Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, and Typemaking at ATF

8/14/2019 Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, and Typemaking at ATF

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Patricia A. Cost

Linn Boyd and Morris Fuller Benton, father andson, each played crucial parts in the develop-ment of modern typefounding in the UnitedStates and the world. Both worked at the Amer-ican Type Founders Company, which as a gen-

eral policy did not promote or advertise the im-portance of individual employees. AlthoughMorris sublimated his talents to the needs of acommercial type foundry, nevertheless hisscores of remarkably successful designs . . . formthe backbone of American type design. At thesame time, the mechanical wizardry that madethe profusion of these types possible in the greatmechanical age of typefounding is due in nosmall measure to the e ff orts of his illustrious fa-ther.

As individuals, the Bentons are virtually un-known. Linn Boyd was a gregarious man who,all through life seized opportunities and foundways to produce the results he wanted. His sonMorris was reticent, not eager to be noticed orpraised, and even proved to be a di fficult subjectfor the Inland Printer reporter once sent to in-terview him.

The Benton name was brought to the UnitedStates by an Englishman, Andrew Benton, whosettled in Connecticut in . Linn Boyd Ben-tons father, Charles Swan Benton, was the youngest in a family of ten children. Charles wasborn July , , in Fryeburg, Maine, to Dr.Joseph Benton and Catherine Britton. Dr. Ben-ton was a physician of the old school, whosereputation extended for a circuit of a hundredmiles. Charles developed a great respect for hisfather, noting in later years that his scoldingscured more people than did his medicines.

When Charles was fourteen he was sent to Lit-tle Falls, New York, where he was apprenticed tohis uncle, a tanner. Charles soon gave up the tan-ners trade to attend the nearby Lowville Acad-emy, and then, at the age of , began to study law at the office of his oldest brother, Judge

Nathaniel S. Benton, also in Little Falls. Charleswas admitted to the bar in when he wastwenty-ve years old, but apparently was notdestined to pursue a legal career, since, as onehand-written obituary pointed out years later,

he possessed a warm feeling-ed, humanfriendly for right and truth glowing heart, and aman with one such heart, can as lawyer here notsuccessful be.

When Charles Benton was twenty-two, he es-tablished the Mohawk Courier & Little Falls Gazette . In Josiah A. Noonan became pub-lisher of the paper, with Benton as editor, whichbrought him prominence and a means for beingvocal on political issues.

In Charles married Emeline Fuller,

whose family could trace its ancestry back atleast to , when a Thomas Morris bought alarge mansion in New Haven, Connecticut.Amos Morris, a descendent of Thomas, servedin the Revolutionary War, and was taken captiveby the British. In , Eliphalet Fuller marriedAmoss daughter Amy, who became Emelinesgrandmother.

Two years after he married, Charles Bentonwas elected to Congress from the th Congres-sional District of New York State, and was re-elected in . While he was in Congress, Ben-ton voted to aid Samuel Morse in building therst electric telegraph line.

During his term in Washington, D.C., Charlesmet a congressman named Linn Boyd from Ken-tucky, who later became Speaker of the House of Representatives. The two became close friendsand shared an interest in dueling. Boyd, whileteaching Charles the sport, declared: Neverght a duel; never be afraid to ght a duel letthem know you will ght and you will neverhave to ght. On May , , Linn Boyd Ben-ton was born and named after Charless es-teemed friend.

In , Charles Benton was elected Clerk of

Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton,and Typemaking at ATF


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The Bentons and Typemaking and ATF Printing History

the Court of Appeals of New York State andserved for two terms. His wife Emeline died dur-ing this time, less than ve years after Linn Boydwas born. Boyd, as he came to be called, re-mained an only child and a motherless one forseveral years until when his father marriedElizabeth Babcock Reynolds of Oswego, N.Y.She and Charles had one son, Charles R. Benton.At least for some of the time, Boyd was broughtup by his maternal grandmother. He learned torely on himself during those years, and becameincreasingly independent (g. ).

