembled, the machine forced a high pressure mixture of lead and tin into a mold sandwiched between the molten metal pot and the brass molds. 
The result was a complete line of type in reverse that would read properly when the ink was transferred onto paper. Those finished lines - slugs - were then assembled into a page frame that was placed into the printing press. 
But Merganthaler's machine, although revolutionary, would have a short life. 
With the discovery of the offset printing method in 1906, the days of the hot, noisy newspaper composing room had already begun to fade. 
And in just another 50 years they would be gone. 
In fact, by the late 1950s, many of the smaller newspapers in Oklahoma began to eye this new printing process.
In September 1962, the old world, letterpress printing method ended in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. On Sept. 23, the Pauls Valley Daily Democrat became the first Oklahoma newspaper to be published via the offset method. 
But the process wasn't easy. 
In his book, The Story of Oklahoma Newspapers, newspaper historian L. Edward Carter writes about Ken Reid - then-publisher of the Pauls Valley newspaper - and of Reid's "horrible memories" of that historic, first issue. 
"We never did get all that issue out," Reid told Carter. "And we worked straight through without sleep from Friday morning through Monday morning." When they 
finally stopped, Reid said, employees "picked some papers off the floor and mailed them." 
But the offset process stayed. 
Other newspapers quickly followed and by 1970 many of the state's smaller publications had moved from letterpress publishing to the offset method. Because of the huge investment in people and equipment, the state's largest newspapers would continue to use the older, letterpress method for several years. 
Yet even with the faster and better offset technology being adopted, for many Oklahoma newspapers the Linotypes and Ludlows (a machine similar to a Linotype that cast headlines) remained a necessary part of production. 
Because few of the small weekly and daily newspapers could afford their own offset press, these papers simply mothballed their older, letterpress units and made printing arrangements with companies who owned offset presses. 
But their Linotypes remained. 
Stories were still cast in lead and used to print copy that would be cut apart and pasted on a blue grid sheet using melted bee's wax. The grid sheets would then be taken to an offset printer where they were photographed to make a large negative. That negative was used to make an aluminum plate that could be used on an offset press. 
This hybrid type process would serve many newspapers well into the early 1970s when technology would once again change and end the use of the Linotype. 
Developed during World War II, phototypesetting - also referred to as "cold type" - became popular in the early 1970s and finally ended the newspaper's use of hot lead. 
Several companies jumped into the cold type method. 
Mergenthaler, the original producer of the Linotype, along with Alphatype, Varityper and Compugraphic all produced phototypesetting machines in the 1970s making it possible for small newspapers to set their own type professionally. 
Compugraphic's Compuwriter, which sold new for more than $20,000, used a filmstrip wrapped around a drum rotating at several hundred revolutions per minute. 
The filmstrip contained images of type faces in bold, italic and Roman (regular) style. If a different type size was needed, the typesetter loaded a different film strip or used a magnifying lens built into the machine to double the font's size. 
Yet another Compugraphic-made machine had a lens turret with eight lenses providing different point sizes from the font ranging from 8-point  all the way to a full inch in size, or 72-point. 
As the operator typed on the machine's keyboard, a light would expose a strip of light-sensitive paper with the image of the letter contained on the filmstrip. The paper was then processed, producing black type against a white background. Once the type was dry, it could be waxed and, like proofs printed from slugs, pasted onto grid sheets to be made into printing plates. 
Though still cumbersome, the process worked smoothly until 1984, when the newspaper industry would once again witness a major revolution in the technology used to create their publications. 
That change, born in Cuper-
tino, Calif., would not only send shockwaves through the newspaper industry but also force many publishers to rethink their entire operation. 
The new technology would come in the shape of a small, plastic box with a smiling face.