This is the Monotype which was invented in c. 1895 by Sergeant Tolbert Lansten. Lansten was also a high court judge, civil war veteran and invented an adjustable horse shoe and an early type of calculator. The Monotype could produce single characters and so if mistakes were made it was only a single letter which had to be recast and not the entire line. The metal used by the Monotype was harder than that used by the Linotype and the Intertype and so the quality of the type produced was much better. (The metal used by all machines was composed of lead, tin and antimony. The antimony was the component which caused it to cool quickly) The Monotype consists of two machines and so had two operators. The first operator composed the job at the keyboard. You can see here that there are seven sets of letters; Small Caps, Caps, Lower Case, Italics and Bold. The machine punched holes into this roll and each hole corresponded to a different character. When the compositor had finished the job, he handed the roll over to the caster. The information was passed onto the casting machine by a process of air passing through the holes punched in to the roll. This machine recognised the letter and so cast the appropriate letter.

The Shaw pen ruling machine was invented in 1930. It was used for making lines on copy-books and ledgers. This was usually a job done by women and as it was quite a slow moving process, the women used to pass the time knitting!

This press is a manual one. It is called a Columbian Press and was invented by George Clymer in Philadelphia about 1812/13. These presses became obsolete fairly quickly as the metal was needed for laying railways. Clymer left the USA in 1817, he went to Britain and started manufacturing the Columbians there. The US models all displayed an eagle and a rattlesnake. All models manufactured outside the US had a cartouche (medieval sea creature - could it be anything to do with the Loch Ness monster??) instead of the rattlesnake, German ones, however, replaced the eagle with a Griffin Vulture. There aren't many of them in the world, about 100 in Britain and Ireland. When the need for mass production increased during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, this sort of press went out of usage.