TYPE. — By "type" or "typical phenomenon" is meant that which, given a collectivity of phenomena that differ from one another within certain limits, best represents the entire collectivity. Statisticians consider as "typical" the characteristic that, in a series, corresponds to the most numerous class, the most common variant among many rarer ones, sometimes even the simple result of a large number of observations. By "habitus" or "morphological type" is meant the particular bodily structure of an individual, ascertainable through the correlation of anthropometric measurements of the body's segments and cavities.
A true science of typology is of very recent origin, having its founder in Achille De Giovanni (1838–1916), although a tendency to classify individuals into various groups is very ancient, so much so that Hippocrates already distinguished two pathological human types: the long type (with limbs long in proportion to the torso, thin, predisposed to tuberculosis), and the short type (predisposed to apoplexy). Until 1800, however, the most widely used classification of individuals was that proposed by Galen and advocated by the Salernitan school, which was more a temperamental classification than a morphological one, as it was based on clinical and functional characteristics determined by the presence or absence of four presumed substances (humors) in the organism: blood, bile, phlegm, and the astral. From this arose four types or human temperaments: the sanguine, the choleric or bilious, the melancholic or atrabilious, and the phlegmatic.
A. De Giovanni, instead, brought the study of human individuals onto a new plane, adding to pure clinical observation a study based on rigorous measurements of the human body, thus initiating an anthropometric study of individual constitution (v.), i.e., of their bodily structure, understood both in an absolute sense and in the reciprocal relationships of the body's individual parts. He thus created his three "combinations" (or habits), not only identifying three distinct types according to external morphological appearance but also evaluating from external constitution the development of internal organs, their functionality, and their morbid dispositions. De Giovanni recognized the brachytypes, longitypes, and normotypes. Contemporaneously with his studies, numerous other researchers in Italy and throughout the world devoted themselves to this new branch of medicine, proposing more or less similar classifications. Among them are: Kretschmer, Stiller, and Kraus in Germany; Naegeli and Jung in Switzerland; Marafon in Spain; Obermer and Cavadias in England; Marinescu in Romania; Charcowe Nicolaeff in Russia; Biant and Stockardt in North America; Rossi, Boccia, and Berardinelli in Latin America.
Anthropometry took a decisive step forward through the work of G. Viola, who was the first to apply the law of errors (binomial law or law of probabilities) of Quetelet-Gauss to medicine for evaluating the frequency of a given characteristic within a given collectivity of individuals. In this way, a binomial curve can be obtained graphically, whose apex represents the "norm" in a statistical sense, while the variations from the norm are arranged along the two branches (ascending and descending). Viola thus proposed a method for calculating the extent of quantitative deviation from the statistical norm and the severity index of the deviation. Based on his studies, he formulated a new classification, based both on simple measurements of the torso and on the value of the torso-limb ratio, considering the former as an expression of vegetative life and the latter as an expression of relational life. Thus, according to Viola, there are microsplanchnics, normosplanchnics, and macrosplanchnics depending on the size of the torso, while in relation to the variation in the torso-limb proportion there are brachitypes (torso more distant from the "norm" than the limbs) and longitypes (limbs more distant from the norm than the torso); if the deviations from the norm are equal for both the torso and the limbs, normotypes are obtained. In this way, types, or rather "constitutional concepts," are the product of a single universal biological law of deformation of the average type, a law enunciated and demonstrated by Viola in 1907: "The more an organism accelerates its development, the more it differentiates morphologically."
