The work of Charles T. Moore is difficult to classify. He invented a printing telegraph just after the US Civil War (1869), a type-setting machine (1872) with a "chord keyboard," typewriters (1873, 1885/1886), and a lithographic composing machine (1876/1877). In 1877/78 he patented the process which a century later would come to be known as paste-up. Later he was involved with several typewriters and typewriter companies, possibly with punched tape composition (unverified), and (through these companies at least) more lithographic transfer machines; one of the companies with which he was involved even, during his lifetime, performed very early work in phototypesetting. For all this, the details of his life are obscure, though it appears to have been troubled. In his younger years he killed a man for trivial reasons ( {Hopkins 1991}, pp. 7-8), and in his later years his actions triggered litigation that made it all the way to the US Supreme Court {218 US 422}.
But he will be (or should be) remembered because of his associations with the beginning of the development of the Linotype. His lithographic transfer system was the first composing machinery that Ottmar Mergenthaler was involved with. Moreover, his 1887 patent (filed 1884) for slug-casting was, to the best of my current knowledge, the earliest patent for the casting of entire lines of type at once. It did not envision this casting happening in a composing machine; to Mergenthaler belongs the credit for that innovation. But it is the base patent for all subsequent linecasting machines.
Moore ws born in 1845 or 1847 in White Sulphur Springs, WV. He is reported as having shot and killed a neighbor, Daniel Perry, in 1873 but is said to have been aquitted (apparently the court records are lost; see {Hopkins 1991}, with information from {Romano 1986} and {Rollins 1937}). He died in 1910 and was buried in Front Royal, VA. The dates on inscribed on his mausoleum are 1847-03-16 to 1910-11-26. ( {Hopkins 1991}, citing research by Corban Goble). By coincidence, Front Royal is the same town that ATF's former type merchandising manager Stevens L. Watts retired to.
The only works devoted specifically to Moore are the potentially unreliable 1937 article by Rollins, "Charles T. Moore - Arrogant Mechanic" {Rollins 1937}, and the meticulously researched booklet by Richard L. Hopkins, His Ideas Got Mergenthaler Started! The Story of Charles T. Moore. {Hopkins 1991}. Hopkins also references information about Moore from {Romano 1986}, but I haven't yet had the opportunity to read that source.
(I've placed this Notebook here, within the Noncasting Type Composing Machinery Notebooks, because of his type-setting machine of 1872. But it could just as easily have been filed with Telegraphy, Lithography, or (perhaps most importantly) "Composing Linecasters" such as the Linotype. See especially the Timeline of Composing Linecaster Development for Moore's place in that history. )
Moore was involved in a very important way with the early development of what became the Linotype. (The Linotype was not "invented" all at once, but rather was developed over a period of about 15 years.) Given the importance of the Linotype in printing history, it would seem important to try to clarify what Moore did, and did not, do.
The key figure here is James Ogilvie Clephane, a Washington, DC, based court reporter who was the primary instigator of the project which led to the Linotype and was its first financial backer. His history is well covered in standard histories of the Linotype. I would recommend in particular Basil Kahan's book Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine {Kahan 2000}
Clephane's interest was in some mechanical method by which things such as court reports could be more easily reproduced. Hopkins (perhaps relying on Romano?) says that Clephane's first contact with Moore was due to Moore's 1869 patent for a printing telegraph (printing telegraphs have obvious applications for the duplication of texts) {Hopkins 1991} Apparently nothing came of this.
(Fig. 1 (top view) from Moore's US patent 94,329 for a printing telegraph. The image above links to a PNG version of the official USPTO scan of the entire page (the illegibility characterising many parts of this drawing is present in the official copy; the USPTO scanned all of their patent specifications at 300dpi bi-level and then destroyed the originals). For a PDF version, see the entire patent.)
However, at some point before 1876 Moore, or possibly Moore and Clephane together, with financial backing by Clephane and several others, began work on a composing machine. They attempted to have this made for them at the Washington, DC machine shop of a Mr. Grant, but were unsatisfied with the results. ( {Goble 1984}, p. 46. He cites, in turn, {Clephane 1890s} )
In August 1876 they switched machine shops, going instead to the shop of August Hahl in Baltimore, MD. This was the shop in which Ottmar Mergenthaler was then working. Mergenthaler found that "not quality of workmanship but errors of construction [that is, faulty design] were the main causes why the machine did not perform what was expected." He provided them with advice, and then later, in the summer of 1877, constructed for them a revised machine. ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, pp. 4-5.)
