Part of Newspaper Culture Disappeared with the Composing Room

In this photo dated Sept. 1, 1906, the men who worked in the night-side composing room of the Mobile Daily Register are taking a break at 11:15 p.m. to pose for the camera.

The Register was a morning newspaper and these men and others worked through the night to have the newspaper ready to go out in the early morning.

This late hour also apparently was the crew’s lunchtime break, which lasted 20 minutes. The men appear to have coffee cups and sandwiches in their hands.

At the time, the compositors used Linotype machines to set the lines of metal type that made up the newspaper pages. The men assembled the pages of type in a metal frame called a chase.

At the right, each of the wheeled tables, called turtles, held the chases that were eventually rolled to the platemaking department. Several more steps were needed to create the curved plates that went on the press and eventually printed the newspaper.

After World War II, machines began automating many of these jobs. By the 1980s, the jobs no longer existed and more than 100 years of newspaper culture disappeared with them.

The photo is from the AlabamaPhotographs and Pictures Collection of the Alabama Department of Archives and History.