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TYPE — PRINTING
Enrico Scinzzenzeler, Aldo Manuzio, to whom we owe the development of the italic typeface that he called Aldine, Italic, or Chancery. Alongside the innovation in typefaces, care was taken to give books their own distinction through marginal embellishments of superb elegance, architectural-style decorations, and flourished initials. On the other hand, typographic production made a significant contribution to science and literature, gradually drawing scholars back to the pure sources of language and thus giving ample scope to that fervor of studies and research that characterized Humanism: legal doctrine found in printing the most useful instrument for its progress and dissemination, as did geography, astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. Later, Italy would produce great masters of printing: the Aldines, the Giuntas, the Giolitos, up to Zatta, Albrizzi, Lelio della Volpe, G. B. Bodoni, and Camino; in France, Sébastien Griffo, Jean Barbou, the Anissons, Antoine Vitré, Panckoucke, and the Didots; in Switzerland, the Frobens; in the Netherlands, Christoffel Plantin, the Elzeviers, and Willem Blaeu; in England, the Roycrofts; in Spain, Joaquín Ibarra; and up to modern typographers such as Alberto Tallone, to whom we owe the achievement of the highest technical and aesthetic perfection in printing and the book.
PRINTING PRESSES. — The mass reproduction of written works today is achieved through printing (a term denoting both the industry and the printing office) by means of machines that can be divided into two categories: composing machines and printing presses.
The discovery of mechanical printing was due to the German Friedrich Koenig, who in 1810 constructed the first mechanical press. After various attempts to replace the early Gutenberg (v.), it was able, through a series of improvements, to produce large print runs in a very short time. Printing presses, which industrialized an activity hitherto carried out by specialized craftsmen, have been classified according to their various production systems as flat-bed, flat-bed cylinder, and rotary presses. The latter operate at continuous speed and with high efficiency; they were first built in 1846 and later perfected by Hippolyte Marinoni and Jules Derriey. They are generally used for the simultaneous printing of several sheets of a newspaper.
As for composing machines, the first to conceive of a machine using type was Roberto Gaubert, who in 1826 experimented with a rudimentary system for moving and distributing type, later perfected by John Mac Millian (1884). Once the prejudice that printing could only be done with ready-made type was abandoned, special machines were developed in the 19th century that proved particularly useful in the printing industry: punch machines, which impressed characters onto a plastic substance intended to serve as a matrix for casting type; and matrix machines, or cavity machines, which cast type letter by letter or line by line. These are the so-called monotype and linotype, the first realized after a laborious succession of attempts by the American Tolbert Lanston (1897) and composed of a keyboard and a casting-composing unit; the second created by the German watchmaker Othmar Mergenthaler (1885), and constructed so that in a single block it accomplishes composition, justification, casting, and decomposition of the matrices, completing the entire work cycle almost always without human intervention: the "linotypist" needs only to strike a keyboard that, with the so-called matrix magazine and casting apparatus, constitutes the essential mechanism of the machine. The entirely mechanical process of placing the matrix in the composing unit, in the casting chamber where the line of type is formed, in the distributor, and then in the channel from which it departs, allows a sector production of about eight thousand letters per hour. On the same principle, other machines were later constructed, such as the typograph, the barotype (1890), and the intertype (1913). Making use of phototechnics, new improvements were made to printing machines. In 1915, Bawtree and Lee created the photoline, which photographically reproduces characters by using, in transparency, glass disks 25 cm in diameter on which the characters are arranged concentrically. Uniformity of body size is achieved by moving the matrices closer to or farther from the sensitive wall, as with a common camera. Robertson (1922) achieved better results with his machine by using small glass plates instead of disks, with the letter image transparent against a black background. With the teletypepester (1929), an attempt was made to apply to printing the system of long-distance transmission used for telegrams. This is a central transmitting apparatus connected to other receiving apparatuses via telegraphic or wireless systems, whose signals, transmitted remotely, perforate a roll of paper connected to the receiver and applied to a linotype equipped with an automatic control device.
Other systems of mechanical composition include the orotype by Max Ullman (1935), the typar, the thothmic by the Englishman Hunter, and the uhertype by the German Uher, the latter having opened new horizons for bookmaking technique. Vedi tav. XV.
— Si V. le illustrazioni della voce: GIORNALISMO CATTOLICO.