In , Boyd moved to Milwaukee, Wiscon-sin, to join his father who was by then the editor

and part owner of the Milwaukee Daily News .Boyd, at the age of eleven, learned to set type inthe composing room of the paper. Charles Ben-tons former publisher in Little Falls, Josiah A.Noonan, also moved to Milwaukee during thistime, became a partner in a paper mill, opened apaper warehouse, and also established whatcame to be the Northwestern Type Foundry.

Around , Charles Benton was appointedregistrar of the land o ffice in LaCrosse, Wiscon-sin, by President Franklin Pierce, and held that

office until Abraham Lincoln was elected Presi-dent in . Charles Benton had actually beenconsidered as a candidate for the presidency inthe Democratic convention, but lost thenomination to Stephen Douglas. In he wasa candidate for Congress on the Democraticticket, and, while he had no hopes of winningthe election in the highly Republican sixth dis-trict of Wisconsin, he did carry LaCrosseCounty. After this, Charles took up farming inWest Salem, Wisconsin, and later in Galesburg,Illinois, until , when he returned toLaCrosse.

Because his family moved so often, Boyd Ben-tons education was somewhat unusual. After at-tending schools in Little Falls and Milwaukee, hewas sent to Galesville College in Galesville, Wis-consin, and later studied Latin, Greek, and otheradvanced subjects for about two years with a pri-vate tutor in LaCrosse. Determined not to betaught from books all day, Boyd arranged withhis tutor to teach him in the mornings; if they nished their lessons, Boyd could do as hewanted in the afternoons.

Boyd liked to work with the local tombstonemaker, learning to design letters and cut them in

stone. Evidently, he was not particularly apt. Hismistakes had to be chiseled o ff , the tombstonessmoothed down, and the work started over, allpaid for out of Boyds own money. He later toldhis granddaughter that he never earned any cashmoney because he ruined so many tombstones,though he did learn a lot about letters.

When a jeweler settled in LaCrosse, BoydBenton decided to leave the tombstone businessto study jewelry repair. Detail and accuracy be-came very important to young Boyd as helearned to remake watch parts. His mechanicalaptitude became obvious when the jeweler gavehim a piece of gold that Boyd fashioned in hisspare time into a tiny model steam engine thatactually ran. The jeweler was so pleased that heput the steam engine on display in the windowof his shop.

After completing his education, Boyd appar-ently went back to Milwaukee to work again atthe Daily News . But instead of exploiting Boydstalents, his employer used him mainly as an er-rand boy. Another contemporary account hasBoyd learning to print in the o ffice of Charles

Fig. . Linn Boyd Benton in his last formal portrait. Published in the August, , issue of The Inland Printer .


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Seymours LaCrosse Republican, and then leav-ing to work as a bookkeeper for a leather housein the same town.

In any event, Boyd must have had some ac-counting training because in he became thebookkeeper for Josiah Noonans NorthwesternType Foundry in Milwaukee. Soon after, Boydwas promoted to buyer for Noonans warehouse.

One summer night while out for a walk, Boydheard the lovely music of banjos and mandolinsbeing played by several young women as they saton the steps outside one of their homes. Stop-ping to enjoy the music, he quickly recognizedone of the young women as Jessie ElizabethDonaldson, a friend from his youth whom hehad rst met in a dancing class but had not seenin years. Following a romantic courtship, Boydand Jessie were married in Milwaukee in .

Perhaps because he had been an only child foreleven years, Boyd longed to have a large family.Jessie, too, wanted many children. Their planswere altered, however, when Jessies rst childwas delivered in a breech birth. Boyd sworenever to put her through such an experience

again, and so Morris Fuller Benton, born on No-vember , , was to be their only child (g.). He was named after Boyds maternal grand-

mothers brother, Morris E. Fuller.Josiah Noonan went bankrupt in the panic of

, enabling Boyd and a partner namedCramer to purchase Noonans type and elec-trotype foundry. Years later Boyd lamented thatif he had known anything about typefounding atthe time, he would have thrown the entire plantinto the lake as a measure of economy! Instead,he went on to master that di fficult art andchange it dramatically with a series of importantimprovements and inventions.

