Glenn Fleishman, a tech journalist who is occasionally on the This Week in Tech podcast, is also an amateur historian of early printing technology. In this blog post, he writes about something called Stanhope moulds and plates. I had never heard of them until seeing his post.
The so-called Stanhope process relied on plaster molds made from forms of type—full pages or smaller laid-out arrangements. A liquid plaster mixture was poured on the form in a special frame, then baked in an oven and removed. Liquid lead alloy could then be poured into the mold in yet another specialized frame, cooling almost instantly. The plaster mold would then be broken off and the remains of the plaster chiseled out. The result solid plate could go directly on press. Any number of molds could be made from the same plate.
This technique was used across the 1800s but still had significant limits—time, cost, and complexity, based on my research. It’s unclear how widely it was employed. The perfection by the early 1860s of a paper-based method, called flong, had a very quick uptake because a flong could be bent into a hemisphere and cast as a curved plate used on a high-speed rotary press.
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