US Patent 1,344,577 (1920-06-22), Clair H. Brasted

A "Proto-Elrod"

There must be some interesting history behind this patent, but I don't yet know it. The patent was filed in 1918, after the 1917 development work by Benjamin S. Elrod on his machine, and after the filing of Elrod's basic patent (1917-04-14). It was, however, issued in June of 1920, more than two years before the issue of Elrod's basic patent. It was assigned at issue to the Ludlow Typograph Company, one month before they were approached by Benjamin Elrod to produce his machine.

In The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods: 1822-1925 (Charlottesville, VA: Published for the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1973), Huss writes "In July 1920, [Benjamin S.] Elrod approached the Ludlow Typograph Company about making an arrangement whereby the Ludlow Company would take over the manufacture and sale of the Elrod. Ludlow saw its advantages over the machine they had been experimenting with and abandoned their machine..." (283). Clair Brasted had been involved with the original "matrix bar" Ludlow Typograph (US patents 1,091,477 and 1,146,302). I wonder if this present machine wasn't the stripcaster that Ludlow abandoned upon adoption of Benjamin Elrod's machine?

Curiously, Brasted later developed an entirely different stripcasting machine ( US Patent 1,507,456, 1924-09-02 ), but while this later patent also was assigned to the Ludlow Typograph Company, it is unlike any Elrod. I have therefore considered it not here but in the "Other Machines" section of the general Strip-Casters section .

The overall principles are (almost) identical to the Elrod (continuous casting through a water-chilled mold, with a puller, though the puller and the mold interact in a way that they never did on any Elrod), but the details differ. The orientation of the strip in the mold is horizontal. There is no cutter blade or material stacker. There are no throat or mold burners. The mold is not removable as in later production Elrods, but rather is a "nozzle" bolted to the crucible. (This was, however, also the case in Elrod's basic patent.) There is no provision for oiling the mold.

The primary difference of principle between this machine and the Elrod (in all forms) is that in the Elrod the mold and the puller are separate mechanisms, where here the puller extends into the mold and forms the (reciprocating) bottom casting surface of the mold. Fig. 5 of the patent shows this best.

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