The German-American inventor, Ottmar Mergenthaler, is best known for creating the revolutionary Linotype machine - an invention which drastically changed the printing industry. In the mid-1880s, he created a machine which could automatically cast complete lines of type. This significantly increased the speed and efficiency of typesetting compared to the manual process, and had a major impact on the world of communication - allowing newspapers and other publications to produce content much faster, keeping pace with the growing demand for information.