This machine seemed to have worked (so Mergenthaler says), but the overall process in which it was involved did not (it was a machine for lithographic printing, and the failure was at the point of transferring the composed text it produced to a lithographic stone). Mergenthaler ceased direct involvement with it. However, several things emerged from this:
It's worth looking at these in more detail.
I am unaware of any direct evidence about the appearance or construction details of either the Moore/Grant machine of 1876 or the Moore/Mergenthaler machine of 1877. (As will be seen below, the illustrations typically used in discussions of these events are not in fact illustrations of these machines.) While it is likely that thee 1876 and 1877 machines bore some resemblance to the machines shown in Moore's patents, on the one hand, and to Mergenthaler's later Rotary Impression Machine, on the other hand, we just don't know.
We can, though, understand the overall process that Moore proposed, as he described this in his patent "Improvement in Methods of Preparing Transfer-Sheets or Matrices for Printing" (US 201,436, filed 1877, issued 1878) This is a patent which would have been more interesting, in retrospect, in the phototypesetting era than it was in 1878. It is a basic patent for the entire process of paste-up.
In the method it proposes, you produce typewritten text in strips, one per line (your typewriter can either produce these directly or you can use an ordinary typewriter and cut the page up into line-strips). If you need to adjust inter-word spacing, you can cut up the strips. You paste these down on a backing sheet, adjusting the spacing of them to suit your taste.
(Figs. 1 and 2 from Moore's US patent 201,436. The image above links to a PNG version of the official USPTO scan of the entire page For a PDF version, see the entire patent.)
If this had been the 1970s rather than the 1870s, you would then have taken a photograph of your pasted-up artwork, had it developed into a plate, and printed it using an offset lithographic press. In the 1870s, though, Moore had to transfer this pasted-up artwork directly to a lithographic stone for printing.
This was the point at which Moore's system broke down. He doesn't specify how these typewritten strips might be suitable for transfer to a lithographic stone. I presume that he would employ an oil-based ink suitable for lithography. But, as Mergenthaler tells us:
"When they came to the final stage of the process, the lithographing, it turned out that the conditions underlying the lithographic process were far more exacting than any of the parties had any idea of at the time they started. The stone failed to take all the impressions of the original copy; it often showed blurs where nothing seemed to be wrong with the original, and the work lacked sharpness and regularity of result. ..." {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 5.
Kahan reproduces a photocopy said to have been made of a letter typeset using this process. ( {Kahan 2000}, p. 15.) It is not an inspired example of the printer's art.
Mergenthaler attributes the design of this system to Clephane, relegating Moore to the role of constructor of machinery. I would regard this attribution as uncertain, however. Mergenthaler held Clephane in high esteem, on the one hand, and Moore was an aristocrat not known as a practical mechanic, on the other. The patent for the system was issued in Moore's name with half-interest assigned to Clephane's brother (Lewis) and another of the backers (J. H. Crossman).
The machine that Moore brought Hahl/Mergenthaler in 1876 and the machine that Mergenthaler built for Clephane and Moore in 1877, were type-writing machines of some kind which typed out the strips for Moore's lithographic process.
Moore had, by that time, taken out two patents for machines which could have been used with this system (recall that his patent for the system says that any typewriter would work).
One of these was a keyboard-controlled rotary composing machine for ordinary printer's type (US patent 137,466, filed 1872, issued 1876) This device, which if viewed from a sufficient distance and with suitable inattention resembles the later Mergenthaler Rotary Impression Machine, is interesting because it proposes what would be known today as a "chord" keyboard. (It may be one of the few "chord" keyboard devices actually to use a piano-like keyboard.)
(Fig. 1 from Moore's US patent 137,466. The image above links to a PNG version of the official USPTO scan of the entire page For a PDF version, see the entire patent.)
The other was a keyboard-controlled rotary type-writer (US patent 173,232, filed 1873, issued 1876) which also employed movable type and a chord keyboard.
(Fig. 1 from Moore's US patent 173,232. The image above links to a PNG version of the official USPTO scan of the entire page For a PDF version, see the entire patent.)
