Stories of Inventors: The Adventures of Inventors and EngineersDoubleday, Russell
History
Stories of Inventors: The Adventures of Inventors and Engineers
Doubleday, Russell
Inventions; Inventors
This marvellous machine is capable of setting almost any size of type,
from the minute "agate" to and including "pica," a letter more than
one-eighth of an inch high, and a line of almost any desired width, the
change from one size to any other requiring but a few minutes. The
Lanston machine sets up tables of figures, poetry, and all those
difficult pieces of composition that so try the patience of the hand
compositor.
It is called the monotype because it casts and sets up the type piece by
piece.
Another machine, invented by Mergenthaler, practically sets up the
moulds, by a sort of typewriter arrangement, for a line at a time, and
then a casting is taken of a whole line at once. This machine is used
much in newspaper offices, where the cleverness of the compositor has to
be depended upon and there is little or no time for corrections. Several
other machines set the regular type that is made in type foundries, the
type being placed in long channels, all of the same sort, in the same
grooves, and slipped or set in its proper place by the machine operated
by a man at the keyboard. These machines require a separate mechanism
that distributes each type in its proper place after use, or else a
separate compositor must be employed to do this by hand. The machines
that set foundry type, moreover, require a great stock of it, just as
many hundred pounds of expensive type are needed for hand composition.
[Illustration: WHERE THE "BRAINS" ARE LOCATED
The perforations in the paper ribbon (shown in the upper left-hand part
of the picture) govern the action of the machine so that the proper
characters are cast in the proper order, and also the spaces between the
words.]
Though a machine has been invented that will put an author's words into
type, no mechanism has yet been invented that will do away with type
altogether. It is one of the problems still to be solved.
HOW HEAT PRODUCES COLD
ARTIFICIAL ICE-MAKING
One midsummers day a fleet of United States war-ships were lying at
anchor in Guantanamo Bay, on the southern coast of Cuba. The sky was
cloudless, and the tropic sun shone so fiercely on the decks that the
bare-footed Jackies had to cross the unshaded spots on the jump to save
their feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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