Industrial Revolution: Steam, Line-casting & Automated Punch-cutting
(start 1870-95; end 1950-65)
Amazingly, the printing press and the science of typecutting had only minor
refinements from the late 1500s to the late 1800s. Towards the end of this
period, the industrial revolution brought major innovations in printing
technology. Rotary steam presses (steam 1814, rotary 1868) replaced
hand- operated ones, doing the same job in 16 per cent of the time;
photo-engraving took over from handmade printing plates.
Typesetting itself was transformed by the introduction of line-casting
machines, first Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype (1889), and then the Monotype
machine. Essentially, line-casting allowed type be chosen, used, then
recirculate back into the machine automatically. This not only introduced a
huge labor savings in typesetting, (again, on the order of the 85% reduction in
printing time), but also rendered obsolete the huge masses of metal type
created by the previously existing type foundries.
In 1885, Linn Boyd Benton (then of Benton, Waldo & Company, Milwaukee) invented a pantographic device that automated the previously painstaking process of creating punches. His machine could scale a drawing to the required size, as well as compressing or expanding the characters, and varying the weight slightly to compensate for the larger or smaller size--- this last being a crude form of the ``optical scaling'' done by skilled typographers making versions of the same font for different sizes. In optical scaling, the thickest strokes retain the same relative thickness at any size, but the thinnest strokes are not simply scaled up or down with the rest of the type, but made thicker at small sizes and thinner at large display sizes, so as to provide the best compromise between art and readability.
In the United States, the majority of type foundries escaped a bankruptcy bloodbath in 1892 by merging into a single company, called American Type Founders (ATF). Ultimately twenty-three companies merged into ATF, making it far and away the dominant American type foundry.
Also around this time, the ``point'' measurement system finally reached ascendancy. In the earlier days of printing, different sizes of type had simply been called by different names. Thus, ``Brevier'' was simply the British name for 8-point type of any style. Unfortunately, these names were not standardized internationally; 8-point type was called ``Petit Texte'' by the French and ``Testino'' by the Italians. Such a naming system also allowed wonderful confusion, such as ``English'' referring both to blackletter type, and a 14-point size; ``English English'' was thus a 14-point blackletter.
