The Monotype Composition Caster and Keyboard (See the Leading and Border Casting Machines article for more information on the Material Maker.) These machines were all part of the grand goal of “non-distribution”, promoted by Monotype - forms that were entirely cast in-house could be dumped and re-melted, including leading and borders, rather than laboriously sorted for re-use. The original Monotype system consisted of a Composition Caster and separate keyboard, but over time, the Lanston Monotype Machine Corporation created a number of machines based on similar principles that expanded the range of type sizes that could be cast in-plant, as well as perfecting the free-standing Material Maker for leading, rule and fancy borders. This allowed the development of the calculating mechanism in the keyboard, which is central to the sophistication of Monotype set matter. A lower case “i”, or a period would be five units, an uppercase “W” would be eighteen. He instead devised a unit system that assigned each character a value, from five to eighteen, that corresponded to its width. To allow the casting of fully justified lines of type, Tolbert Lanston chose not to follow the path of Ottmar Merganthaler, who used tapered spacebands to create word spacing. In many ways the key innovation in the Monotype System was not the mechanical device, ingenious as it was. While the competition between Linotype and Monotype was fierce, the printing industry realized there were strengths and weaknesses in both systems, and that the one chosen really depended on the needs of the individual printing plant, not the inherent superiority of one machine over the other. This followed a number of years of experimentation that created working machines that were displayed but not mass produced. The Monotype, or more accurately, the Monotype System, was brought to market in its most common current form in 1900. The Monotype Composition Caster and Keyboard.
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