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IBM's Ingenious Solution for a Typewriter with Swappable Fonts

With industrial designer Eliot Noyes in 1961

By Rain Noe - November 14, 2023

in Object Culture

Smartphones are today's dominant communication device, and they come with default fonts. The iPhone uses San Francisco Pro, while Android phones use Roboto.

The typewriter was a dominant communication device of the 20th century, and they too came with default fonts. The standardized type of mechanical typewriter, which emerged around 1910, featured keys connected to individual typebars:

Image: Katrin Hauf

Image: Dariusz Maksimik

These typebars were metal arms that terminated in small individual blocks featuring embossed characters. When you pressed a key, the corresponding typebar swung up and over to strike the ink ribbon, printing the character on the page. Replacing dozens of typebars was not trivial, so the font you used was the font your typewriter came with (typically Courier).

Image: Matej

However, in 1961 IBM released something crazy: An electric typewriter that would allow you to change the font in just seconds.

Designed by industrial designer Eliot Noyes, the IBM Selectric didn't have typebars at all. Instead it had a single golf-ball-like element, or typeball, that electrically tilted and rotated to strike the desired character onto the page.

Image: Scs, Public Domain

This design made jams impossible. (On older typewriters, if you hit two keys at nearly the same time, both typebars would swing towards the page and become stuck together.) It also meant changing the font was as trivial as inserting a different typeball.

Image: Ecloud, CC BY-SA 3.0

This was a mind-blowing innovation, proof of IBM's complete technical dominance of the era. To office workers of the time it must've seemed like science fiction. Here's IBM's 1960s commercial for the Selectric, demonstrating how it works:

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The Selectric sold 13 million units over the next 25 years or so, before typewriters (and IBM) went into decline in the mid-1980s.

Today, typewriter nerds can still find typeballs for sale on Etsy and eBay.

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Martin Rosenblum

a year ago

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My introduction to the Selectric was as part of the console of the IBM 1130 computer around 1968/1969. Image: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/ibm-1130.jpg
My friend's father somehow persuaded IBM to donate it to our public high school in Englewood, NJ. As the school nerd, it was my hangout when skipping English class. Programming was Fortran on punch cards, main memory was 4K bytes hand-wired integrated circuits on metal frame cage, the cartridge hard drive was IIRC 1 MB. It spoiled me for the real world of shared mainframe time at college, so I avoided computer science and became a materials scientist. Later in life, I got spoiled again when I spent a couple of years at Xerox PARC around 1980 and got to use the Lisa computer with bit-mapped graphics and the room-sized laser printers.

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- Martin Rosenblum
  
  Martin Rosenblum
  
  a year ago
  
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  The aspect of the Selectric that interested me the most was the casting and materials used for the ball. It is very light weight.
  
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  - Ryan Cee
    
    Martin Rosenblum
    
    a year ago
    
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    I assume because it has to travel and hit the page upwards of several times a second, but also strike with enough force to impart the ink on to the paper from the ribbon. Probably what kept it from being developed earlier.
    
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Delmo Walters Jr.

a year ago

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I would play with this type of typewriter when my mother would bring me to work with her on days off from school.

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Andy Collins

a year ago

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It's worth looking at the mechanism that steers the golf ball. Called a Whippletree or Wiffletree it's a brilliant, wholly mechanical, digital to analogue converter.

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