Nicolas Jenson
Nicholas Jenson was a French engraver, pioneer and type designer who carried out most of his work in Venice, Italy. Jenson acted as Master of the French Royal Mint at Tours, is credited with being the creator of one of the finest early Roman type faces. Nicholas Jenson has been something of an iconic figure among students of early printing since the nineteenth century when the aesthete William Morris praised the beauty and perfection of his roman font. Jenson is an important figure in the early history of printing and a pivotal force in the emergence of Venice as one of the first great centers of the printing press. In October 1458, while acting as Master of the French Royal Mint, Jenson was sent to Mainz, by King Charles VII, to study the art of metal movable type. By the time Jenson arrived in Mainz, there were a number of established printers under which he could have been apprenticed. Jenson left Mainz in 1461; some hypothesize that Jenson studied under the tutelage of Johann Gutenberg, although there is no verifiable evidence of this.
By this time Gutenberg's first press had been seized by Johann Fust, historians are unsure of his activities during this period. In 1468 Jenson went to Venice, opening a printing shop in 1470, and, in the first work he produced, the printed roman lowercase letter took on the proportions and arrangements that marked its transition from an imitation of handwriting to the style that has remained in use throughout subsequent centuries of printing. Jenson designed Greek-style type and black-letter type; the printer was prodigious in his publishing producing around 150 titles. By the end of his life Jenson was a wealthy man, producing liturgical and legal texts in a variety of gothic fonts, the roman type left only for the odd commissioned work. Working separately but concurrently with Johann and Wendelin of Speyer, Nicholas Jenson is popularly thought to have made the final definitive break from blackletter style towards a evolved roman letterform. During the 1470s Nicholas Jenson’s technical skill and business acumen helped establish Venice as Italy’s publishing capital and in centuries since he has been celebrated for perfecting roman type, the rebirth of Latin inscription.
In 1477 Jenson was able to run as many as twelve presses at the same time. To lower prices and force out less productive rivals, he cut cursive gothic type, enabling him to print text and gloss on the same page for the first time. During the time of his arrival in Venice Jenson was quite successful as an artist but was financially successful as well, his early training as a gold smith allowed him greater sensitivities to the sculptural nature of type. Jenson's legible and evenly colored typeface, based upon Humanistic scripts, has been reinterpreted through the centuries by numerous type designers, most notably William Morris. Jenson's fame as one of history's greatest typeface designers and punch cutters rests on the types first used in Eusebius's De praeparatione evangelica, which presents the full flowering of roman type design. Jenson constructed the first roman typeface on the basis of typographical principles, as opposed to the old manuscript models, it was first in use in his 1470 edition of Eusebius.
In 1471, a Greek typeface followed, used for quotations, in 1473 a Black Letter typeface, which he used in books on medicine and history. In distinction to his contemporary printers, Jenson was able to expand his financial base. By 1477 he could run as many as twelve presses simultaneously, he is responsible for launching two book trading companies, first in 1475 and in 1480, under the name of Johannes de Colonia, Nicolaus Jenson et socii. Following his death respective typefaces were employed by the Aldine Press, have continued to be the basis for numerous fonts. Examples include William Morris' Golden Type, Bruce Rogers' "Centaur" in 1914, Morris Fuller Benton's "Cloister Old Style" in 1926, Robert Slimbach's "Adobe Jenson" in 1996; the Manual Of Linotype Typography, Published 1923 by Linotype Company A hardcover book containing 256 pages of type specimens and typographic recommendations. From the introduction: "This "Manual of Linotype Typography" places before... printers pages based on the best typographic standards of today, presented with the greatest possible variety in order to promote versatility, accompanied by explanatory remarks.