In Cramer sold his half-interest in thetype foundry to Lieutenant-Commander FrankM. Gove, a man who knew nothing about thefoundry business but who would prove to be amost successful and popular salesman for therm. The new partners changed the name of therm to Benton, Gove and Company. While Govehandled the business end, Boyd Benton learnedeverything he could about manufacturing typein a highly competitive market.

Many years later, in , Henry Lewis Bullen,

the historian and publicist for the AmericanType Founders Company, described this periodof Boyds life in an article for The Inland Printer :

Before Gove died, Benton had completed his self-instruction in typefounding and found himself onthe most intimate terms with decimal fractionsand measurements of ten thousandths of an inch.He had and still has a mania for accuracy to thevanishing point, not only knowing, as the bookstell us, that a hot breath impinged on a small pieceof steel changes its dimensions, but actually takingthat solemn fact to heart, grieving that it cannot beovercome. The bane of Bentons career has beenthe limitations of error which are made necessary by the disposition of all metals to refuse to resistmolecular action. What other mortals cheerfully accept as accuracy Benton regards as a calamity.

Bentons rst type-related patent was regis-tered in and described a multiple mold forcasting leads and slugs. Benton claimed that thismachine, with one man operating it, could castmore spacing material in a ten-hour day thanten men working the same period could turn outwith other methods. In the same year, Bentonbegan to work on a typesetting machine withautomatic justication. He devised a system,

The Bentons and Typemaking and ATF

Fig. . Morris Fuller Benton, ca. .


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based on his so-called self-spacing type, thatshortened the time required for justication by reducing the number of character widths in afont of type. Thus, printing type was cast for therst time to pre-determined widths.

Gove died in , and Benton sold a one-third interest to R. V. Waldo, a former wholesalegrocer who in time proved to be an ideal partner.Again the rms name changed, this time to Ben-ton, Waldo & Co.

Linn Boyd Benton continued to invent andperfect machines for his type foundry. By the foundry was using the rst version of a pan-tograph machine he invented for engraving steel

punches. Benton received a patent for the thirdversion in . He was becoming well known inthe printing industry, though his company wasnot as inuential as other foundries. The Sep-tember Inland Printer reported that Bentonwas an intelligent, entertaining, unostentatiousgentleman, a mechanical genius of whom [Mil-waukee] has every right to feel proud; . . . onesuch man is of more value to the community thanall of the brainless dudes to be found throughoutthe length and breadth of the country.

Though Benton spent much of his time devel-oping his business, he still made time for outsideinterests. He had a ne baritone voice and sangin a number of Milwaukee church choirs. Boydand Jessie also belonged to a singing society inMilwaukee, and performed in a number of Gilbert and Sullivan productions, as well asother light operas. An interest in music was alsocultivated in young Morris. He sang as a choir-boy, studied the violin, and later, like his mother,learned to play the mandolin.

As Boyd had learned to set type at age elevenwith the help of his father, so Morris Fuller Ben-ton spent time in his youth working at his ownprinting press in the familys home on WellsStreet in Milwaukee. When he was eleven, Mor-ris designed and printed admittance tickets forchildrens music classes, tickets for neighbor-hood shows, receipts for work he did for his fa-ther, and booklets of riddles. He also printed aparody of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star andnamed it To an Electric Light.

Morris was not a strong boy and su ff eredthrough a variety of childhood ailments, includ-ing scarlet fever. As a result of Morriss poorhealth, his doctor recommended that he be

moved away from Lake Michigan. So the family moved to the west of Milwaukee to Wauwatosa,and Morris again set up a workshop for hisprinting and photography.

