Tolbert Lanston | |
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| Born | February 3, 1844 Troy, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | February 18, 1913 (aged 69) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Resting place | Oak Hill Cemetery Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Occupation | Inventor |
| Spouse | Betty G. Herdel (m. 1866) |
| Children | 1 |
| Awards | Elliott Cresson Medal (1896) |
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Tolbert Lanston (February 3, 1844 – February 18, 1913) was the American founder of Monotype, inventing a mechanical typesetting system patented in 1887 and the first hot metal typesetter a few years later. [1]
Tolbert Lanston was born into a poor family in Troy, Ohio. He quit school at the age of 15, he was a volunteer in the Federal Army during the Civil War. His last rank was sergeant. [2]
After 1865 he worked at the Pension-Department of the American Government. He worked with Seaton and Herman Hollerith (founder of IBM) on tabulating devices and invented an adding machine which was the first money-maker for Hollerith's company. Lanston's brother was a printer and evidently that connection caused his interest in automating the laborious task of hand-setting every letter in any or all texts. He resigned his post at the Pension office and devoted the remainder of his life to perfection of his machine. He created the idea but others perfected it and made the Lanston Monotype Machine Company successful. That includes J. Maury Dove, a coal merchant who became president of the company and remained there until his death in 1923, and John Sellers Bancroft, who was the mechanical genius behind the Monotype machine. The story is thoroughly developed in Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting.
He married Betty G. Herdel in 1866, and they had one son. [2] [3]
In 1896, he received the Elliott Cresson Medal for his invention. [2]
He died in Washington, D.C., on February 18, 1913. [3] He was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C. [4]
Although Lanston was an inventor, he had no education at all as an engineer.
He did start his inventions to create a type-setting machine, first with the financial help of Seaton, later from J. Maury Dove, coal-merchant in Washington.
Letters sent to the Patent-bureau with specifications sent at:
The idea was to make lead type for printing, with two machines, the first to produce two paper-tapes, these two paper-tapes controlling the second machine to produce the type. Lanston made a series of prototypes.
John Sellers Bancroft of Sellers & Co in Philadelphia was asked to help with the development of the machine.
Bancroft made a series of important improvements. A wedge to govern the width of the character. This wedge makes the same movement as the diecase with the matrices, in one direction. The matrices are ordered in the diecase, each row has only matrices for characters of the same width. The wedge controls the opening in the mould.
Compressed air was used to control the movements of the matrices above the mould of the machine.
This machine was capable to produce filled lines, by controlling the width of the spaces, with two extra wedges. The accuracy of the machine was 2,000 parts in 1 inch.
The first commercial machines were available around 1897. These machines had only room for 132 matrices. A few of these machines were sent to England.
Later types had die-cases with 15*15 and 17*15 or even 16*17 matrices. [5]
Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
The Mergenthaler Linotype Company is a corporation founded in the United States in 1886 to market the Linotype machine, a system to cast metal type in lines (linecaster) invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. It became the world's leading manufacturer of book and newspaper typesetting equipment; outside North America, its only serious challenger for book typesetting was the Anglo-American Monotype Corporation. Starting in 1960, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company became a major supplier of phototypesetting equipment which included laser typesetters, typefonts, scanners, typesetting computers. In 1987, the US-based Mergenthaler Linotype Company became part of the German Linotype-Hell AG; in the US the company name changed to Linotype Co. In 1996, the German Linotype-Hell AG was taken over by the German printing machine company Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG. A separate business, Linotype Library GmbH was established to manage the digital assets. In 2005, Linotype Library GmbH shortened its name to Linotype GmbH, and in 2007, Linotype GmbH was acquired by Monotype Imaging Holdings, Inc., the parent of Monotype Imaging, Inc. and others.
