the.com/type metal
The alloy that armed Gutenberg, printed empires, and quietly poisoned every typesetter who licked it.
means A soft, easily melted alloy of lead, tin, and antimony used to cast the individual letters and characters of movable type for printing.
from A plain compound of "type" and "metal," naming the stuff types were cast from. "Type" itself comes through French and Latin typus from Greek typos, "a blow, an impression, the mark a stamp leaves" — which is precisely what a piece of type does to paper. The recipe was a balancing act: lead for cheapness and low melting point, tin for fluidity, and antimony, the crucial ingredient that expands slightly as it cools so the cast letter fills the mould crisply instead of shrinking into a blur.
- recipe
- Lead, tin, antimony — antimony expands when cooling
- sharp casts
- Antimony fills molds, capturing crisp letter edges
- low melt
- Liquid around 240°C, easy benchtop pouring
- recycled forever
- Old type remelted into fresh letters endlessly
- toxic trade
- Lead exposure plagued centuries of printshop workers
bathory — swedish band that pioneered black metal in the 1980s, blending heavy metal with dark atmospheres
venom — british band from newcastle whose 1981 album 'black metal' coined the genre name
mayhem — norwegian band formed in 1984, central to the second wave of black metal in the 1990s