Thus the composing-room force has opportunity to copy something good and do it with understanding." This page in the Manual shows Linotype's version of Jenson's type. Beautifully preserved production printed in black and vermillion with a tipped-in frontis illustration and decorated endpapers. Caesar, Julius. Works, 1471. Printed, in venice by Nicolas Jenson, 1471 Nicolas Jenson printed one of the earliest and most beautiful editions of Caesar. We note here the remarkable clarity and simplicity of the printer's Roman typeface, which drew its inspiration from etchings on Roman monuments. On this opening page we are treated to a wonderful illuminated initial and border. VK 405, Bible in Latin, Nicolas Jenson, Venice, 1479 The Bible was written by forty different human authors over a 1500-year period. While the original Autographs were "perfect", the process of hand copying resulted in derivations from the original texts. Of the French printers of the era from Nicolas Jenson came nearly a hundred of the finest books produced in the fifteenth century.
This is the first Bible to be issued from Jenson’s press, of this Latin Bible, issued in 1479, Pope Sixtus IV conferred upon him the honorary title of Count Palatine. Pliny, Natural History, 1476. Printed in Venice by Nicolas Jenson. 1,02
Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and other symbols are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts. One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission. During much of the letterpress era, movable type was composed by hand for each page. Cast metal sorts were composed into words lines paragraphs pages of text and bound together to make up a form, with all letter faces the same "height to paper", creating an surface of type; the form was placed in a press, an impression made on paper. During typesetting, individual sorts are picked from a type case with the right hand, set into a composing stick held in the left hand from left to right, as viewed by the setter upside down; as seen in the photo of the composing stick, a lower case'q' looks like a'd', a lower case'b' looks like a'p', a lower case'p' looks like a'b' and a lower case'd' looks like a'q'.
This is reputed to be the origin of the expression "mind your p's and q's". It might just as have been "mind your b's and d's"; the diagram at right illustrates a cast metal sort: a face, b body or shank, c point size, 1 shoulder, 2 nick, 3 groove, 4 foot. Wooden printing sorts were in use for centuries in combination with metal type. Not shown, more the concern of the casterman, is the “set”, or width of each sort. Set width, like body size, is measured in points. In order to extend the working life of type, to account for the finite sorts in a case of type, copies of forms were cast when anticipating subsequent printings of a text, freeing the costly type for other work; this was prevalent in book and newspaper work where rotary presses required type forms to wrap an impression cylinder rather than set in the bed of a press. In this process, called stereotyping, the entire form is pressed into a fine matrix such as plaster of Paris or papier mâché called a flong to create a positive, from which the stereotype form was electrotyped, cast of type metal.
Advances such as the typewriter and computer would push the state of the art farther ahead. Still, hand composition and letterpress printing have not fallen out of use, since the introduction of digital typesetting, it has seen a revival as an artisanal pursuit. However, it is a small niche within the larger typesetting market; the time and effort required to manually compose the text led to several efforts in the 19th century to produce mechanical typesetting. While some, such as the Paige compositor, met with limited success, by the end of the 19th century, several methods had been devised whereby an operator working a keyboard or other devices could produce the desired text. Most of the successful systems involved the in-house casting of the type to be used, hence are termed "hot metal" typesetting; the Linotype machine, invented in 1884, used a keyboard to assemble the casting matrices, cast an entire line of type at a time. In the Monotype System, a keyboard was used to punch a paper tape, fed to control a casting machine.
The Ludlow Typograph otherwise used hot metal. By the early 20th century, the various systems were nearly universal in large newspapers and publishing houses. Phototypesetting or "cold type" systems first appeared in the early 1960s and displaced continuous casting machines; these devices consisted of glass or film disks or strips that spun in front of a light source to selectively expose characters onto light-sensitive paper. They were driven by pre-punched paper tapes, they were connected to computer front ends. One of the earliest electronic photocomposition systems was introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor; the typesetter typed a line of text on a Fairchild keyboard. To verify correct content of the line it was typed a second time. If the two lines were identical a bell rang and the machine produced a punched paper tape corresponding to the text. With the completion of a block of lines the typesetter fed the corresponding paper tapes into a phototypesetting device that mechanically set type outlines printed on glass sheets into place for exposure onto a negative film.