The relocation took its toll on the social lifethat Boyd and Jessie had enjoyed so much inMilwaukee. The city was several hours by horseand buggy, and the last train left Milwaukee tooearly in the evening for the Bentons to attend thetheater. Calling upon the same inventivenessthat he brought to his business, Boyd quickly found a solution to the dilemma. Boyds grand-daughter Caroline recalled: My grandfatherand two or three buddies decided to buy a train

from the Milwaukee railroad. Running an en-gine and one car, the young entrepreneurs couldtake their friends to Milwaukee to see all theshows and other evening activities that inter-ested them, and leave the city just before mid-night. The enterprise was so successful that they bought a second car, and then a third. At the endof the year the railroad bought back the train.

In September , at the age of twenty, Mor-ris left Milwaukee for Cornell University inIthaca, N.Y. He was older than most of his fellow

students because of the school time lost to child-hood illnesses. Morris did not intend to followhis father into the typefounding business and,when he rst matriculated at Cornell, was stillopen-minded about his career. Only later did hedecide to study mechanical engineering, per-haps because he realized he had a knack for it.

One thesis requirement was to work for partof a semester at a machine shop. Morriss assign-ment was to choose a piece of machinery in theshop, draw blueprints of it, and then build amodel. While at Cornell he also designed a can-non, built a model of it out of brass, and, for years afterwards, red it every fourth of July.

Morriss best grades were in mechanical draw-ing, but he had trouble with the language re-quirement. Caroline remembers her father re-calling his struggle with French: He kept goingin to take the test in French. Hed bone up on itand hed go in he only had to have a readingknowledge, I think . . . And nally, senior year, hehad his thesis all written (and he had a littletrouble on that the professor lost the thesis,and had to give him a grade o ff the top of hishead) but nally, the French professor said,Ive seen too much of you. You bone up once



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more and come in and well see what we can do.So he went in and took it once more and [theprofessor] gave him a passing grade. Morrisgraduated in June , having taken prizes infreehand drawing, mechanical drawing, andmachine shop work.

* * *In , just as Morris was entering Cornell,

twenty-three American type foundries includ-ing the Benton, Waldo rm merged to form theAmerican Type Founders Company, or as itsoon came to be called. For the rst few chaoticmonths after the merger, the elder Bentons re-mained in Milwaukee, but it soon became evi-dent that Boyds genius and experience were re-quired in New York where the new company haddecided to situate its o ffices. Boyd moved hisfoundry to New York in , but left Waldo inMilwaukee to handle a sales office. He also heldonto his house on Wells Street. Morris was incharge of renting out the Wells Street house andspent a few summer vacations away from Cor-nell, looking after the family property. When the

time came several years later to sell the house,Morris handled most of the arrangements.

A few months after Morris graduated fromCornell, he became his fathers assistant at .He designed machines and began to learn abouttypefaces. On September , , after a three- year engagement, Morris Benton married EthelBottum, the daughter of Boyds patent attorney.

The young couple took up residence in asmall, somewhat dingy apartment on Staten Is-land, ten blocks away from the senior Bentons.Each morning, Morris and his father wouldmeet and take the ferry to New York City. Thefoundry was at that time on the southernmost

tip of Manhattan. Ethel was alone all day, andwhen her rst daughter, Elizabeth Boyd, wasborn the following year, she became terribly lonesome. Caroline explained, She didn t knowanybody, not a soul, on Staten Island. Shortly after the babys birth, the young family moved inwith Boyd and Jessie, who had recently bought alarge Victorian house at Central Avenue inThompkinsville, Staten Island. Another daugh-ter, Caroline, was born in (g. ). The twofamilies lived together on Staten Island for nine

years.After moved to Communipaw Avenue inJersey City, N.J., in , Boyd and Morris de-cided to leave Staten Island and move closer tothe company. They eventually chose Plaineld,N.J., for its schools and because it was famousfor its clean artesian well water. In Boydrented a home for the whole family, a large Vic-torian house at Crescent Avenue. About two years later he bought a house with three and ahalf acres of lawn and gardens at CrescentAvenue (g. ). Boyd had always wanted a largefamily, and both he and Jessie were pleased withthe three-generation arrangement (g. ).

