An Editorial on Radio Finally Gets Shorter Songs

[CTListener]

Not to change the subject (again) but I always thought one of the most fascinating machines of all time was the modern printing press (modern as in circa 1950). I used to stand outside the windows of the local newspaper printing room and watch them crank out a newspaper (which I then delivered). To this day I have never figured out how anyone designed a machine that could take raw rolls of newsprint and create a ready-to-read paper out of it in one fell swoop. And the rumble and the roar sounded more like a train than anything else. .

Working late on the copy desk, my final duty most nights was checking the first copies of the paper as they came off the press, which meant I was right there when that big train started to roll. A lasting childhood memory is being taken to the Boston Globe by my dad for my 11th or 12th birthday, going on the guided tour and asking so many questions that the tour guide finally asked me to push the button that would start that afternoon's press run! I was thrilled beyond belief and even got a linotype slug as a souvenir. I loved listening to the radio as a kid and still do, but I was writing a neighborhood newspaper as well, and I knew I'd get into one of those fields as a grown-up by the time I was 10.

 

[davideduardo]

No problem. I'm not in radio nor am I an IT guy, but I'm sure all this is fascinating to those who are. I could add to the wandering thread with tales of Computype, Hendrix, and other early electronic typesetting systems I cursed at at newspapers in the 1970s and 1980s, but I'd likely be entertaining no one but myself.

When I was about 10 or 11, I got a printing press... a smaller Chandler & Price... which I watched being made at the factory in Cleveland. My grandfather, who worked at the C&P, took me one day to a typesetting service where I watched Meganthaler Linotype machines produce molded lead, line by line. I took home a bunch of slugs with type-style and font variants of my name and address.

Later, my stepbrother took me through the plant of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he worked, as they started a print run of over 400,000 copies of the paper. The speed, the noise, the precision was amazing.

The nearly lost art of letterpress printing!

 

[Kemosabe]

Not to change the subject (again) but I always thought one of the most fascinating machines of all time was the modern printing press (modern as in circa 1950). I used to stand outside the windows of the local newspaper printing room and watch them crank out a newspaper (which I then delivered). To this day I have never figured out how anyone designed a machine that could take raw rolls of newsprint and create a ready-to-read paper out of it in one fell swoop. And the rumble and the roar sounded more like a train than anything else.

It's hard to not be fascinated by such machinery. The former Brooklyn printing plant of The New York Times afforded passersby on Third Avenue a view of the printing, collating, and folding process of its roughly half-block-long press.

This is the most extreme example of "thread drift" I can ever recall seeing!

One could drift even further astray by discussing a Hoe's impact, so to speak, on modern-day printing presses.

 

[CTListener]

One could drift even further astray by discussing a Hoe's impact, so to speak, on modern-day printing presses.

As in Wood-Hoe? That was the press at the last paper I worked at that had its own press. My first paper had a Goss. My current paper is published about an hour away and I've never seen the press. So what's the story behind that Hoe?

 

[Kemosabe]

So what's the story behind that Hoe?

In 1805, Robert Hoe (1784–1833) and his brother-in-law founded a company that manufactured, among other things, flatbed printing presses. In 1843, Robert Hoe's eldest son, Richard March Hoe (1812–1886), invented the rotary press, which yielded far greater throughput than a flatbed press could. In 1870, Richard Hoe developed a perfecting press that improved efficiency yet further by printing both sides of a page in a single pass.

 

[RadioFan2J3]

Not to change the subject (again) but I always thought one of the most fascinating machines of all time was the modern printing press (modern as in circa 1950). I used to stand outside the windows of the local newspaper printing room and watch them crank out a newspaper (which I then delivered). To this day I have never figured out how anyone designed a machine that could take raw rolls of newsprint and create a ready-to-read paper out of it in one fell swoop. And the rumble and the roar sounded more like a train than anything else. But then (back to subject matter) I also spent a lot of time in the studios of KTKT watching how the DJ's did their work too. DJing was on my bucket list as a kid but I only got as close as a navy radioman.

Adding to the capabilities of newspaper presses that amazed me was the ability to change rolls of paper on the fly - Guess more correctly, the load up a new roll of paper without stopping.


If the feed transfer is done properly, they won't even stop a press to insert a new roll of paper.

 

[blackgold]

Yeah, i remember that happening!

WBZ faded out "The Boxer" before the acoustic ending. As did WRKO. Both of these stations located here in Boston.

 

[stephensmith]

Before heading off to college in 1969, I would listen to WABB (1480 AM) in Mobile, Alabama. At that time they would sometimes play long versions of songs, but only after midnight. I particularly remember staying up just so I could hear the extended version of the Doors' "Light My Fire." My parents and most normal people had already gone to bed, so it seemed as if I entered a special place after midnight, one reserved for us "cool" and "hip" folk.

"After midnight, we're gonna' let it all hang out ..."