Photosensitive paper was exposed to light through the negative film, resulting in a column of black type on white paper, or a galley. The galley was cut up and used to create a mechanical drawing or paste up of a whole page. A large film negative of the page is used to make plates for offset printing; the next generation of phototypesetting machines to emerge were those that generated characters on a cathode ray tube. Typical of the type were the Alphanumeric APS2, IBM 2680, I. I. I. VideoComp, Autologic APS5, Linotron 202; these machines were the mainstay of phototypesetting for much of the 1980s. Such machines could be "driven online" by a computer front-end system or took their data from magnetic tape. Type fonts were stored digitally on conventional magnetic disk drives. Computers excel at automatically correcting documents. Character-by-character, computer-aided phototypesetting was, in turn rendered obsolete in the 1980s by digital systems employing a raster image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution digital image, now known as imagesetting.
The first commercially successful laser imagesetter, able to make use of a raster image p
Silicon
Silicon is a chemical element with symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic lustre, it is a member of group 14 in the periodic table: carbon is above it. It is unreactive; because of its high chemical affinity for oxygen, it was not until 1823 that Jöns Jakob Berzelius was first able to prepare it and characterize it in pure form. Its melting and boiling points of 1414 °C and 3265 °C are the second-highest among all the metalloids and nonmetals, being only surpassed by boron. Silicon is the eighth most common element in the universe by mass, but rarely occurs as the pure element in the Earth's crust, it is most distributed in dusts, sands and planets as various forms of silicon dioxide or silicates. More than 90% of the Earth's crust is composed of silicate minerals, making silicon the second most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen. Most silicon is used commercially without being separated, with little processing of the natural minerals.
Such use includes industrial construction with clays, silica sand, stone. Silicates are used in Portland cement for mortar and stucco, mixed with silica sand and gravel to make concrete for walkways and roads, they are used in whiteware ceramics such as porcelain, in traditional quartz-based soda-lime glass and many other specialty glasses. Silicon compounds such as silicon carbide are used as abrasives and components of high-strength ceramics. Silicon is the basis of the used synthetic polymers called silicones. Elemental silicon has a large impact on the modern world economy. Most free silicon is used in the steel refining, aluminium-casting, fine chemical industries. More visibly, the small portion of highly purified elemental silicon used in semiconductor electronics is essential to integrated circuits – most computers, cell phones, modern technology depend on it. Silicon is an essential element in biology. However, various sea sponges and microorganisms, such as diatoms and radiolaria, secrete skeletal structures made of silica.
Silica is deposited in many plant tissues. In 1787 Antoine Lavoisier suspected that silica might be an oxide of a fundamental chemical element, but the chemical affinity of silicon for oxygen is high enough that he had no means to reduce the oxide and isolate the element. After an attempt to isolate silicon in 1808, Sir Humphry Davy proposed the name "silicium" for silicon, from the Latin silex, silicis for flint, adding the "-ium" ending because he believed it to be a metal. Most other languages use transliterated forms of Davy's name, sometimes adapted to local phonology. A few others use instead a calque of the Latin root. Gay-Lussac and Thénard are thought to have prepared impure amorphous silicon in 1811, through the heating of isolated potassium metal with silicon tetrafluoride, but they did not purify and characterize the product, nor identify it as a new element. Silicon was given its present name in 1817 by Scottish chemist Thomas Thomson, he retained part of Davy's name but added "-on" because he believed that silicon was a nonmetal similar to boron and carbon.