However, while these two machines of 1872 and 1873, both are rotary machines with piano-like chord keyboards which employ some form of type, they are essentially different from each other. We do not know to what degree either the Grant-made machine of 1876 or the Mergenthaler-made machine of 1877 resembled them. It would probably be safe to assume that the 1877 Mergenthaler machine differed significantly from both. Mergenthaler was at pains to insist that he executed the drawings for the 1877 machine himself. {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 5.
In the sample of the output of this process reproduced by Kahan, which is a letter to Thomas L. Feamster (who was the assignee of a half-interest in patent 137,466) the machine is called the "dial Type Writer". This letter is dated 1876-12-23, so it must have been produced using the earlier, pre-Mergenthaler, device. ( {Kahan 2000}, p. 15)
The path of development of Moore's type-writer / paste-up / lithographic-transfer system ends with the unsuccessful trials of the 1877 machine built by Mergenthaler. (Though Moore returned to typewriter design in the late 1880s with what would in later terminology be called a proportional-spacing typewriter, and companies in which Moore was involved in the 1890s and 1900s demonstrated lithographic composing systems.) One aspect of Moore's system, however, took root.
The flaw in Moore's process as demonstrated in August 1877 was in the lithographic transfer. One obvious solution would of course be to use some process other than lithography. Moore anticipated this in the patent for his overall process (201,436, filed 1877-11-12):
"This method of justifying is also applicable to those cases of preparing the matrix for casting stereotypes in which the letters or characters are formed in a yielding or plastic material by means of a type-writing or similar machine, the material, after having the letters or characters impressed therin, being cut and arranged in the same manner as are the printed strips above described..." (p. 2, left column).
Mergenthaler attributed the idea of using the stereotype rather than the lithographic process to Clephane. ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 7.) Goble, citing letters from Mergenthaler preserved in the Whitelaw Reid papers, says that it was Clephane who initiated the development of a machine along these lines. ( {Goble 1984}, p. 51.
Mergenthaler completed a version of a "Rotary Impression Machine" in "the latter part of 1878. ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 7.) We know that it (or an early successor, by 1879) must have resembled the machine he patented in US patent 304,272 (issued 1884), even though that patent was not filed until 1884-05-31 (nearly six years after it was built) because in his (auto)biography Mergenthaler illustrates his "Rotary Impression Machine, 1879." That illustration is identical with the one in his patent:
(Fig. 1 from Mergenthaler's US patent 304,272, showing an early version of the "Rotary Impression Machine." The image above links to a PNG version of the official USPTO scan of the entire page Here is a PDF of the entire patent, "Matrix-Making Machine": us-0304272-1884-08-26-mergenthaler-rotary-impression-machine-filed-1883.pdf )
Mergenthaler describes the trials of this machine in the 1878-1879 timeframe, and indicates that in the end he "now came to the conclusion that further efforts for the perfection of this system were useless, and so informed Mr. Hahl and Mr. Clephane and his associates." ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 10) His involvement with the Rotary Impression Machine ceased at this time.
We know from both Mergenthaler's (auto)biography and from letters by him surviving in the Whitelaw Reid papers (quoted and cited by {Goble 1984}, p. 52.) that after Mergenthaler stopped work on the Rotary Impression Machine his colleagues continued. As he puts it:
"... The latter [Hahl, Clephane, and associates] were of a different opinion, and concluded to continue experiments. They removed the machine and appliances to Washington, and established a little machine shop of their own, where they worked honestly and persistently for years, but to no avail. In spite of the ingenuity of Maltby, White, Moore, and others, the system at the time of its final abandonment in 1884 showed no improvement over its condition when it left the hands of Mr. Mergenthaler in 1879." ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 10)
At the end of this period of development by Clephane, Moore, et. al. (but not Mergenthaler) from 1879 to 1884, ownership of this work would have remained with Clephane and his fellow financial backers. This would have included included Moore's 1884 patent for slug-line casting as well as any Rotary Impression Machines as further developed. As Clephane continued to back the development of what became the Linotype, and as his next move was to engage Mergenthaler to develop the "First Band Machine," ownership of these properties would ultimately have passed to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. No doubt the Moore patent would have been of value to them in their litigation with the Rogers Typograph Company.
The likelihood that a late "Moore/Clephane/Hahl version" of the Rotary Impression Machine passing into the hands of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company may serve to explain the otherwise puzzling appearance of the machine most often illustrated as "Mergenthaler's Rotary Matrix Machine."