Morriss interest in hobbies was as keen asever. He took color photographs and developedthem in his own darkroom on the third oor of the new house. The darkroom contained a worktable and a lathe, as well as equipment for exper-imenting with stereotypes. Morris also amusedhimself with target shooting, though he did notcare for hunting. He had inherited a collectionof some fourteen guns from his father-in-law,and he belonged to a local gun club. He kept hisguns, target records, and ammunition locked inhis darkroom. Morris kept the guns oiled and


Fig. . Mary Ethel Bottum Benton and her two daughters Elizabeth (left) and Caroline, ca. .


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cleaned, and later taught his daughters how toshoot at tin cans. The children had toy pan-tographs and Morris once electried a mechan-ical train for them, before electric trains werereadily available.

Music was an important feature of family life

in the Benton household, and both of Morrissdaughters were encouraged to study the piano.Very much like his father, who expected perfec-tion from mechanical parts, Morris often re-tuned the piano after the regular piano tunerhad left the house. Caroline recalled that he hadthe theory that every individual piano had cer-tain tonal areas which needed to be balancedwith extra care in the tuning.

He owned an Edison phonograph and, later, aVictrola, and loved to listen to Enrico Carusoand most classical music, except Brahms. Healso owned an Aeolian Orchestrelle, a pump or-gan with stops that Benton would manipulate toget the tone he wanted, while the paper roll tookcare of the notes. His daughter Elizabeth re-membered: He used to play Tannhauser, andmy little bed upstairs would rock!

Morris was a patient man, and explainedthings carefully to his daughters. He drew dia-grams on the paper tablecloth after dinner to il-lustrate points he was making and, when thetable was set with good linen, would use the saltand pepper shakers to represent in simple termssome complex piece of machinery.

Both Morris and Ethel loved the outdoors. He

was an avid gure-skater, and took the family tothe Adirondacks for vacations, where they would hike with map and compass. Caroline de-scribed one of her fathers foolproof methods fornding their way back: He would take red tagsand hang them on the trees, and then comingback, hed collect the tags again. Daughter Eliz-abeth recalled that he took slides of the family vacations and later would give slide shows backin Plaineld.

Boyd was more sociable than his son. Hisgrandchildren described him as a big, powerfulcharacter. He would often orate at the dinnertable, especially about politics. He was what peo-ple then called a single taxer who did not sup-port the income tax law, saying,Thats ter-rible! Its socialism. He would often slap thetable to make a point, startling his wife in theprocess.

Morris channelled his own considerable driveand ambition into careful and conscientiouswork. Prior to coming to New Jersey, Morris hadhelped his father to further develop the punch-and matrix-engraving machines, in addition tohis work on other typefounding equipment.Throughout his career, Morriss lack of preten-

Fig. . The Bentons house in Plaineld, N.J., at Crescent Ave., ca. .Photograph by Morris Fuller Benton.

Fig. . Linn Boyd Benton wrote this letter inthe outline of a dog to his six-year-old grand-daughter Caroline on July .


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sion won him considerable respect in the com-pany, even if accounts of his achievements didnot reach far beyond Jersey City. According toCaroline, he was never adequately compensatedfor his many contributions to .

Caroline remembered the two Bentons con-sulting over some of the later inventions.[They] would talk things over sometimes, [but]not at the [dinner] table. Grandpa would say,Oh, Morris, before you go upstairs, Id like toask you something. And they would go into ahuddle together and discuss [it]. . . . After my grandfather died I [asked] my father aboutworking on one of the recent machines grandpa

had perfected, and I said, Did you work on thattoo? And he said, Oh, yes. And then I saidWell, you had a mechanical engineering degree,did you work on the others? And he said, Ithink I worked on practically all of them.

