Stereotyping was for many years the chief means of making plates for books and also for commercial printing. It has several advantages. The first, obviously, is the advantage which it shares with several other methods of providing a solid printing plate made by molding from an original form of type or engraving. Its peculiar advantage, however, is that it is the quickest method of producing a duplicate plate from an original. In comparison with electrotyping, however, it has two distinct disadvantages. One is that it is not adapted for reproducing the fine lines of engravings and type faces. In addition it is comparatively shallow and does not possess a sharp, clean printing face. The other disadvantage is that a stereotype is relatively soft and quickly worn. Stereotypes have been made more durable, to withstand the wear of printing, by the deposition of a film of harder metal--copper or nickel--on the face of the plate after it has been cast. This, however, is not satisfactory, as it involves not only another operation, but also makes an already shallow printing plate that much shallower and increases the probability of it printing "dirty," which is one of the chief objections to the stereotype in itself. This practice is not recommended. ELECTROTYPING In 1799, Allesandro Volta, of Pavia, in Italy, constructed the first electric battery, which came to be called the Voltaic pile. Improvements in the form of Volta's battery were made almost immediately by William Cruickshank, in England, who discovered in experimenting with it that he could by its power electrolyze or chemically decompose the salts of certain metals in solution. Both copper and silver, he found, could be precipitated from their salt solutions and deposited upon a plate immersed in the solution. This observation was the first step in the process of electroplating, which is electrotyping when applied to the art of typography. In 1837, thirty-eight years after Volta's discovery, Mr. Thomas Spencer of Liverpool, England, accidentally stumbled upon the first realization of the electrotyping process. While experimenting with a modification of a Daniell battery, he used an English copper penny as one of the poles instead of a plain piece of copper. A deposition of copper from the solution in the battery took place upon the penny, and upon removing the wire which attached the penny to the zinc plate a portion of the copper deposit was pulled off the penny also. This first copper electrotype shell Spencer found to be an exact duplicate or mold of part of the head and lettering on the coin. _It was as smooth and as sharp as the original._