The Rotary Impression Machine of 1879 as illustrated by Mergenthaler in his (auto)biography and as shown in his patent for it employs piano-like keys. This other machine employs keybuttons. Here it is, for example, as shown in Frank M. Sherman's 1950 volume The Genesis of Machine Typesetting. ( {Sherman 1950}, p. 14)
(Scanned by DMM from the original.)
As early as 1915, the Mergenthaler Linotype Company was exhibiting this machine as a part of an exhibit of Linotype precursors (along with the First and Second Band Machines and the "Blower" Linotype). There was, for example, an exhibition of these four machines in that year at the Waldof-Astoria Hotel. How they described it in their exhibit I do not know; they may have been completely accurate. However, the press report of this exhibition which appeared in The American Printer for June, 1915 calls it the "Mergenthaler Rotary Matrix Machine of 1883." This report is significant in that it dates the machine to 1883 (presumably they obtained this date from the Mergenthaler exhibition). But as Mergenthaler had ceased working on the Rotary Impression Machine in 1879, the machine as shown must reflect the Moore/Clephane/Hahl modifications, not his.
(An extract, in PDF form, of pp. 434-435 from {American Printer 60.4}.)
In addition to the Mergenthaler exhibitions of this machine, the enthusiastic but perhaps insufficiently critical printing historian Henry Lewis Bullen illustrated this machine in his 1924 articles in The Inland Printer on the "Origin and Development of the Linotype Machine." {Bullen 1924-02} In a description with his characteristic anti-Mergenthaler (the man, not the company) slant, he attributes it as shown to Mergenthaler and says that Mergenthaler's earlier versions "used piano keys ... and thus made the apparatus unnecessarily cumbrous."
Huss, in his comprehensive study of The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods, 1822-1925 also shows this same machine. {Huss 1973}, pp. 75-76 (He attributes his photograph to the Smithsonian, and the Smithsonian did receive several of the machines from the collection of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. I have been unable to find this machine in the Smithsonian's online database of its holdings, however.)
Even in the 21st century, a very good history of Moore's later involvement with typewriters begins with this same illustration, identified as "Mergenthaler's Rotary Matrix Machine."
We know that Mergenthaler was involved with a machine in 1878-9 which employed piano-style keys. We know that by 1883 the Moore/Clephane/Hall team, without Mergenthaler, built the machine with button keys as shown above. Technically, we have no evidence of what the machine looked like when Mergenthaler left it in 1879. But it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the style of machine with button keys as in the 1883 machine was not Mergenthaler's. Yet basically every history of the Linotype or machine composition in the 20th and 21st centuries which covers this machine at all shows the 1883 Moore/Clephane/Hahl version and identifies it, wrongly, as Mergenthaler's.
The Linotype was above all a line-casting machine (rather than a type-casting or setting machine), and so the question of when line-casting entered into its development is necessarily an important one. It cannot, however, be answered with certainty.
Moore's original idea was to do paste-up and then transfer the resulting artwork to a lithographic stone. The Rotary Impression Machine of 1878 substituted strip-format paper stereotype matrices into the process. It would be straightforward to assume that these stereotype matrix strips were assembled into a page and then a stereotype plate was cast from them; indeed, this would be the only variation of this process admitted by Moore's 1877/1878 patent (201,436).
But in his (auto)biography, Mergenthaler says that in developing the 1878 Rotary Impression Machine,
"a casting mould had been simultaneously made with the stereotyper ["the stereotyper" = the Rotary Impression Machine], and no time was lost in putting it to a test. The idea was to cast independent slugs or lines of type, and the mould consisted of a metal frame with cross pieces, between which the several lines would be formed. The front of it was closed by the matrix [note: singular] and the back by a metal plate, and the mould was intended to cast about forty lines at a time." ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 8.)
This would date the first casting of slug-lines to 1878, although it does not identify the inventor of this mould. Mergenthaler does not himself claim credit for it.
To confuse the issue, there are two patents for the basic idea of line casting, one by Mergenthaler and one by Moore. Both are much later than 1878.
Mergenthaler was the first, with US patent 311,350 filed 1883-03-12 and issued 1885-01-27. His system envisioned using the strip-paper matrices to cast long bars of type which are then cut into line-size slugs for assembly into a form or page. By the time he filed this patent, his development of the First Band Machine was well underway.
