Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/195

Rh wonderful apparatus has a furnace for a heart and a melting-pot for a stomach. The furnace, consisting of a series of gas-jets, and the melting-pot, are in the lower part of the body of the machine. In the pot, stereotype metal is melted. The pot is not very large, because fresh metal may be put into it at any time when needed. The same metal may be used over and over again as often as desired; it does not deteriorate.

A jet of molten metal is thrown into the matrices by a force-pump worked by the automatic action of the machine. The metallic fluid, hardening almost in an instant, a property of



stereotype metals, forms a solid cast or bar, on the face of which is the line "new things come to pass," and the machine automatically ejects this cast or bar of letters into a receiver, into which it is followed line after line by new casts with wonderful rapidity, until in a short space of time a column of reading-matter in bars is ready for the press. The speed of the machine is measured by