Note 71 — Early Typography. CHAPTER III.

Letters made of copper or tin alone would scarcely be hard enough to use as punches, except for plaster moulds; but a mixture of metals forming brass, of which several writers say the first cut metal types were made, would answer the purpose, and could be struck into blocks of soft copper or tin without the slightest difficulty. At a pinch, however, Benjamin Franklin has shewn that even with ordinary types, matrices of lead can be made and used with success: “Our printing house,” he writes, “often wanted sorts, and there was no letter-foundry in America; I had seen types cast at James’s in London, but without much of attention to the manner; however, I contrived a mould, and made use of the letters we had as puncheons, struck the matrices in lead, and thus supplied in a pretty tolerable way the deficiencies.”