(Click on the image below for a PDF of Mergenthaler's entire patent 311,350.)
Moore didn't file his patent until nearly a year later, in early 1884. ( US patent 362,987, filed 1884-02-12, issued 1887). This 1884/1887 patent both describes a mould similar to the one Mergenthaler described and specifically references Moore's patent 201,436 of 1878.
(Click on the image below for a PDF of the entire patent 362,987.)
It is of course perfectly possible that Moore originated this mould - and with it the basic idea of slug-line casting - in 1878 yet did not file a patent for it until 1884 (the approximate date at which work on the Rotary Impression Machine by himself, Clephane, and others ceased). It may be that this gap might be explained by the start of work by Mergenthaler (backed by Clephane) on his First Band Machine in 1883. If the Rotary Impression Machine wasn't working out in its extended development by Moore et. al. from 1879-1884 there would have been little need to go to the expense of further patents. But with the advent of a new approach from 1883 the need to secure priority for the underlying process of slug-line casting would become clear. Moore's 1884/1887 patent for the slug-line casting was assigned to the National Typographic Company, the predecessor (at that time) of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. (The later patent litigation between the Rogers Typograph Company and the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, for example, was decided in the Mergenthaler company's favor on the basis of its priority in linecasting.)
It may be that we will never have enough information to pin down with certainty the credit for the slug-line of type, one of the most important developments in the history of machine composition. For now, Mergenthaler and Moore share the credit.
It is important, also, to realize that we are not yet talking about integrated slug-line casting on the composing machine, but rather the casting of a stereotype plate as independent slug-lines.
It is interesting to note, however, that in 1890 when the Mergenthaler Printing Company began its campaign against the newly introduced Rogers Typograph they cited Moore's patent, not Mergenthaler's in their threats to Rogers' customers in The Inland Printer. This fight escalated into litigation that was determined in favor of the Mergenthaler company on the basis that they held the basic patents to the slug-line of type. Moore's patent was the foundation of their success in blocking the production of the Rogers Typograph in America. (These 1890 ads also reference the Square Base Linotype. See the discussion of "Threats in the Trade Press" in the CircuitousRoot Notebook on the Square Base Linotype for more information.)
After 1884, Moore seems to depart from the history of the development of the Linotype. Work on the Rotary Impression Machine seems to have terminated, and he was not a part of Mergenthaler's work on the Band Machines.
For Mergenthaler, the next step in his involvement with composing machinery was the development of a stereotype impression composing machine which made its impression one line at a time (whereas the Rotary Impression Machine worked one character at a time). Such an approach would bypass the problem inherent in all sequential stereotype impression techniques: that of a succeeding punch into the stereotype matrix distorting an existing punch. As Mergenthaler put it, one of the problems with the Rotary Impression Machine was that "The paper matrix also showed the existence of what was termed 'interference,' or in other words, a displacement of the material into the matrix made previously, which resulted in a distortion of the right side of each letter." ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 10) Mergenthaler's one-line-at-a-time impression machine became his "First Band Machine" tested in July of 1884.
Mergenthaler claimed to have had the idea for this in 1879, but before he completed his drawing of it he "destroyed it in a fit of anger brought about by the extreme financial straits into which he and the Hahl establishment had gotten themselves by reason of their connection with the [Moore/Clephane] enterprise, for much of the late experimental work was carried on credit." ( {Mergenthaler 1989}, p. 10) This may well have been the case, but the first (surviving) documentation of such a machine dates to the work he began for Clephane after a pause, in 1883. The first patent for it was filed in 1884 (US 312,145).
Except for the fact that Mergenthaler's First Band Machine was used to produce paper strip stereotype matrices which were used according to Moore's system, its development and subsequent developments leading up to the Linotype move in a new direction and leave Moore behind. They are really the subject for a different account.
[NOTE: This section isn't finished; for now it's mostly just references that I need to investigate further. Some of these references branch out into areas that desever study in their own right. For example, the American Planograph Company, with which Moore was associated, was the assignee of US patent 1,079,402 (1905/1913) by George R. Cornwall for a very early form of photographic type. (Aside: note that Google has filed the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1913 as The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy, who died in 1829.) ]
Moore was involved in some way with the following companies:
In 1885, Moore filed the patent which became US patent 549,523 (not actually issued until 1895). This patent was assigned to the Capital [sic] Type Writing Machine Co., but because it is possible to modify a patent application and because this one was pending for ten years, it is not possible on the basis of the patent alone to know at what point between 1885 and 1895 Moore was involved with this company.
