STEREOTYPING
About the beginning of the eighteenth century a certain Van der Meyer, of Antwerp, made the next step towards a definite improvement in typography, the first that had been attempted since the invention of printing from movable, cast-metal type. Van der Meyer prepared the composed pages of the Bible by soldering together the bottom of the type in the form. This was the first “stereotype,” a term derived from two Greek words meaning literally “solidtype.”
This method met one requirement. It prevented the “pi-ing” of the type, but it had the disadvantage of holding in comparative idleness a large and costly mass of type useless for any other purpose, and it was not generally practiced.
This was followed in 1730, by William Ged, a goldsmith of Edinburgh, who is credited with casting printing-plates in plaster-of-paris molds for the University of Cambridge Bible. These plates, however, were destroyed by jealous printers and thrown aside, resulting in the process being abandoned for many years.
In the meantime several other improvements along this line were undergoing experiment. Firmin Didot, (1764-1836), a printer of Paris, cast type of a hard alloy, and when his book-pages were composed, made an impression of them on a sheet of soft lead, thus forming a mold. Molten metal was then poured into a shallow tray, and just as this was on the point of solidifying, but still plastic, the lead-mold of the book-page was pressed on the soft metal in the tray. This process called Polytypage, was but partly successful; it could be used only for small pages, and the plates were too often defective. A process similar to this is what Lambinet thought the printers of the latter half of the fifteenth century might have used as one of the probable methods to cast their metal types.
These and other experiments, however, were leading to the real stereotyping process which developed later.
Early in the nineteenth century, Earl Stanhope, of England, re-introduced Ged’s stereotyping process with many improvements.
One or more pages of type were locked in a chase, the surface of the type being oiled to prevent the subsequent mold from sticking. The mold was made by pouring a semi-fluid composition of plaster-of-paris mixed with a little fine salt to make the plaster settle solidly. While the plaster was still soft, it was carefully pressed down and rolled smooth on top to give a uniform thickness to the mold and to expel any air there might be in the plaster. When the plaster became solid, it formed a perfect matrix of the type pages.