In printing, type metal refers to the metal alloys used in traditional typefounding and hot metal typesetting. Historically, type metal was an alloy of lead, tin and antimony in different proportions depending on the application, be it individual character mechanical casting for hand setting, mechanical line casting or individual character mechanical typesetting and stereo plate casting. The proportions used are in the range: lead 50‒86%, antimony 11‒30% and tin 3‒20%. Antimony and tin are added to lead for durability while reducing the difference between the coefficients of expansion of the matrix and the alloy. Apart from durability, the general requirements for type-metal are that it should produce a true and sharp cast, and retain correct dimensions and form after cooling down. It should also be easy to cast, at reasonable low melting temperature, iron should not dissolve in the molten metal, and mould and nozzles should stay clean and easy to maintain. Today, Monotype machines can utilize a wide range of different alloys. Mechanical linecasting equipment uses alloys that are close to eutectic.
The Linotype machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing which is manufactured and sold by the former Mergenthaler Linotype Company and related companies. It was a hot metal typesetting system that cast lines of metal type for individual uses. Linotype became one of the mainstay methods to set type, especially small-size body text, for newspapers, magazines, and posters from the late 19th century to the 1970s and 1980s, when it was largely replaced by phototypesetting and digital typesetting. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type. It was a significant improvement over the previous industry standard of manual, letter-by-letter typesetting using a composing stick and shallow subdivided trays, called "cases".
Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely used in scientific publishing, especially in disciplines that make frequent use of mathematical notation.
Phototypesetting is a method of setting type which uses photography to make columns of type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publishing.
In the manufacture of metal type used in letterpress printing, a matrix is the mould used to cast a letter, known as a sort. Matrices for printing types were made of copper.
Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with consumer electronics devices. Incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Woburn, Massachusetts, the company has been responsible for many developments in printing technology—in particular the Monotype machine, which was a fully mechanical hotmetal typesetter, that produced texts automatically, all single type. Monotype was involved in the design and production of many typefaces in the 20th century. Monotype developed many of the most widely used typeface designs, including Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Arial, Bembo and Albertus.
In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs. The resulting sorts or slugs are later used to press ink onto paper. Normally the typecasting machine would be controlled by a keyboard or by a paper tape.
A Ludlow Typograph is a hot metal typesetting system used in letterpress printing. The device casts bars, or slugs of type, out of type metal primarily consisting of lead. These slugs are used for the actual printing, and then are melted down and recycled on the spot. It was used to print large-type material such as newspaper headlines or posters.
Type casting is a technique for casting the individual letters known as sorts used in hot metal typesetting by pouring molten metal into brass moulds called matrices.
Robert Wiebking (1870–1927) was a German-American engraver typeface designer who was known for cutting type matrices for Frederic Goudy from 1911 to 1926.
The Intertype Corporation produced the Intertype, a typecasting machine closely resembling the Linotype, and using the same matrices as the Linotype. It was founded in New York in 1911 by Hermann Ridder, of Ridder Publications, as the International Typesetting Machine Company, but purchased by a syndicate for $1,650,000 in 1916 and reorganized as the Intertype Corporation.
The Monotype system is a system for printing by hot-metal typesetting from a keyboard. The two most significant differences from the competing Linotype machine are:
Deepdene is a serif typeface designed by Frederic Goudy from 1927–1933. It belongs to the "old-style" of serif font design, with low contrast between strokes and an oblique axis. However, Deepdene has crisp serifs and a nearly upright italic, with much less of a slant than is normal for this style.
The Inland Type Foundry was an American type foundry established in 1894 in Saint Louis, Missouri and later with branch offices in Chicago and New York City. Although it was founded to compete directly with the "type trust", and was consistently profitable, it was eventually sold to ATF.
Ehrhardt is an old-style serif typeface released by the British branch of the Monotype Corporation in 1938. Ehrhardt is a modern adaptation of printing types of "stout Dutch character" from the Dutch Baroque tradition sold by the Ehrhardt foundry in Leipzig. These were cut by the Hungarian-Transylvanian pastor and punchcutter Miklós (Nicholas) Tótfalusi Kis while in Amsterdam in the period from 1680 to 1689.
Monotype fonts were developed by the Monotype company. This name has been used by three firms. Two of them had their roots in "hot metal" or lead type in the printing industry. They did not adapt when the market changed as computer, offset and photographic systems became dominant. These were:
Frank Hinman Pierpont was an American engineer and typeface designer. He worked primarily in England for the Monotype Corporation of Britain.
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