In 1823, Jöns Jacob Berzelius prepared amorphous silicon using the same method as Gay-Lussac, but purifying the product to a brown powder by washing it. As a result, he is given credit for the element's discovery; the same year, Berzelius became the first to prepare silicon tetrachloride. Silicon in its more common crystalline form was not prepared until 31 years by Deville. By electrolyzing a mixture of sodium chloride and aluminium chloride containing 10% silicon, he was able to obtain a impure allotrope of silicon in 1854. More cost-effective methods have been developed to isolate several allotrope forms, the most recent being silicene in 2010. Meanwhile, research on the chemistry of silicon continued; the first organosilicon compound, was synthesised by Charles Friedel and James Crafts in 1863, but detailed characterisation of organosilicon chemistry was only done in the early 20th century by Frederic Kipping. Starting in the 1920s, the work of William Lawrence Bragg on X-ray crystallography elucidated the compositions of the silicates, known from analytical chemistry but had not yet been understood, together with Linus Pauling's development of crystal chemistry and Victor Goldschmidt's development of geochemistry.
The middle of the 20th century saw the development of the chemistry and industrial use of siloxanes and the growing use of silicone polymers and resins. In the late 20th century, the complexity of the crystal chemistry of silicides was mapped, along with the solid-state chemistry of doped semiconductors; because silicon is an important element in high-technology semiconductor devi
Claude Garamond
Claude Garamont, known as Claude Garamond, was a French type designer and punch-cutter based in Paris. Garamond worked as an engraver of punches, the masters used to stamp matrices, the moulds used to cast metal type, he worked in the tradition now called old-style serif design, which produced letters with a organic structure resembling handwriting with a pen but with a more structured and upright design. Considered one of the leading type designers of all time, he is recognised to this day for the elegance of his typefaces. Many old-style serif typefaces are collectively known as Garamond, named after the designer. Garamond was one of the first independent punchcutters, specialising in type design and punch-cutting as a service to others rather than working in house for a specific printer, his career therefore helped to define the future of commercial printing with typefounding as a distinct industry to printing books. Garamond's early life has been the subject of considerable uncertainty. Dates as early as 1480 and as late as c. 1510 have been proposed for his birth, the latter being preferred by the French ministry of culture.
In favour of a date, his will of 1561 states that his mother was still alive. He married twice, to Guillemette Gaultier and, after her death, to Ysabeau Le Fevre. Garamond may have apprenticed with Antoine Augereau and was also trained by Simon de Colines, he worked with Geoffroy Tory, whose interests in humanist typography and the ancient Greek capital letterforms, or majuscules, may have informed Garamond's work. Garamond came to prominence around 1540, when three of his Greek typefaces were requested for a royally-ordered book series by Robert Estienne. Garamond based these types, now known as the Grecs du roi, on the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, the King's Librarian at Fontainebleau; the result is an immensely complicated set of type, including a vast variety of alternate letters and ligatures to simulate the flexibility of handwriting. Garamond worked for a variety of employers on commission, creating punches for publishers and the government. Garamond's typefaces were popular abroad, replaced Griffo's original roman type at the Aldine Press in Venice.
He worked as a publisher and bookseller. While his italics have been considered less impressive than his roman typefaces, he was one of the early printers to establish the modern tradition that the italic capitals should slope as the lower case does, rather than remain upright as Roman square capitals do. Although Garamond himself remains an eminent figure in French printing of the sixteenth century, historical research over the last century has placed his work in context. Garamond was one figure among many at a time when new typefaces were produced in sixteenth-century France, these type designers operated within a pre-existing tradition defined by the work of figures such as Aldus Manutius who were active over the preceding half-century; the period from 1520 to around 1560, encompassing Garamond's career as an artisan, was an busy period for typeface creation, with a wide range of fonts created, some for exclusive use by a specific printer, others sold or traded between them. Many engravers were active over this time, including Garamond himself, Guillaume Le Bé, Antoine Augereau, Simon de Colines, Pierre Hautin and others, creating typefaces not just in the Latin alphabet, but in Greek and Hebrew for scholarly use.
