Martin Wiberg was apparently Swedish, but filed British patent No. 1,548 of 1854 (at that time British patents were numbered sequentially within each year) for a type composing machine. {Huss 1973} This machine is Catalog No. 24 in Huss, "Wiberg's Self-Spacing Composer." This is the earliest instance of unit-set type in the machines identified by Huss. I do not know if there were any earlier instances of unit-set type intended for hand setting.
Wiberg's British patent contains the critical sentence: "The thickness of each type is a multiple or sub-multiple of the thickness of the rest."
GB Patent No. 1,548 of 1854 (Abridgment)
This is the abridgment of the specification of Wiberg's British patent No. 1,548 of 1854 as printed in Patents for Inventions: Abridgments of Specifications Relating to Printing . (London: By George E. Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1859.) The icon at left links to a PDF of the two pages (pp. 444-445) which contain the abridgment of Wiberg's patent.
{Huss 1973} Huss, Richard E. The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods, 1822-1925. (Charlottesville, VA: By the University Press of Virginia for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1973.)
The 1859 Eyre and Spottiswoode patent abridgements volume is in the public domain due to the expiration of all possible copyright. Its digital reprint by Google and the extract from that reprint used here remain in the public domain.
US patent specifications are in the public domain by law.
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