This article came up on Hacker News:
Interesting to see the specifics of routing (esp. w/ a pantograph) and to have the ancestry of the Hershey Fonts set down clearly.
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Very interesting, Will. An example of an article that didn’t know it needed to be produced! 
But why engraving to begin with? Because the affordable and casual printing options we enjoy today – the office laser printers and home inkjets, the FedEx Kinko’s, the various cheap labelers – weren’t there.
In 1976, while just starting my career, I was tasked with documenting the engineering on an existing instrument panel about 36” x 24” full of swiches, lamps and meters (including screw and mounting holes for a paper strip chart.) The big boss wanted that panel edging towards CNC (which wasn’t really a word back then.)
Everything on the panel was labeled; most in tiny letters. In the beginning of the panel’s life, the letters were simple letters from a manual drafting design that produced a full-sized page (that no one wanted to even touch!)
I had to make them understand that even though the lettering was on the paper, the “font” was added at the machine shop with a pantograph of unknown origin! The real task was highly political in nature trying to get the owner of a busy small machine shop to describe the details of his equipment that was built before 1920!
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There is a video referenced on that page:
notably, there is a brief mention of climb vs. conventional cutting.
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IM is a wonderful rabbit hole of a YouTube channel into which to dive.
Adam Savage also did a pantograph restoration on his Tested channel.
In the late 1980s I worked with a German injection molder (actually a die maker who expanded into molding by necessity…) who used a Deckel pantograph to machine mold cavities, using acrylic masters.
And I didn’t know that Leroy was an offshoot of Gorton… Working at a pen plotter manufacturer in the early 1990s made me very familiar with stroke fonts…
Thank you for bringing up the memories, Will.
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Arguably, the more accurate description would be that Gorton was the first successful manufacturer to instantiate the existing lettering standards/traditions in a mechanically reproducible form.
Trying to remember if we have a nice hand lettering font in our custom set — sadly Francis D.K. Ching’s distinctive lettering style was captured by David Siegel for Adobe as Tekton and it drove out almost all other perceptions.
There were some other very cool approaches:
(though arguably it should have been named “Olive Hill”)
which I looked into at:
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