Dr. Hudson finished making his cabinet filled with coils and transformers and condensers and circuits I’d never heard of, and we set it up in the composing-room one night.

It was that night that full realization hit me that we had set only two hundred galleys of type out of the two thousand on the Legal Printing Company job, and that there were only two weeks left to get it out. Somehow or other, I had let it slip by. I thought Dr. Hudson was watching those things; I had been busy trying to make an impression for the receivers.

I was sick when I figured it all out. We had six machines. If we should run those six machines two shifts a day, our capacity was about three hundred and sixty galleys a week. Into eighteen hundred that goes considerably more than two times. We would need five weeks of full production⁠—and we couldn’t possibly give it full production; we had other jobs, too.

The only hope was Dr. Hudson’s new machine.

The next day the electricians hooked it up to a twelve-hundred-volt feed-line, and by noon it was ready to go. At twelve thirty, as soon as the men punched in, I called them together. This was on office time, of course, so there couldn’t be any squawk. Dr. Hudson was there to explain. I never had fully realized how much of him was nose before I watched him that day.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is nothing to be afraid of. This is merely a modern device to assure continuous production in the composing-room by eliminating lost time from sickness and accidents. As you know, if a linotype operator is ill, his machine goes untouched. That day’s production is lost. At a cost per man of around ten dollars an hour, that represents a considerable loss.”