Visually, this machine resembles strongly the one described in patent 419,864 (filed 1886), but the features claimed for it differ. The typewriter is a rather complex one, and some of the patent claims for it rather broadly framed. It is in general terms a rotary type-wheel machine. As described in the patent it is purely a typewriter rather than a part of a printing process. It is interesting that as shown in the patent it still employs piano-like keys, since the 1883 Moore/Clephane/Hahl Rotary Impression Machine already used the more modern button-style keys. Below is Fig. 4 from Sheet 3 of this patent:
In 1886, Moore filed the patent which became US patent 419,864 (not issued until 1890). This patent was not assigned, but all that tells us is that in 1886 Moore was not associated with the Capital Type Writing Machine Company (assignors of his 1895/1885 patent 549,523).
Visually, this machine resembles strongly the one described in patent 549,523 (filed 1885), but the features claimed for it differ. It is the first machine in any Moore patent (of which I am aware) that employs button-style (vs. piano-style) keys. This machine is what we would now term a "proportional spacing" typewriter ("a type-writer in which the types or characters employed are of variable widths, like ordinary printers type"). He planned to use "ordinary printers' ink" and to "turn out work exhibiting that clearness and uniformity of imperssion and accuracy and regularity of spacing found at present only in printers' press-work." As described, though, the machine is purely a typewriter rather than a part of a larger printing process. Here is Fig. 3 from Sheet 3 of this patent:
Business matters of the 1900/1901 timeframe resulted in litigation involving the Moore Printing Typewriter Company which reached the United States Supreme Court in 1910. {218 US 422} In the US, in theory, higher courts only review matters of law rather than matters of fact in cases referred to them. From the point of view of the Supreme Court, this case involved certain technicalities in the laws governing trusts. However, the legal and business tangle which led up to the need for this litigation, as reported, contains some interesting historical information. In particular, in their response to the suit, the Moore company submitted an answer which
"... alleges new matter to the following effect: In January, 1900, Moore, Bryan, and Cornwall, three of the appellants, entered into a conspiracy for the purpose of wrecking the Moore company and a company called in the answer the Liomatrix, the stock of which is owned by the Moore company, and acquiring for themselves the assets of the Moore company, including certain inventions of Moore. To this end they procured the organization of the planograph company, the purposes of which were of the same general character with those of the Moore company.
"Afterwards, by the use of the new incorporation and by a course of fraudulent representations and conduct, which included the piracy of the most valuable machine of the Moore company, the officers of the latter company were induced to believe that the planograph company possessed some inventions of great value, and that the Moore company would be benefited by a consolidation of the two companies. Such consolidation was effected in 1901, upon terms and in a manner which gave complete control of the consolidated companies to the confederates, and that they have used such control for their own profit, and have by various fraudulent means possessed themselves of a very large part of the 35,005 shares of that company's stock, deposited with the Savings & Trust Company. A detail of the transactions by which this was effected is not necessary to recite." (218 US 426)
(Click on the image below for a PDF-format extract of the pages from 218 US containing 218 US 422.)
A British group, The Mosely Industrial Commission to the United States visited the American Planograph firm in 1902 and reported the demonstration of a lithographic transfer machine. ( {Moseley 1903}, p. 227) They make no mention of the perforated tape features cited by Huss in his entry on Moore's "Planeograph" .
{Huss 1973}, p. 226, lists a "Planeograph" of Charles T. Moore as his catalog no. 217. He says describes it as starting with a perforated strip (like a Lanston Monotype paper tape) which, when fed through another machine, produced print on "chemicalized paper." This, after editing, was transferred to a lithographic plate.
