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"He did much toward facilitating American printing and towards making it a fine art, inventing, with the assistance of his nephew, David Bruce, Jr., a successful type-casting machine which has come into general use." William Vincent McKean, born in 1820 of Ulster Scot descent, was another distinguished type-founder and editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia Public Ledger for many years.
Except so far as taste is concerned, you do not think of rebuking the self-complacent type-founder, who prides himself on having produced a new form which all the world will admit to be a genuine 'A, as soon as they make out that it was meant for one.
A joke of the time was a supposed order to the type-founder for some words of frequent occurrence, which ran thus: "Please send me a hundredweight, sorted, of murder, fire, dreadful robbery, atrocious outrage, fearful calamity, alarming explosion, melancholy accident; an assortment of honourable member, whig, tory, hot, cold, wet, dry; half a hundred weight, made up in pounds, of butter, cheese, beef, mutton, tripe, mustard, soap, rain, etc., and a few devils, angels, women, groans, hisses, etc."
On looking over the list we saw that one who had been a Custom House Officer had recently acted as Carpenter's Labourer; a Type-founder had been glad to work at Chimney Sweeping; the Schoolmaster, able to speak five languages, who in his prosperous days had owned a farm, was glad to do odd jobs as a Bricklayer's Labourer; a Gentleman's Valet, who once earned #5 a week, had come so low down in the world that he was glad to act as Sandwich man for the magnificent sum of fourteenpence a day, and that, only as an occasional affair.
At great expense and trouble he had all the commonest words and phrases cast together. He would give his type-founder an order like this: Send me a hundredweight, made up in separate pounds, of heat, cold, wet, dry, murder, fire, dreadful robbery, atrocious outrage, fearful calamity, and alarming explosion.
He was accordingly put apprentice to a cutler; but was so badly treated by his master, that he shortly afterwards left his employment, on which he was placed with a type-founder. His parents dying, Jacquard found himself in a measure compelled to take to his father's two looms, and carry on the trade of a weaver.
Kettering's account of the many vexations that preyed on him his troubles with his men, the heavy expense of constantly renewing the composition on his machine rollers, the idleness and wantonness of the apprentice, the perpetual ordering of "sorts" from the type-founder, the inconsiderateness of customers who kept his type locked up, and the carelessness of everybody but himself in the handling of his material.
One debt of twenty-eight thousand francs was settled by the transfer of a lot of old unsaleable literature, which would have been dear at a halfpenny a volume. And then, when everything was in confusion debtors recalcitrant and creditors pressing what must he do but launch on another venture, buy the bankrupt stock of a type-founder, and start manufacturing.
William Douglas Mackenzie, President of Hartford Theological Seminary Foundation, is a son of John Mackenzie of Knockando, Morayshire, and was born in Fauresmith, South Africa, in 1859. Miss Catherine Wolf Bruce established a Free Circulating Library in Forty-second Street in memory of her father, George Bruce the type-founder, in 1888. It is now a branch of the New York Public Library.
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