This period saw the creation of a pool of high-quality punches and matrices that would supply the French printing industry, to a large extent, for the next two centuries. Despite Garamond's eminence, he was never financially successful due to a surfeit of competition and piracy in the Parisian book industry of the time. In 1545, Garamond entered the publishing trade in a partnership with Jean Barbé, a Parisian bookseller; the first book Garamond published was called, "Religiosa Meditatio" by David Chambellan. In November 1561, following his death, his equipment and matrices were inventoried and sold off to purchasers including Guillaume Le Bé, Christophe Plantin, André Wechel, his wife was forced to sell his punches, which caused the typefaces of Garamond to become used for two centuries, but with attributions becoming confused. The chaotic sales caused problems, Le Bé's son wrote to Plantin's successor Moretus offering to trade matrices so they could both have complementary type in a range of sizes.
Egelhoff-Berner brought out a specimen in 1592 of types by Garamond and others, which would be a source for many Garamond revivals. The only major collection of original Garamond material in the Latin alphabet is that collected soon after his death by Christophe Plantin, based in Antwerp; this collection of punches matrices now forms a major part of the collection of the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, together with many other typefaces collected by Plantin from other typefounders of the period. The collection has been used extensively for research, for example by historians Harry Carter and Hendrik Vervliet. Garamond History of Western typography Movable type Printing Press Punchcutting Typesetting Tilley, Arthur. "Francis I". The English Historical Review. 15: 456–478. Doi:10.1093/ehr/xv.lix.456. Lane, John A.. "Claude Garamont and his Roman Type". In Adobe Systems. Garamond Premier Pro: A Contemporary Adaptation. Adobe Systems. Pp. 5–13. CS1 maint: Extra text: editors list A survey of Claude Garamond's career and typefaces, of Robert Granjon's italic types which were combined with Garamond roman types, a brief summary of subsequent revivals through Garamond Premier Pro.
Kapr, Albe
Letterpress printing
Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing using a printing press, a process by which many copies are produced by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against sheets or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type which creates an impression on the paper. In practice, letterpress includes other forms of relief printing with printing presses, such as wood engravings, photo-etched zinc "cuts", linoleum blocks, which can be used alongside metal type, or wood type, in a single operation, as well as stereotypes and electrotypes of type and blocks. With certain letterpress units it is possible to join movable type with slugs cast using hot metal typesetting. In theory, anything, "type high" or.918 inches can be printed using letterpress. Letterpress printing was the normal form of printing text from its invention by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century until the 19th century and remained in wide use for books and other uses until the second half of the 20th century.
Letterpress printing remained the primary means of printing and distributing information until the 20th century, when offset printing was developed, which supplanted its role in printing books and newspapers. All forms of data collection were affected by the invention of letterpress printing, as were many careers such as teachers, preachers and surgeons and artist-engineers. More letterpress printing has seen a revival in an artisanal form. Johannes Gutenberg is credited with the development in the western hemisphere, in about 1440, of modern movable type printing from individually cast, reusable letters set together in a form. Movable type was first invented in China using ceramic type in 1040 AD. Gutenberg invented a wooden printing press, based on the extant wine press, where the type surface was inked with leather-covered ink balls and paper laid on top by hand slid under a padded surface and pressure applied from above by a large threaded screw, it was Gutenberg's "screw press" or hand press, used to print 180 copies of the Bible.
At 1,282 pages, it took him and his staff of 20 3 years to complete. 48 copies remain intact today. This form of presswork replaced the hand-copied manuscripts of scribes and illuminators as the most prevalent form of printing. Printers' workshops unknown in Europe before the mid-15th century, were found in every important metropolis by 1500. Metal presses used a knuckle and lever arrangement instead of the screw, but the principle was the same. Ink rollers made of composition paved the way for further automation. With the advent of industrial mechanisation, inking was carried out by rollers that passed over the face of the type moved out of the way onto an ink plate to pick up a fresh film of ink for the next sheet. Meanwhile, a sheet of paper slid against a hinged platen, which rapidly pressed onto the type and swung back again as the sheet was removed and the next sheet inserted; as the fresh sheet of paper replaced the printed paper, the now freshly inked rollers ran over the type again. Automated 20th-century presses, such as the Kluge and "Original" Heidelberg Platen, incorporated pneumatic sheet feed and delivery.