Linomatrix? The obituary for James Ogilvie Clephane which appeared in The American Stationer in 1910 says: "In 1871 he [Clephane] brought C. T. Moore to New York from West Virginia, and enabled him to construct the Moore typewriter and linomatrix machine. He was a director of the first company formed to promote the device, and when the concern was later merged into the American Planograph Company he bacame vice-president and director." {American Stationer 60.23}, p. 20) It is interesting that it links Clephane to the American Planograph Company. The "linomatrix" would seem to be just a slightly muddled reference to the Rotary Impression Machine, were it not for the "Liomatrix" company, a subsidiary of the Moore Printing Typewriter Company mentioned in the US Supreme Court case 218 US 422 (see above) Here's a PDF of the page containing the obituary:
On 2013-01-25, Robert Messenger of the Australian Typewriter Museum in Canberra published on his oz.Typewriter blog an excellent account of Moore's work. {Messenger 2013} In it, he reprints an American Planograph stock certificate dated 1901 which bears Moore's signature.
US patent 94,329 (1869)
US patent 94,329, "Improvement in Printing-Telegraphs." Issued 1869-08-31 to Charles T. Moore of White Sulphur Springs, WV. {Hopkins 1991} say that this is the patent which, later, brought Moore to the attention of James Ogilvie Clephane (It was Moore's later work on lithographic composing machines, rather than this early printing telegraph, which led more directly to the early work by Mergenthaler, funded by Clephane, which in turn led to the Linotype. However, the use of a piano-like keyboard and the overall configuration and use of cylinders is similar to some of that work, even up to the early versions of Mergenthaler's "Rotary Impression Machine.")
US Patent 137,466 (1872/1873)
US patent 137,466, "Improvement in Type-Setting Machines," issued 1873-04-01 to Charles T. Moore of White Sulphur Springs, WV. Application filed 1872-05-28. Half-interest was assigned to Thomas L. Feamster, of Lewisburg, WV.
The earliest specifically typographical machine by Moore of which there is some record is the one that {Huss 1973}, pp. 75-76 calls the "Double-Cylinder Typesetter." This was a type-setting machine (unlike Moore's later lithographic machines), but it did employ a rotary configuration and in that sense is a kind of a precursor to the Mergenthaler Rotary Impression Machine. It is notable for its use of what would now be called a chord keyboard (an idea of recurring popularity; see also Munson).
US Patent 173,232 (1873/1876)
US patent 173,232, "Improvement in Type-Writing Machines." Issued 1876-02-08 to Charles T. Moore of White Sulphur Springs, WV. Application filed 1873-05-21. One-fourth assigned to James O. Clephane.
US Patent 201,436 (1877/1878)
US patent 201,436, "Improvement in Methods of Preparing Transfer-Sheets or Matrices for Printing." Issued 1878-03-19 to Charles T. Moore of White Sulphur Springs, WV. Application filed 1877-11-12. One half interest assigned to Lewis Clephane [J.O.Clephane's brother] and J. H. Crossman.
US Patent 362,987 (1887, Filed 1884)
US patent 362,987, "Printing." Issued 1887-05-17 to Charles T. Moore, of Washington, DC. Filed 1884-02-12 as application serial number 120,440.
This is one of the more important patents in the history of printing, yet it is almost unknown (and by itself would not necessarily be worthy of note). See the discussion above on Moore, Clephane, and the Linotype for a clarification of this.
US Patent 419,864 (1890, Filed 1886)
US patent 419,864, "Type-Writing Machine." Issued 1890-01-21 to Charles T. Moore, of Washington, DC. Filed 1886-12-23 as application serial number 222,416. Not assigned.
US Patent 549,232 (1895, Filed 1885)
US patent 549,523, "Type-Writing Machine." Issued 1895-11-12 to Charles T. Moore, of Washington, DC. Filed 1885-07-03 as application serial nubmer 170,645. Assigned to the Capital Type Writing Machine Company, of Virginia.
{US 218 422} This is the United States Supreme Court case "MOORE PRINTING TYPEWRITER CO. v. NATIONAL SAVINGS & TRUST CO." The cases decided by the US Supreme Court are collected in the series "United States Reports." This case appeared in Volume 218 of the United States Reports, as originally published, starting on p. 422, and is cited today as "218 US 422". It is available on any database of US Supreme Court decisions (such as the one on findlaw.com). The transcript presented here is that from its publication in 1917: United States Reports, Volume 218. Cases Adjudged in The Supreme Court at October Term, 1909 and October Term, 1910. Charles Henry Butler, Reporter. (NY: the Banks Law Publishing Co., 1917.) It is the case: "Moore Printing Typewriter Company v. National Savings and Trust Company. Appeal from the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia. No. 231. Argued October 27, 1910. Decided November 28, 1910." which appears on pp. 422-431 This volume has been digitized by Google from the Harvard University copy; it appears on pages 481-490 of the PDF.