Morris Fuller Benton had become s chief type designer in . Painstakingly researchingeach new typeface idea, Morris studied the mar-ket to determine what sort of face was needed.Richard Marder, whose grandfather JohnMarder was one of the original founders of ,

remembered seeing Benton in the companysrenowned typographic library on Saturdays,which then were half workdays for employees. Iused to spend a lot of my time on Saturdays in thelibrary. . . . [Bentons] inspiration came from thatlibrary. Thats one of the reasons it was created.

About the time that Morris Bentons greatCentury Schoolbook typeface was making itsdebut, he endured a personal tragedy that madehim even more reticent. On March , , hiswife Ethel died suddenly of an infection after anoperation. She was only forty-two years old, andher death was a shock to the family. Shortly afterEthels death, Morris shared some thoughts withCaroline. [He said that] life divided itself upinto compartments, and they didnt necessarily follow through, they cut o ff , . . . . He just felt thatone [had] ended, and he was very, I wouldnt say that he was philosophical, but he did accept thefact that the facts were the facts. He had to makea new life.

In , Morris married Katrina Ten EckWheeler, his second cousin on his fathers side of the family. She was thirty-one at the time,twenty years younger than Morris. They movedout of the big white house in Plaineld to an

apartment about half a block away and re-mained there for seven years.

In the mid- s Morriss health su ff eredagain with the onset of serious stomach ulcers,which probably [were caused by] coping withGrandpa, Caroline explained, because Grand-pa wasnt as sweet and lovable as he had beenwhen he was younger. The added pressures atwork also took their toll. If things didnt goright at the foundry, then he [Morris] was theone that had to straighten them out, Carolineexplained, and there were times when he was sotired, he would just have bread and milk forsupper.

To other observers, Boyds advancing age only found him more a ff able. In , when Boyd wasseventy-eight years old, Henry Lewis Bullenwrote, Mr. Benton outdoes his youthful years inhumor and geniality. An observant man, he hasaccumulated a great fund of genial anecdotes.Bullen also noted that Boyd Benton retained asardent an interest . . . in every detail of type-founding as ever he had when confronting itsmost difficult problems in earlier years. He [per-mitted] nothing to interfere with a most punc-

tual attention to his duties, though these [were]largely self-imposed. His character, accordingto Bullen, was beyond reproach. In theAmerican Printer described Boyd Benton as oneof those men, quietly doing their days work,who have had a tremendous inuence on theAmerican printing industry.

Boyd loved working his friends were atand his social life revolved around the company.He did not have the same interest in hobbies,sports, and the outdoors that his son had, so heput off thoughts of retirement, even though hiseyesight became worse and worse. In , whenhe was eighty-six years old, he received a patentfor an important improvement in the largerprinting types used in newspaper headings.

On September of the same year, Jessie Ben-ton died at the age of eighty-four. Boyd missedher greatly. Caroline remembered: He wouldstand at the dining room table and bring his stdown, saying, Damnable! Ive lost my littledoll!

After his mother died, Morris and Katrinamoved back to the big white house with Boyd.The two men continued to go to work togetherevery day. Caroline recalled, Papa said, [Boyd]



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would come into the foundry and all hell wouldbreak loose everything had to be just so. . . .Thats the trouble when you work til youre , you know, somebody has to help you. And youknow who did it. But Caroline stressed thatMorris remained very patient with his father,and very sweet.

Linn Boyd Benton retired from his position asmanager of s general manufacturing depart-ment on July , . He died suddenly on July of a cerebral hemorrhage.

