Soru

In the late nineteenth century, the bottleneck of newspaper printing was not the printing press itself, which could churn out thousands of pages per hour, but the tedious process of typesetting. Compositors had to manually select individual metal letters from type cases and assemble them line by line. This labor-intensive method limited the size and frequency of daily newspapers. In 1886, German immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler revolutionized the industry by introducing the Linotype machine. The Linotype allowed operators to type on a keyboard, which dynamically assembled brass matrices—molds for individual characters. The machine then cast an entire line of type in molten metal (hence, a 'line o' type') before redistributing the matrices back to their respective channels. This mechanized process increased typesetting speeds by sixfold. Consequently, newspapers grew from modest, multi-page pamphlets into thick daily publications, dramatically expanding public access to information and driving up literacy rates across the industrialized world. While eventually replaced by phototypesetting and digital publishing in the late twentieth century, the Linotype remains a cornerstone of the democratic dissemination of knowledge.

Which of the following best describes the primary purpose of the passage?