Today's Tidbit... Football and Etaoin Shrdlu

Ideas for Tidbits come from many sources, with a good number arising by chance; many originate by stumbling upon articles, images, or illustrations while researching another topic. Still, most stumbled-upon articles are found in old newspaper sports sections, not other sources.

Today's Tidbit is of a different, though somewhat related, sort. It came while watching two documentaries about the Linotype machines used to typeset newspapers and other printed materials from the 1880s to the 1980s when photoelectronic methods took over. Of course, I watched the documentaries to understand the newspaper process of old and a general interest in how one technology replaces another, so I did not expect a specific story idea to come from the documentaries.

('The Linotype, A Revolution In Printing,' New York Tribune, May 19, 1889)

So, here it is. Linotype operators typed in the contents of articles written by the reporters, generating one physical "line o' type" at a time, with each line of metal print called a slug. Although the operators sometimes made errors, the machines did not allow backspacing or other means of correcting the error. The solution was for the operator to enter a consistent error into that line by keying each letter in the two leftmost columns on the Linotype keyboard, which differed from the QWERTYUIOP pattern on the standard U.S. typewriter. The result was the sequence of characters, ETAOIN SHRDLU, alone or with other sequences. After entering Etaoin Shrdlu, the operator reentered the line of text correctly and moved on to the rest of the article.