The other day, as we were driving home with a couple of family movies she had

picked out for New Year’s Eve, granddaughter Ella briefed me on some of the things she’d been learning. One of those was how to draw both “upper case” and “lower case” letters.

Fascinated by this terminology having been employed by someone who just days earlier had celebrated her fifth birthday, I had to ask whether she happened to know the origins of those unusual terms used to differentiate between capital and small letters.

Not surprisingly, she didn’t, and so I explained that back in the days when my granddad, T. F. E., started working at the paper he later owned, The Shelburne Economist, all the type to be found in the newspaper offices was in drawer-like “cases” and the more popular varieties of type occupied two cases, with the capital letters going in the upper case and the small letters below in the lower case.

That brief conversation got me to thinking about how enormous the changes have been in our industry in the last half-century, particularly by comparison with some fields like baking and cooking, where similar procedures have always been used and the main change has been in the arrival of mechanized means of going things once done by hand.

In the newspaper business, such mechanization has been only a tiny portion of the transformations that have taken place in the last century, and particularly in the last few decades.

When T. F. E. decided to embark on a writing career, one of his first jobs was as one of the three men required to operate the Economist’s Washington Hand Press — one to crank the press, one to fee the paper and one to roll on the ink. Today, in common with papers as big as The Globe and Mail, we no longer have a press of our own, having instead reserved a weekly time slot on the huge press at Central Ontario Web in Barrie.

As any Shelburne oldtimer will tell you, T. F. E. stayed on the job until 1964, having bought The Economist in 1903 and The Free Press 25 years later. In 1929, the combined paper entered the “hot type” era with the purchase of a second-hand Linotype, which served the paper well until 1974, when it and its much newer sister were replaced by a computerized typesetting device we knew of as the “Comp Junior and the paper switched to “cold” type and offset printing.

During T. F. E.’s tenure, the industry’s changes were mainly evolutionary, with the biggest change obviously being the move from hand-set to machine-set type.

Invented in 1886 by Ottmar Mergenthaler, the Linotype could set as much type in an hour as the best manual typesetter could accomplish in a full day, and there was no longer any need to distribute the type back into cases after the paper was printed.

In the 60-plus years my granddad was at the helm, the paper gradually became modernized, with most of the acquisitions taking place in the 1950s. These included a new second-hand press acquired from the Queen’s Printer in Ottawa, a brand new Linotype, a machine that would scan photographs and a new folder that could handle up to 12 pages.

Of course, those changes paled by comparison with those that accompanied by our entry into the age of the computer. Just a few months after the switch to offset printing and computerized typesetting, we had reached the point where it was possible to launch the Orangeville Citizen, and it was barely four years later that we had our first word processors and a means of communicating electronically between Orangeville and Shelburne.

Since then, the changes have been mainly evolutionary but no less dramatic, the biggest being desktop publishing and what we call “pagination.”

Initially, and until just a few years ago, all headlines, articles and advertising were produced on paper and the pages created by “cut and paste,” using scissors or blades and hot wax.

These days, everything is done by computer, with the Internet playing a huge role. This column is written using one of several programs and eventually works its way on to the editorial page as a QuarkXPress document.

The same software is used for the locally-produced advertising, while the “national ads” now are generally received over the Web and the photographs from digital cameras.

Then, once the ads and news are fitted on to the pages, the next step is to convert the QuarkXPress documents into PDF files for transmission to the printer by high-speed Internet, which usually is capable of transmitting all the pages in less than an hour.

Elimination of the “cut and paste” operation has dramatically reduced the typical newspaper’s space requirements, with all the employees now at desks and/or “work stations” — a far cry from the print shops that used to dominate every community paper.

As for handset type and their upper and lower cases, they are still to be found, albeit it mainly in museums.