A century ago, Charles Chapin of the New York Evening World was considered “the ablest city editor who ever lived.” He was also among the most hated: Nearly everyone who ever worked for Hard-Boiled Charlie found him a sadistic tyrant.

Yet his ideas remain relevant. He envisioned reporting news without slant or prejudice and instituted the legman/rewrite system still in use: reporters gathering facts and telephoning them to rewrite men who then write the story. He forced reporters to use the summary lead, which put the important facts – who, what, when, where, why – into the first sentence, and the inverted pyramid story form, which organized facts by their importance. He eradicated ornate, self-consciously literary writing from the news section.

Born in 1858, Chapin taught himself to set type and take shorthand. In 1879, he became a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and, in 1883, city editor of the Chicago Star. At 33, while visiting New York, he walked into the New York World and introduced himself. They hired him immediately.

Chapin was cold. He wrote, “I was boss of the office for more than 20 years and … I never saw or spoke to a member of the staff outside the office or talked to them in the office about anything except the business of the moment. I was myself a machine, and the men I worked with were cogs.”

He loved firing people: for being two minutes late, staying home to minister to a sick child, or being knocked unconscious in pursuit of a story. Once, as a dismissed reporter headed for the door, Chapin barked to the city room, “That is the 108th man I’ve fired.” Perhaps this explains why, when Chapin once called in sick, reporter Irvin S. Cobb said, “Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”

Chapin spoke in headlines. Journalist Allan Churchill claimed Chapin couldn’t say, “Hurry up with the story of the child who was killed.” Rather, it was, “Hurry up with TINY TOT WITH PENNY CLUTCHED IN CHUBBY FIST DIES UNDER TRAIN BEFORE MOTHER’S EYES.”

Chapin’s response to the burning of the excursion Steamer General Slocum, with over 1,000 dead, the city’s largest single loss of life before the attacks of September 11, was infamous. At the World, rewrite men taking down the details burst into tears. Some vomited. But Chapin hummed merrily. He ran up and down the city room gleefully shouting, “Women and children jumping overboard with clothing afire! Water full of charred bodies!”

When Mayor William J. Gaynor was shot in 1910, a World photographer kept snapping pictures. Chapin rejoiced: “Blood all over him, and an exclusive, too!”

World reporter Carlos Hurd happened to be aboard the liner Carpathia when she picked up survivors from the Titanic and interviewed them. Though he was forbidden the ship’s wireless for his stories, the World nonetheless beat its competitors: Chapin took a chartered tug to meet the incoming liner, and Hurd, who spotted the editor from Carpathia’s deck, tossed him the story over the rail. An extra edition was out before the ship docked.

Chapin had lived lavishly (limousine, yacht, and suite in the Plaza Hotel) based on insider trading. But he lost nearly everything in a 1914 panic and was insolvent by 1918. He believed his wife would be unable to bear his financial collapse, so he resolved to spare her the shame and degradation by killing her. Chapin mailed a suicide note to the World’s business manager, Don C. Seitz, on the evening of Sunday, September 16. Around 8a.m. on Monday, as his wife slept, Chapin pointed a revolver at a spot slightly above her right ear and pulled the trigger.

Chapin hung a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door and began riding the subways and elevated railways, supposedly to find a quiet spot in which to shoot himself. Meanwhile, Seitz had received the letter. Thus, when Chapin left the no. 1 train at West 66th Street, he saw his name staring up from the headline: “CHARLES CHAPIN WANTED FOR MURDER.” He surrendered at the nearest police station. In January 1919, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life.

Soon after his arrival at Sing Sing, he began editing the prison newspaper. But when it advocated inmates’ rights, the authorities shut him down. A new warden, Lewis Lawes, future author of “Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing,” then let him garden the facility and Chapin transformed it with roses. But in 1930, Lawes told Chapin that, during the prison’s impending renovations, the garden would become a dump.

Chapin took to his bed. Lawes visited him and asked, “Do you want anything?”

“Yes,” Chapin replied. “I want to die. I want to get it over with.”

On December 16, 1930, Hard-Boiled Charlie got what he wanted.