Linotype — The Line-Casting Machine
For four hundred years text was set the way Gutenberg had begun it: letter by letter by hand, and after printing every single letter returned by hand to its case. That returning — the distribution — often took longer than the setting itself.
Mergenthaler's machine distributes nothing. It melts it down. A keyboard drops brass matrices into a line, molten type metal is cast against them, and out comes a single solid bar of metal — a line o' type. The matrices travel back to the magazine automatically, and the bar is melted down again after printing.
US Patent 378,798, granted 28 February 1888, titled Machine for Producing Type-Bars. Mergenthaler came from Württemberg and was a trained watchmaker — which shows in the machine.
CC0 公共领域
此蓝图以 CC0 协议发布。你可以自由复制、修改、分发和使用此作品，无需征得许可。
通过购买蓝图中的产品支持创客，他们将获得 创客佣金 （由供应商设定），或创建此蓝图的新版本并将其作为连接包含在你自己的蓝图中以分享收入。