Rotary presses were used for high-speed work. In the oscillating press, the form slid under a drum around which each sheet of paper got wrapped for the impression, sliding back under the inking rollers while the paper was removed and a new sheet inserted. In a newspaper press, a papier-mâché mixture called a flong used to make a mould of the entire form of type dried and bent, a curved metal stereotype plate cast against it; the plates were clipped to a rotating drum and could print against a continuous reel of paper at the enormously high speeds required for overnight newspaper production. This invention helped aid the high demand for knowledge during this time period. Letterpress printing was introduced in Canada in 1752 in Halifax, Nova Scotia by John Bushell in the newspaper format; this paper became Canada's first newspaper. Bushell apprenticed under Bartholomew Green in Boston. Green moved to Halifax in 1751 in hopes of starting a newspaper. Two weeks and a day after the press he was going to use for this new project arrived in Halifax, Green died.
Upon receiving word about what happened, Bushell moved to Halifax and continued what Green had started. The Halifax Gazette was first published on March 23, 1752, making Bushell the first letterpress printer in Halifax, Canada. There is only one known surviving copy, found in the Massachusetts Historical Society. One of the first forms of letterpress printing in the United States was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick started by Benjamin Harris; this was the first form of a newspaper with multiple pages in the Americas. The first publication of Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was September 25, 1690. Letterpress started to become out-of-date in the 1970s because of the rise of computers and new self-publishing print and publish methods. Many printing establishments went out of business from the 1980s to 1990s and sold their equipment after computers replaced letterpress's abilities more efficiently; these commercial print shops discarded presses, making them affordable and available to artisans throughout the country.
Popular presses are, in particular, Vandercook cylinder proof presses and Chandler & Price platen presses. In the UK there is particular affection for the Arab press, built by Josiah Wade in Halifax. Letterpress
William Caslon
William Caslon I known as William Caslon the Elder, was an English typefounder. The distinction and legibility of his type secured him the patronage of the leading printers of the day in England and on the continent, his typefaces transformed English type design and first established an English national typographic style. Caslon was born in Cradley, Worcestershire in 1692 or 1693 and trained as an engraver in nearby Birmingham. In 1716, he started business in London as an engraver of gun locks and barrels and as a bookbinder's tool cutter. Having contact with printers, he was induced to fit up a type foundry through the encouragement of William Bowyer, he died on 23 January 1766, was buried in the churchyard of St Luke Old Street, where the family tomb is preserved. Though his name would come to be identified with an enduring style of Latin alphabet, Caslon's first typefaces were what contemporary typefounders called "exotics." His first design was an Arabic made at the English size, commissioned by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge before 1725, followed by a Hebrew created for William Bowyer in 1726, a Coptic for Wilkins first used in 1731.
