Advent of Photo Engraving Machine Rocks Local Daily

The New Look enters its second week this afternoon. At 12 a.m. last Friday, a monster strode into 14 Plympton Street. Late Sunday night it belched a cloud of black smoke and omitted the first picture engraved on the premises over run by the CRIMSON.

Since then, every photograph in Cambridge's only breakfast table daily has been manufactured on the new, modern engraving machine.

Because of its presence, the Crime was able to print in Tuesday morning's edition a picture taken at the Little Hall fire after midnight.

The acquisition of the apparatus heralds two major changes in CRIMSON policy. First, the 45-minute camera-to-press interval permits inclusion of photographs of unscheduled nocturnal events, where previously the consumption of time involved in sending a picture to be engraved in Boston by the tedious zinc-and-acid progress ruled out late shots.

Second, the lower per-picture-cost enables printing of more pictures than before and of action photographs of men making the news instead of stock cuts.

The new machine consists of a mammoth metal cabinet, on which perches a mechanism resembling a combination of two lathes and an iron lung. On one of the two revolving cylinders goes the photograph, on the other a sheet of plastic.

As the cylinders spin, a photo-electric "eye" scans the photograph while a red-hot needle carves the plastic.