William Church (inventor)
Dr. William Church (c. 1778 in Vermont; † 1863 in Birmingham) was the inventor of typesetting machine and the Typengießmaschine to which he received a patent in 1822. The machines should help to accelerate the setting of Scripture.
Life
William Church was born about 1778 in Vermont. Since about 1807 he began to develop a typesetting machine. In 1820 he moved to England and lived in Birmingham. The development of his machine, he continued in England, but it took a total of 15 years until he was able to complete the typesetting machine and the Typengießmaschine. On February 18, 1822 Church finally received a patent on its developments. The following year William Church issued a press in Birmingham, where his machines have been tested in practice. William Church was a total of 40 years as an engineer.
Services
Church had managed to be the first to develop a machine that could automate the placement process. The jig had a frame made of wood with a horizontal plate. In a desk- like frame with the containers for the letters. Below it is a cross beam to which the keyboard was mounted for input. The machine is driven by means of a movement with weights, which has been raised by a pedal again. The lowermost type has been released from the container by the pressure of a button, and dropped by their own weight onto the front part of the plate. There she pushed a plunger in the middle, where there was the collection channel for the matrices. Then the next letter could be triggered from the keyboard. The collected thereby, finished line had to be excluded by hand. The depositing of the types after the printing was done by hand as well. However, Church had planned that for the set of new writing material was used always because cars types were too often stuck in the machine. For this reason, he designed and built the Schnellgießmaschine as a supplement. Although his machines worked well, failed the nationwide introduction. The aim of mechanization, the time and cost savings for the set operation, the machine could not be realized. Too many steps had to be done by hand and the use of conventional manual record types from the lead sentence proved to be impractical. They often remained stuck in the machine, which reduced the time savings. After William Church tried many other inventors to build machines for metal type letters, but that none had success. So the machine from Church remains as an early attempt at mechanization of typesetting technology exist, but not being a practical solution. Some principles of his machine but later found in successful inventions feeder. For example, the matrices were exactly as in Church and in the Linotype typesetting machine transported by gravity into the collection.