At the same time that the Linotype machine was being developed, Tolbert Lanston (1844-1914), a government clerk in the United States, was inventing another composition system that he called Monotype. Lanston's initial patent was awarded in 1885, but he was not successful until he founded the Lanston Monotype Machine Company in Washington in 1887.
In Lanston's system, letters, spaces, and other characters were selected mechanically from instructions contained on a paper tape into which patterns of holes, each representing a different character or space, had been punched using a keyboard. Although typesetting using Monotype was not as quick as Linotype, where complete lines of text were cast, Monotype text could be corrected more easily, spacing could be more finely controlled, and its versatility made complex setting possible.
Lanston used cold metal strips into which letters were punched to produce raised reverse type for printing, but realized that much finer definition could be achieved by casting the letters in hot metal. In 1896 he patented a hot-metal machine using copper molds for each character.
Now it was possible to hand-cut the molds for the characters and typography began to become an art form. The first Monotype type face was Modern Condensed. In 1920, Frederic Goudy became Art Director at Monotype and he designed over a hundred typefaces. In Britain, Stanley Morison (1889-1967) also came up with outstanding new typefaces. Although hot-metal typesetting was superseded by phototypesetting in the 1960s, and rendered obsolete by digital typesetting, Monotype typography continues to influence the way we read.
