There were two dedicated material-making machines from Lanston Monotype: the Monotype Material Making Machine and the Monotype Junior Material Making Machine. Very little is known about this latter machine.
The Junior Material Making Machine is summarized in a brief paragraph in Richard Hopkins' book on Tolbert Lanston, where he illustrates it from a flyer in his possession and notes that none are known to have survived [1].
Note also that with the correct equipment it was possible to cast strip material on the Monotype Type-&-Rule Caster, the Monotype Giant Caster, the Monotype-Thompson Type-Caster, and the Monotype Supercaster. All of the Monotype strip-casting was done using "fusion" casting in a manner entirely different from Elrod continuous strip-casting.
Since the publication of Hopkins' book, two additional pieces of evidence have come to light:
Inland Printer (August 1931)
The Inland Printer. Vol. 87, No. 5 (August 1931): 95. Trade note announcing the Lanston Monotype Junior Material Making Machine. This is the only known document dating the introduction of this machine.
Curiously, this page of trade notes from The Inland Printer also contains the announcement of the Elrod Models E and F. It is my present belief that this is a coincidence unrelated to the Lanston / Elrod patent dispute. The 1917 Knight patents on which Lanston's fusion-casting technology was based would not expire until 1934.
The icon here links to a JPEG version of this page scan, at full resolution. This may not display well on many browsers. Here is a PDF conversion of this image, which may be more easily scalable: inland-printer-v087-n5-1931-08-0600rgb-095-monotype-junior-material-maker-and-elrod-e-f.pdf
Since so little is known about the Junior Material Making Machine, every scrap of evidence is of use. Here, therefore, is the full-resolution version (1200 dpi RGB PNG) of the Junior Material Maker section of this page scan. It is a 36 Megabyte image: inland-printer-v087-n5-1931-08-1200rgb-095-monotype-junior-material-maker-crop-jmm-2880x8560.png
Strip Rule and Cornerpieces
"Monotype Strip Rule Designs and Cornerpieces to Match." (Philadelphia, PA: Lanston Monotype Machine Company, n.d.) This is a specimen of non-ornamental rule and corresponding corner-pieces with matrices to be used in the Type-&-Rule Caster, the Material Making Machine / Junior Material Making Machine, or both. Since it refers to the Junior Material Making Machine, it must date from no earlier than the introduction of that machine in 1931. As this is the case, it is curious that this specimen makes no mention of the Giant Caster (introduced 1925). The non-Material-Making-Machine matrices in this specimen include both display matrices and composition (cellular) matrices (although the latter are not used for machine composition in it).
The icon here links "up and over" to the presentation of this document in the Lanston Monotype Material Making Machine Notebooks.
1. Hopkins, Richard L. Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting . (Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2012): 95.
The copyright on the August 1931 issue of The Inland Printer was not renewed, as was then required. It therefore entered the public domain upon the expiration of its initial copyright. This digital reprint remains 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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