The Hinman collator, an early optical collator, was an opto-mechanical device for comparing pairs of documents for differences in the text. Documents that appeared similar were said to “collate”. The collator resulted in rapid advances in the study of

literary Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, plays, and poems. It includes both print and digital writing. In recent centuries, ...

works. Invented by

Charlton Hinman Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman (1911 in Fort Collins, Colorado – 16 March 1977 in Rockville, Maryland) was the editor of the ''Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles'' and ''The Norton Facsimile: The First Folio of Shakespeare''. He is well known as the in ...

in the late 1940s, the device used

lights Light is an electromagnetic radiation, part of which stimulates the sense of vision. Light or Lights may also refer to: Illumination * Lighting * Light bulb * Traffic light Arts and entertainment Music * Lights (musician) (born 1987), Canadian s ...

and

mirror A mirror, also known as a looking glass, is an object that Reflection (physics), reflects an image. Light that bounces off a mirror forms an image of whatever is in front of it, which is then focused through the lens of the eye or a camera ...

s to superimpose images of the two documents so that differences in text alignment or wording stood out. This resulted in huge improvements in speed and efficiency compared to the traditional

cross-referencing The term cross-reference (abbreviation: xref) can refer to either: * An instance within a document which refers to related information elsewhere in the same document. In both printed and online dictionaries cross-references are important because ...

of texts by eye. The idea built on earlier work such as Carl Pulfrich's

blink comparator A blink comparator is a viewing apparatus formerly used by astronomers to find differences between two photographs of the night sky. It permits rapid switching from viewing one photograph to viewing the other, "blinking" back and forth between t ...

used to help identify the former planet

Pluto Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of Trans-Neptunian object, bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Su ...

, and Hinman's work analysing aerial photographs during

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. Hinman used his device to compare the many slightly different impressions of the

First Folio ''Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies'' is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is cons ...

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare ( 23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...

's works. The

printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ...

and

bookbinding Bookbinding is the process of building a book, usually in codex format, from an ordered stack of paper sheets with one's hands and tools, or in modern publishing, by a series of automated processes. Firstly, one binds the sheets of papers alon ...

processes used in the time of Shakespeare often resulted in variations in the pages bound into the final books, and the collator enabled Hinman to describe the exact order in which the Folios had been composited and printed. He used the collator to compare 55 different copies of the First Folio held by the

Folger Shakespeare Library The Folger Shakespeare Library is an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., United States. It has the world's largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare, and is a primary repository for rare materia ...

, and subsequently wrote about his findings in ''Printing and Proof-reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare'' in 1963. In the wake of Hinman's success, the device was purchased by a number of universities, libraries and other institutions (allegedly including the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and ...

). As more compact types of collator were developed in the 1960s, the last Hinman was built in 1978. In his 2002 survey of mechanical collators, Steven Escar Smith estimates from scattered records that as many as 59 Hinman Collators were produced, 41 of these surviving at the time of his survey's publication. A more portable collator was developed by Randall McLeod.Zalewski, Daniel
''Through the looking glass.''
Lingua franca, June 1997.

References

External links

*Kelsey Jackson Williams,
The Hinman Collator
, Stirling (Scotland): The Pathfoot Press, 2018.
Charlton Hinman and The Roots of Mechanical CollationInstructions for implementing Blink Comparator on personal computer
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200325193143/http://www.instructables.com/id/Blink_Comparator_on_Personal_Computer , date=2020-03-25 Optical devices Bibliography Textual scholarship

See also

References

External links