William Church (inventor)

William Church (* around 1778 in Vermont ; † 1863 in Birmingham ) was the inventor of the type setting machine and the type casting machine, for which he received a patent in 1822 . The machines should help to speed up the typesetting of fonts .

Life

William Church was born in Vermont around 1778. From around 1807 he began to develop a typesetting machine. In 1820 he moved to England and lived in Birmingham. He continued the development of his machine in England, but it took a total of 15 years before he was able to complete the type setting machine and the type casting machine. On February 18, 1822, Church finally received a patent on his developments. The following year, William Church set up a press in Birmingham to test his machines in practice. William Church worked as an engineer for a total of 40 years.

Services

The first typesetting machine invented by Church

Church was the first to succeed in developing a machine that could automate the setting process. The typesetting machine had a frame made of wood with a horizontal plate. Above that is a desk-like frame with the containers for the letters . Below it is a crossbar on which the keyboard for input was mounted. The machine was driven by a clockwork with weights, which was rewound by a pedal. By pressing a button, the bottom type was released from the container and, under its own weight, fell onto the front part of the plate. There she pushed a ram into the middle, where the collecting channel for the matrices was. Then the next letter could be triggered from the keyboard. The completed line thus collected had to be excluded by hand . The dropping of the types after the printing was done well by hand. However, Church had planned that new writing material would always be used for typesetting, because used types too often got stuck in the machine. For this reason, he also designed and built the high-speed casting machine as a supplement. Although his machines worked, the widespread introduction failed. The goal of mechanization, the time and cost savings for the setting process, could not be achieved by the machine. Too many work steps had to be done by hand and the use of the conventional manual typesetting from lead type proved to be impractical. They often got stuck in the machine, reducing the time saved. After William Church, many other inventors tried to build machines for metal type, but none succeeded. Church's machine thus remains as an early attempt at mechanizing typesetting technology, but without presenting a practical solution. However, some principles of his machine found their way into more successful inventions later. For example, just as with Church, the matrices in the Linotype typesetting machine were carried to the collection point by their own weight.

Web links

Commons : William Church  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

• Severin Corsten, Günther Pflug, u. a. (Ed.): Lexicon of the entire book industry . 2nd Edition. Volume II. Anton Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-7772-8527-7 .
• Hans-Jürgen Wolf: History of the graphic process. A contribution to the history of technology. Historia Verlag, Dornstadt 1990, ISBN 3-9800257-4-8 .