His first Latin typefaces were a roman and italic cut in the pica size, of a style, realized by the publication of his foundry's specimen sheet in 1734. Caslon's typefaces were inspired by the Dutch Baroque types, the most used types in England before Caslon's faces, his designs influenced John Baskerville and are thus the progenitors of the transitional and Didone typeface classifications. Caslon typefaces were popular and used for many important printed works, including the first printed version of the United States Declaration of Independence. Caslon's types became so popular that the expression about typeface choice, "when in doubt, use Caslon," came about; the Caslon types were revived in the 1840s. Several revivals of the Caslon types are used today. William Caslon I founded the Caslon Foundry in 1739, based on what had been Godfrey Head's; the other half of that business was purchased by son of Thomas James. John James in the period 1716–1764 built up by purchase what became the leading English type foundry of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
He acquired moiety of half of Robert Mitchell and Jacob Ilive in 1740. A and important purchase was the foundry of Thomas Grover in 1758. James combined under his own direction nine old English Foundries. John James, William Caslon I and Baskerville were left by consolidation as the only three representatives of the trade in the country. Caslon had two apprentices in Thomas Cottrell and Joseph Jackson, they started a foundry of their own in direct competition to their employer in 1757. In 1759 Jackson entered the Navy leaving Cottrell to carry on alone. Jackson left the navy in 1763 and continued to be employed in Thomas Cottrell, Neveil's court 1759–1785 Foundry for a short time, he commenced business in a separate Foundry with two fellow workman who helped to find the capital 1764 – 1792. When Jackson died in 1792 it was William Caslon I's grandson, William Caslon III who purchased the foundry in Salisbury Square. After the death of William Caslon I, his son William Caslon II took over the Caslon Foundry business 1764–1778.
In 1792, William Caslon III sold his share of Caslon Foundry to his mother and his sister-in-law, the widow of his brother Henry. Mrs William Caslon II and Mrs Henry Caslon continued to run the original main Caslon business. In the same year, William Caslon III purchased the Salisbury Square foundry from the estate of the deceased Joseph Jackson, renamed it to W Caslon & Son. In 1807, W Caslon & Son was passed to William Caslon IV. In 1819, William Caslon IV sold Son to the new Sheffield foundry of Blake, Garnett & Co.. In 1837, the Salisbury Square Caslon Foundry became the property of Blake & Co.. The main Caslon Foundry was still running. In 1795 the company proprietors were Mrs Henry Caslon & Nathaniel Catherwood 1795–1821. 1850–1873 when H. W. Caslon died and the Foundry was acquired by T. W. Smith and partners—the Company name remained. H. W. Caslon and Co. Ltd continued running until 1937, when Stephenson Blake acquired the remaining H. W. Caslon & Sons foundry. In 1998, Justin Howes reestablished the Caslon foundry, under the name H. W. Caslon & Company Limited, with an expanded version of ITC Founder's Caslon as the company's initial product.
However, following the death of Justin Howes in 2005, the revived H. W. Caslon & Company was no longer in business, the expanded Founders Caslon is no longer offered in the retail market, his typeface, Caslon This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Caslon". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press. Ball, Johnson. William Caslon, 1693–1766: the ancestry and connections of England's foremost letter-engraver and type-founder. Kineton: Roundwood Press. ISBN 0900093137. Blackmore, H. L.. "William Caslon, gun engraver". Journal of the Arms and Armour Society. 10: 103–7. Howes, J.. "Caslon's punches and matrices". Matrix. 20: 1–7. Mosley, James. "The early career of William Caslon". Journal of the Printing Historical Society. 3: 66–81. Mosley, James. British type specimens before 1831: a hand-list. Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society. ISBN 0901420115. Mosley, James. "The Caslon foundry in 1902". Matrix. 13: 3
Antimony
Antimony is a chemical element with symbol Sb and atomic number 51. A lustrous gray metalloid, it is found in nature as the sulfide mineral stibnite. Antimony compounds have been known since ancient times and were powdered for use as medicine and cosmetics known by the Arabic name, kohl. Metallic antimony was known, but it was erroneously identified as lead upon its discovery; the earliest known description of the metal in the West was written in 1540 by Vannoccio Biringuccio. For some time, China has been the largest producer of antimony and its compounds, with most production coming from the Xikuangshan Mine in Hunan; the industrial methods for refining antimony are roasting and reduction with carbon or direct reduction of stibnite with iron. The largest applications for metallic antimony is an alloy with lead and tin and the lead antimony plates in lead–acid batteries. Alloys of lead and tin with antimony have improved properties for solders and plain bearings. Antimony compounds are prominent additives for chlorine and bromine-containing fire retardants found in many commercial and domestic products.
