Indices : History : Ottmar Mergenthaler

May 10, 1854–October 28, 1899

Ottmar Mergenthal was born in southern Germany. During the 1870s, he moved to Baltimore. In 1886, he invented the Linotype Machine, the world’s first commercially-viable typesetting machine that would later be mass produced by an America company called Mergenthaler Linotype. Newspapers were the primary users of these machines.