Type-setting by Machinery.--Its Practicability.--Various Machines devised.--The Brown Type-setter and Distributer described.--Simplicity.--Reliability.--Speed. In the last chapter we described type-setting by hand. Let us now for a few moments look at the method of doing this by machinery. This is the last achievement of that inventive enterprise which we have seen to be so efficient in all the history of the art; and it deserves some mention here, both for what it already is, and for what it so confidently promises. On witnessing this most interesting and curious operation, one wonders, first, that such a work, apparently requiring the constant exercise of mind and intelligence, can be so rapidly and perfectly done by machinery; and then, observing the simplicity of the instruments and the certainty of their work, one wonders again that it has never been done before. It is our aim in this history to illustrate the prominence machinery has held in the several departments of the art, and how much our literature and books owe to its aid; and it is remarkable that this work of setting and distributing types is the only branch of the printer’s art which has not yet received its share of aid from labor-saving expedients. When we consider the great improvement which has been made in presses within the past few years, whereby the number of impressions is multiplied from 250 to nearly 30,000 per hour, and when, on the other hand, we consider that in the department of type-setting these four hundred years have brought no advance or improvement, but that this work is done in precisely the same slow manner in which the inventor of movable types first ranged them into line in the fifteenth century, it is strongly suggested that the contributions of genius have not been altogether impartial and just, and that here remains a great field of inventive enterprise as yet uncultivated. And when it is further considered that in the estimate of our most extensive publishers full half the present cost of our books and periodicals is in the labor of setting the types, the question urges itself, How has it happened that this important branch of human industry has been so overlooked by inventive genius? Is there any inherent difficulty which makes it impossible to do the work of type-setting by mechanical appliances? The wonderful adaptation of machinery to all other forms of human labor and service suggests antecedently that it must be possible also here. Led by this faith in the possibility of the thing, and urged by the actual necessity of doing something to expedite this branch of the work, many inventors have of late years been studying upon this problem. But the mechanical type-setter is essentially a modern invention: it is the contribution of this age to the art. About twenty years cover the whole period of these efforts. It seems to be a law of human progress that a number of failures must precede the successful effort, every failure contributing