... that nine days after his heart transplant, J. C. Walter Jr. merged his company Houston Oil & Minerals with Tenneco, then retired to his ranch and shortly after founded Walter Oil & Gas?
... that during his final known voyage, Lope Martín overthrew two captains before being marooned on Ujelang Atoll?
... that a Japanese governor wore a pregnancy simulation suit to encourage men to help out their wives at home?
... that Victor L. King employed only black people from the South in 1917 at his new chemical plant in New Jersey to "prevent the entrance into the organization of any enemy aliens" during World War I?
Ottmar Mergenthaler (11 May 1854 – 28 October 1899) was the inventor of the linotype machine, the first device that could easily and quickly set complete lines of type for use in printing presses. Mergenthaler was born into a German family in Hachtel in the Kingdom of Württemberg. He was apprenticed to a watchmaker in Bietigheim before emigrating to the United States in 1872 to work in Washington, D.C., with his cousin August Hahl. In 1876, Mergenthaler was approached by James O. Clephane and his associate Charles T. Moore, who sought a quicker way of publishing legal briefs. By 1884, he conceived the idea of assembling metallic letter molds, called matrices, and casting molten metal into them, all within a single machine. In July 1886, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company installed the first commercially used Linotype in the printing office of the New-York Tribune. This photograph shows Mergenthaler at approximately 45 years of age in 1899; he died that year in Baltimore of tuberculosis.
Photograph credit: unknown; restored by Adam Cuerden
