Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In the year 1795 the celebrated French printer and type-founder, FIRMIN DIDOT of Paris, coined the name “STEREOTYPE” for printing from solid lead plates. Stereo, in Greek, means rigid, solid, and the Greek word typos means type, letter, character. Hence the combined word stereotype means a rigid, solid plate made of types. Stereo-typing is the […]

There is a controversy concerning the first discoverer of the art of printing as just defined. The Dutch city of Haerlem, the German city of Mentz, and the Alsatian city of Strasbourg attribute it to their own countrymen. The dispute, however, is turned rather on words than on facts; it seems to have arisen from […]

In Europe about ninety percent of all book printing and plate making is done by stereotyping and only about ten percent is electrotype work. In America the reverse is the case. In Europe practically all newspapers that stereotype are using dry mats; in America it was only about two years ago that the dry mat […]

In completing this booklet, we come to the equipment necessary to handle the present day methods of stereotyping. The plaster pot disappeared when the Frenchman Genoux invented papier-mache mats for stereotyping, and the paste pot and steam table began their journey to ultimate oblivion when the dry mat cold process was invented. The brush beating […]

A perfect dry mat must have the following properties or characteristics: (1) It must always be of the same thickness. This means that not only must all the mats in any given lot be uniform in thickness but that from lot to lot, the mats must be the same. And it is particularly essential that […]

Present day dry mats are integral homogeneous units, delivered in sheet form of one standardized size, twenty by twenty-four inches. They are made in any thickness between the limits of twenty-four thousandths and forty thousandths of an inch to meet the preferences and needs of stereotypers under varying conditions, and for use in all kinds […]

It is interesting to follow the development of the dry mat method of stereotyping in America. In 1901 FERDINAND WESEL of New York, veteran manufacturer of stereotyping machinery, was in London, where he found newspapers using a German dry mat quite successfully. Wesel went to Germany and there secured the sole sales agency for America […]

In 1900 FRIEDRICH SCHREINER, manufacturer of Stereotyping Supplies in Plainfield, New Jersey, offered matrix paper for “cold type stereotyping”. To quote his prospectus: “Our Patent Cold Process Matrix Paper consists of a Plastic Face Sheet and a gummed Back Sheet. In making a Matrix the back of the Face sheet should be rendered moist with […]

Altho both Eastwood’s and Schimansky’s inventions were not satisfactory in a commercial sense, they certainly influenced a large number of paper makers to experiment with dry mat manufacturing and finally led to the excellent present day product. Several German firms (Claus, Nietzsche, Benesch, Rosenthal, Geissler, etc.) took up manufacturing of dry mats as a side […]

An advance step in the making of stereotype dry mats was made in 1895 by HERMANN SCHIMANSKY of Berlin, Germany. He contended that dry mats made in accordance with the specifications of prior inventors were so constituted that the free spaces were to remain white in the printing were filled up at the back of […]