An emerging application is the use of antimony in microelectronics. Antimony is a member of group 15 of the periodic table, one of the elements called pnictogens, has an electronegativity of 2.05. In accordance with periodic trends, it is more electronegative than tin or bismuth, less electronegative than tellurium or arsenic. Antimony is stable in air at room temperature, but reacts with oxygen if heated to produce antimony trioxide, Sb2O3. Antimony is a silvery, lustrous gray metalloid with a Mohs scale hardness of 3, too soft to make hard objects. Antimony is resistant to attack by acids. Four allotropes of antimony are known: a stable metallic form and three metastable forms. Elemental antimony is a silver-white shiny metalloid; when cooled, molten antimony crystallizes in a trigonal cell, isomorphic with the gray allotrope of arsenic. A rare explosive form of antimony can be formed from the electrolysis of antimony trichloride; when scratched with a sharp implement, an exothermic reaction occurs and white fumes are given off as metallic antimony forms.
Black antimony is formed upon rapid cooling of antimony vapor. It has the same crystal structure as red phosphorus and black arsenic, it oxidizes in air and may ignite spontaneously. At 100 °C, it transforms into the stable form; the yellow allotrope of antimony is the most unstable. It has only been generated by oxidation of stibine at −90 °C. Above this temperature and in ambient light, this metastable allotrope transforms into the more stable black allotrope. Elemental antimony adopts a layered structure in which layers consist of fused, six-membered rings; the nearest and next-nearest neighbors form an irregular octahedral complex, with the three atoms in each double layer closer than the three atoms in the next. This close packing leads to a high density of 6.697 g/cm3, but the weak bonding between the layers leads to the low hardness and brittleness of antimony. Antimony has two stable isotopes: 121Sb with a natural abundance of 57.36% and 123Sb with a natural abundance of 42.64%. It has 35 radioisotopes, of which the longest-lived is 125Sb with a half-life of 2.75 years.
In addition, 29 metastable states have been characterized. The most stable of these is 120m1Sb with a half-life of 5.76 days. Isotopes that are lighter than the stable 123Sb tend to decay by β+ decay, those that are heavier tend to decay by β− decay, with some exceptions; the abundance of antimony in the Earth's crust is estimated to be 0.2 to 0.5 parts per million, comparable to thallium at 0.5 parts per million and silver at 0.07 ppm. Though this element is not abundant, it is found in more than 100 mineral species. Antimony is sometimes found natively, but more it is found in the sulfide stibnite, the predominant ore mineral. Antimony compounds are classified according to their oxidation state: Sb and Sb; the +5 oxidation state is more stable. Antimony trioxide is formed. In the gas phase, the molecule of the compound is Sb4O6. Antimony pentoxide can be formed only by oxidation with concentrated nitric acid. Antimony forms a mixed-valence oxide, antimony tetroxide, which features both Sb and Sb.
Unlike oxides of phosphorus and arsenic, these oxides are amphoteric, do not form well-defined oxoacids, react with acids to form antimony salts. Antimonous acid Sb3 is unknown, but the conjugate base sodium antimonite forms upon fusing sodium oxide and Sb4O6. Transition metal antimonites are known. Antimonic acid exists only as the hydrate HSb6, forming salts as the antimonate anion Sb−6; when a solution containing this anion is dehydrated, the precipitate contains mixed oxides. Many antimony ores are sulfides, including stibnite, zinkenite and boulangerite. Antimony pentasulfide is non-stoichiometric and features antimony in the +3 oxidation state and S-S bonds. Several thioantimonides are known, such as 2− and 2−. Antimony forms two series of halides: SbX3 and SbX5; the trihalides SbF3, SbCl3, SbBr3, SbI3 are all molecular compounds having trigonal pyramidal molecular geometry. The trifluoride SbF3 is prepared by the reaction of Sb2O3 with HF: Sb2O3 + 6 HF → 2 SbF3 + 3 H2OIt is Lewis acidic and accepts
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