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Historical Context

Charles T. Moore formed the Moore Printing Typewriter Company and then the American Planograph Company - serving as President of both. It appears as if the American Planograph Company was born out of a consolidation of the Moore Printing Typewriter Company and the Linomatrix Machine Company. The company was incorporated in West Virginia.

The American Planograph company did later produce at least prototype machinery for a lithographic transfer composing process which involved typewriter-like equipment, but never reached the manufacturing stage.

Charles T. Moore

Charles Thomas Moore (born in Connecticut in 1834) played a critical role in the development of the Linotype machine. Throughout a long career as a printer, compositor and inventor, however, Moore seemed to consistently view his work as coming under the heading of "typewriting machines". Indeed, he called his first significant invention, in 1869, a "transfer typewriter", though it was actually patented as an "Improvement in printing-telegraphs". Moore's patent came long before the typewriter became a reality, and long before the Linotype machine.

For all that, Moore's place in technology history in rooted firmly in the development of the Linotype machine, in which he worked closely with both James Ogilvie Clephane, Clephane's older brother Lewis Clephane, and Ottmar Mergenthaler, as Mergenthaler gradually turned Moore's original idea into the Linotype.

Essentially, Moore's invention was a typing machine designed to print characters in lithographic ink on to paper strips. The character impressions were to be mounted on a backing sheet and the words transferred to a lithographic stone for printing. It is said that Moore described it as "a typewriter for newspapers which was designed to eliminate type-setting by hand".

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