My name is Ottmar Mergenthaler. I was born May, 11, 1854 in Germany. Since I was a little boy, I have dreamed of becoming a mechanical engineer. But at first it didn't work out because I had to work in the household as I was the youngest of three borthers, and my mother had died form childbedfever when she gave birth to my sister. I had to drop out of school. Later I couldn't study mechanical enginerring because of this lack of education and because my father, who is a teacher, couldn't afford it. 

In the end I became the apprentice of a watch maker. This was for the reason that I had shown an amazing skill, as people said at that time, when, at the age of nine, I managed to repair the church steeple clock after the local watch maker had failed at this task.  But I still dreamed of becoming a real mechanical engineer instead of reamining a watch maker for the rest of my life.

When I was eighteen, I wrote a letter to a son of my former watch maker master, who owned a mechanical engineering factory in Baltimore, USA, and asked him to give me a job. He agreed quickly, and so I decided to leave Germany. It was October 26, 1872, when I left Germany forever on the SS Berlin and set out for Baltimore via New York. 

The passage on the ship was very long and the food was horrible. The meat was very salty and fresh drinking water was rare. We were 250 people down in the third class deck, and often we had to share beds. When a storm came, everyone of us was very frightened. One woman even died from fear because she thought that each and every single one of us would drown. 

But then, after 8 weeks, we finally reached New York. We passed by the Statue of Liberty and docked on at Ellis Island. Since I already had a job offering in my pocket and enough money, I had no problems whatsoever at the immigration control. On the contrary, they were glad to welcome me. I was glad, too, because I saw a man of whom I knew that he had given everything up he owned in order to afford the voyage. But as he had spend a week in prison when he was younger and didn't have $50 with him, he was denied immigration and sent back. 

In Baltimore, I quickly started to feel home and I just loved my work. I met a wonderful woman whom I married soon after, and we founded a family. A few years later I invented what I called the "lynotype". It was a machine that had keys with letters on it with which you could quickly write texts. Somebody once said to me in a joke that it might later be called a typewriter... The "lynotype" brought me a lot of money, and I founded my own company: the "Mergenthaler Lynotype Company". 

Now that I'm lying sick in bed and thinking about my life, I'm sure that emigrating from Germany was the best decision I made in my life. It enabled me to make my dream come true - I am a mechanical engineer!

Ottmar Mergenthaler died in Baltimore Oct. 28, 1899, after he had got sick in 1898.

 Barbara Schunicht