{American Printer 60.4} American Printer. Vol. 60, No. 4 (June 1915).
On pp. 434-435 appears an anonymous article, "When Composing Machines were Novelties," describing an exhibition by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel of four machines: a "Rotary Matrix Machine" (dated 1883), the First Band Machine, the Second Band Machine, and the "Blower" Linotype.
{American Stationer 68.23} "Death of James O. Clephane. The American Stationer. Vol. 68, No. 23 (Dec. 3, 1910): 20.
{Bullen 1924-02} Bullen, Henry Lewis. "Origin and Development of the Linotype Machine, Part 1." The Inland Printer. Vol. 72, No. 5 (February, 1924): 769-771.
For a scan of this article, see the CircuitousRoot Notebook on Henry Lewis Bullen
{Clephane 1890s} Clephane, James O. [attributed] History of the Typewriter and the Mergenthaler Linotype (n.d.) 12pp. Goble notes that a copy of this pamphlet is in the ex-ATF/Bullen collection at Columbia.
{Goble 1984} Goble, George Corban. The Obituary of a Machine: The Rise and Fall of Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype at U.S. Newspapers . Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, 1984.
{Hopkins 1991} Hopkins, Richard L. His Ideas Got Mergenthaler Started! The Story of Charles T. Moore. Typographical Curiousities No. 13. Terra Alta, WV: Hill and Dale Private Press and Typefoundry, 1991.
{Huss 1973} Huss, Richard E. The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods, 1822-1925. (Charlottesville, VA: By the University Press of Virginia for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1973.)
{Romano 1986} Romano, Frank J. Machine Writing and Typesetting: The Story of Sholes and Mergenthaler and the Invention of the Typewriter and the Linotype . Salem, NH: GAMA Communications, 1986.
{Kahan 2000} Kahan, Basil. Ottmar Mergenthaler: The Man and His Machine. (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000)
{Mergenthaler 1989} Mergenthaler, Ottmar and Carl Schlesinger, ed. The Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler, Inventor of the Linotype. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 1989.
In 1898, Mergenthaler dictated his autobiography in the third person and published it anonymously as Biography of Ottmar Mergenthaler and History of the Linotype, Its Invention and Development . This present volume is Carl Schlesinger's edition of Mergenthaler's (auto)biography. It contains substantial additional material by Schlesinger, including his analysis of the electroformed matrices used for the first six months of operation of the "Blower" Linotype in 1886.
{Messenger 2013} Messenger, Robert. "On This Day in Typewriter History [Part 242]: Moore's Transfer Typewriter." Blog entry for 2013-01-25 in ozTypewriter. http://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2013/01/on-this-day-in-typewriter-history_7117.html Retrieved 2013-11-16.
{Mosely 1903} Mosely, Albert. Mosely Industrial Commission to the United States of America, Oct.-Dec. 1902: Reports of the Delegates . (Manchester, England: Co-Operative Printing Society Limited, 1903). Digitized by Google from the Princeton University copy.
{Rollins 1937} Rollins, Lawrence E. "Charles T. Moore - Arrogant Mechanic." The West Virginia Review. Vol. 14, No. 10 (1937): 338.
{Hopkins 1991}, p. 6, calls this the "single thread which gives a bit of life to Charles T. Moore," but both he and Corban Goble express doubts as to its accuracy.
{Sherman 1950} Sherman, Frank M. The Genesis of Machine Typesetting. Chicago: M & L Typesetting & Electrotyping Company, 1950.
{Thompson 1904} Thompson, John S. History of Composing Machines. (Chicago: Inland Printer Company, 1904.)
US patent specifications and Supreme Court reports are in the public domain by law.
Sherman's Genesis of Machine Typesetting is in the public domain due to failure to comply with copyright renewal technicalities. The extract from it here remains in the public domain.
The volumes of The Inland Printer, The American Printer, and The American Stationer from which extracts have been made here are in the public domain due both to failure to renew copyright or the expiration of all possible copyright or both. The extracts here remain in the public domain.
All portions of this document not noted otherwise are Copyright © 2013 by David M. MacMillan and Rollande Krandall.
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