It was about three days after Dr. Hudson arrived, that a big job came in from the Legal Publishing Company⁠—a three-volume, four-thousand-page record for the U.S. circuit court. They could not handle the typesetting, so they farmed that part out to us.

It had to be delivered exactly one week before the deadline that had been set by the receivers for closing the plant. I very nearly turned it down, but Dr. Hudson’s eyes glittered when he saw it. “Just what we need,” he said.

“That’s almost two thousand galleys of type,” I reminded him, “besides our regular stuff.” I was very dubious.

But Dr. Hudson was enthusiastic. “We’ll make history,” he promised.

Well, we did. Union or not, the men would have to learn to do things the modern way. That is what I told the chairman when he protested against having the men go back in time to set a job over. That had been my first idea, executed by Dr. Hudson.

As I said, Dr. Hudson was an experimental physicist. He was, you might say, a super-physicist, because he had specialized in finding ways to do all the things which traditionally were impossible, like traveling in time.

So when the Monotype casterman set a job in Caslon that should have been set in Century, I turned him over to Dr. Hudson. The doctor took him into the laboratory and sent him back two days in time and had him do the job over⁠—but right. The casterman didn’t like it, but he didn’t know what to do about it.

There was plenty of buzzing that afternoon among the men, especially when the job, reset in the correct face⁠—or rather, set in the correct face, because this now was the first time it had been set⁠—was put on the dump. I gave the boys five minutes to crowd around and look at the proof and then I broke it up. I was exultant. It didn’t occur to me then that a man could be too ambitious.