"Does it do kerning? Serious question." On the model illustrated, the line of type, or slug, was cast from lead all at the same time. The line was produced by assembling the separate dies for each letter into a line. I assume that each die could be a separate width depending on the letter. In old newspapers, you can see that the font is proportional even back in the fifties.
It was fascinating to watch this machine in action because each die had to be returned to it's bin after the line was cast so it had a very elaborate and noisy Rube-Goldberg mechanism to do this.