The oldest company in the United States

[Len]

Took grandchildren to a museum. Hands-on children's room. The Old Office stuff caught their interest. Black Bakelite telephone with dial wheel, adding machine with a crank, and a Remington typewriter. The 6 yrs old parked himself at the typewriter. After a while he shouted: "Hey you guys, this machine prints immediately!"

[jdurand]

And now you can get presses that are essentially giant laser printers.  Click PUBLISH and a full color newspaper starts spewing out the end of the machine.

Of course nobody READS paper now.  Every week a paper appears in our driveway, I pick it up and drop it in the recycle bin.  Sometimes there's a bill attached, that goes in the bin too.  Wish there was an UNSUBSCRIBE but they charge their advertisers by the number of papers delivered, not how many were requested.

Wonder if anyone pays those bills?

[Len]

Why would you pay Bill. Has he contributed???

[Prospector]

Bill has to be the richest man in the world.  I pay him enough every month, and so does everyone else I know. 

[Bishop Creek]

I really just always wanted one because I'm a former full-time, current freelance, newspaper guy and I love Remington. I always figured that if I lived in those days I'd own a small town paper have a Remington at my hip, a Remington rifle and/or shotgun hanging over my editorial desk, and a Remington typewriter.

In my first job out of high school in the late 1960s, I worked at our small hometown newspaper and used not only a typewriter, but a Lino-type machine, typing stories in hot lead that when cool, were then locked into a form for printing. Also ran a proofing press loaded with ink and a router for taking wood away from mounted zinc photo engraved cuts for advertising. All of this equipment is now on display at our local museum and when I told my now college aged kids that I actually used that equipment at one time, they laughed. 

I worked at a paper that had long ago outsourced their printing...to a company with a press built in the 1950s. We still had the linotype machine and the metal printing plate maker in the back room, and both had been in operation as late as the 1990s.
The press itself was a cast iron turn-of-the-century monstrosity  approximately six feet long by four and-a-half feet wide by four feet tall that could be run by a belt or by hand and could only do one side of a gatefold at a time. It hadn't seen action since the early '70s, and still had the last plate on it ready to go. Considering how fat those papers were back then in that small town, it must have been an all-week process to print all the necessary copies. I imagine every day was a major deadline for the staff, even though the paper was a weekly. It sat in the lobby as a bit of a museum piece.

When I started everyone had long ago moved to the plastic plates, but we were still cutting out stories and hand pasting dummies to be turned into plates. I loved it because it gave you a chance to notice those errors you never see on a screen and fix them before going to press with nothing more than a pair of scissors and a glue stick.

Every office I've ever worked at was a hodgepodge of obsolete equipment, and almost none have their own press anymore. I can only think of six in the entire state that have them, and they print the papers for everyone else.

The cub scouts once requested a tour of the newspaper office and I could not get it through the scoutmaster's head that the office was one 20x30 room with four seven-year-old IMac 3Gs each manned by a refugee of the Jolly Roger.

Interesting. We used Xacto knives and a hot wax roller for cut and paste. Our press room was quite a collection too. We had drawers full of headline wood type dating to the 1890s that we used for printing posters of concerts etc.

[mazo kid]

When I was a kid, we had hand cranked wall phones. One long crank got you the "central" where the operator answered. You told her the number you wanted, such as 28 ring 2. She would manually plug a cable into a jack 28 on the panel and give 2"rings". Immediately, you would hear many "clicks" as people on line 28 picked up to listen in. My, how times have changed!

[jdurand]

Yep, you tell your phone who to call and you don't hear any clicks when everyone listens in.

[Classanr]

Yep, you tell your phone who to call and you don't hear any clicks when everyone listens in.

   Oh, so true.

Did Remington ever make a phone  I know Singer made sewing machines and machine guns, so why not Remington guns 'n phones?

[snake-eyes]

When I was a kid, we had hand cranked wall phones. One long crank got you the "central" where the operator answered. You told her the number you wanted, such as 28 ring 2. She would manually plug a cable into a jack 28 on the panel and give 2"rings". Immediately, you would hear many "clicks" as people on line 28 picked up to listen in. My, how times have changed!

 mk,
     I didn't ever use a crank phone but I definitely remember party lines.....Can you imagine
what one might hear on a party line these days
snake-eyes 

[Classanr]

.....Can you imagine what one might hear on a party line these days
snake-eyes 

Uh, it's a crossed-wire party line called Twit-Face.  A billion people typing what they shouldn't and not minding a bit who reads and gets their panties in a twist.  Then the twisted-panties crowd starts the gossip-mongering, which one can follow on Yahoo as "Top Ten At The Moment".  Remington even participates in this speak-market, throwing digital bones to the crowd.

[DD4lifeusmc]

Speaking of switchboards and stuff.
My stepmom was an operator for ma bell in the 40's- early 60's just outside of Omaha.

and to that we just have to watch Ernestine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIOogEaO3Hc

and speaking of printing presses

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XLWleZgU3s