This is the basic patent for the pivotal type caster in the form that it became successful. It lacks only a choker valve (but not all pivotals had choker valves).
US Patent 3,324 (1843)
US patent 3,324, "Improvement in Type-Casting Machines." Issued 1943-11-06 to David Bruce, Jr. of Williamsburg, NY.
Here are the two sheets of plates, in glorious USPTO low-resolution bi-level:
(Clicking on either of the images above brings it up as a PDF, which may (or may not) scale more easily for you. Here are the two pages as PNG images: us-0003324-1843-11-06-bruce-type-casting-machine-01.png and us-0003324-1843-11-06-bruce-type-casting-machine-02.png
I happen to have a set of old thermal-paper printouts of what would appear to be a microfilm copy of this patent. I do not know who made them. I do not know the source of the microfilm. As bad as the USPTO digital versions are, I'm not entirely sure these are any better (they were entirely analog until I scanned them, but they're a bit fuzzy). Still, given the importance of this patent, it seems desirable to preserve them. So here are my 1200dpi RGB scans. Please note that you probably don't need these, and that they are very large files (192 to 200 Megabytes each). If you just want to read the patent, click on the PDF above, not these file links below. On the other hand, if you're an obsessive typefounder and you have a high-speed net connection, it would be good if these images below were copied to as many separate locations as possible so as to foster their preservation.
Here are the two plates from the photostat/microfilm files. As shown below they've been cropped a bit, reduced in resolution to 600dpi, and converted (lossily) to JPEG:
The text and images of US patents are in the public domain by law.
All portions of this document not noted otherwise are Copyright © 2010, 2013-2014 by David M. MacMillan and Rollande Krandall.
Circuitous Root is a Registered Trademark of David M. MacMillan and Rollande Krandall.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons "Attribution - ShareAlike" license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ for its terms.
Presented originally by Circuitous Root®
Select Resolution: 0 [other resolutions temporarily disabled due to lack of disk space]