The minutes of the directors meeting forOctober , included the following state-ment:

: That the Directors of the AmericanTypefounders Company place upon record theirsorrow and deep sense of loss to themselves per-sonally and to the Company in the death of

, who has been a member of theBoard of Directors since its rst organization in

, a period of forty years.Devoting his great natural genius of invention

exclusively for the advantage of this Company from the time, forty years ago, he became a Direc-tor of the Company, and Manager of its GeneralManufacturing Department, Mr. Bentons inven-tions revolutionized the typefounding art andcraft, and placed the Company in a position of leadership, to the great advantage of the Company and the printing industry which it serves. Thesebenets have been, from the beginning, of incal-culable value. These benets will continue as longas the indispensible art of typography survives.

Those engaged in the arts of typography throughout the world have acknowledged Mr.Bentons genius, and the resulting benets. ThisCompany has benetted by his prestige. No otherman connected with the Company has served it

more valuably than our late departed friend.As a Man Mr. Benton endeared himself to us by his modesty, his delightful humor, and his probity in all matters, intellectual and material. He wasever faithful to his conscience and also to thisCompany and the Board of Directors, who wereconscious of the honor of being associated with sogreat and ne a Man.

The Directors respectfully present this appreci-ation of the Man and his character and genius tohis Family in profound sympathy with theirgrief.

Other lengthy obituaries appeared in thePlaineld Courier-News , the American Printer ,

and The Inland Printer , which printed the fol-lowing testament: In recognition of the benetsshowered upon the industry through the geniusof this great gure, some of whose achievementsare here recorded, the seat of honor, as it were, inthis issue is given over to his most recent por-trait. Turn to the frontispiece . . . , study thekindly, intelligent features, recognize that heworked to benet you even after years of prac-tical blindness until past eighty-eight, and re-member him as one of the truly great in the in-dustrys march of progress. The Editor.

Morris Benton remained at for anotherve years after his fathers death, but it was a

difficult period for the company. Already in thes, prots had begun to decline, and the sbrought a brush with bankruptcy. Caroline at-tributed some of s problems to a lack of planning management seemed unwilling togroom successors for the companys ageing exec-utives. Everyone was getting old, she said, andI think that was the trouble. . . . It was very short-sighted not to take in younger men andtrain them, and they didnt. They were satisedwith getting their prots.

In , at the age of sixty-ve, Morris Bentonretired from the American Type Founders Com-pany. He apparently maintained few contactswith the rm, because in an August , , letterto Ben Lewis, he stated, I have denitely retiredfrom business and am no longer connected withthe A.T.F.

In , after Jessie and Linn Boyd Benton hadbeen dead for several years, Morris and Katrinabought a house on Long Hill Road in Milling-ton, N.J., about six miles from Plaineld, andsold the White Elephant. Their new house in-cluded a large landscaped area on a slope and alovely view on three sides. Morris loved the LongHill Road house since, according to his daughterCaroline, it was the one home he could truly callhis own. Though advised by his doctor that hisrecurrent ulcers required treatment and possibly surgery, Morris nevertheless resisted exposinghimself to the same risk that had taken his rstwife.

Morris enjoyed the remaining nine years of his life, spending summer vacations at a cottageon Beaver Lake, N.J. Like his father, he off eredpolitical advice, cautioning daughter Caroline to


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pattern is right, then the more accurate and pre-cise the machine, the more perfect the reproduc-tion of the designers art.

Preliminary ResearchBefore Morris Benton began to draw a new type-face, he studied the historic exemplars in sextensive typographical library. Even when hewas designing a completely modern face, Bentonrst conducted extensive research. He believedthat gathering thorough background informa-tion for a new face was an essential part of thedesigners job. Benton studied original type-founders specimen sheets, as well as books in-

cluding incunabula printed in a wide variety of typefaces. Many of these resources were lo-cated in s splendid library and museum.

The Drawings Morris Benton and his colleagues began withpencil drawings, which would then be inked-infor evaluation. These would be used to get asense of what the letters would look like.

An original drawing could be of any size, butpreferably was -point or larger. Some faces be-

gan life as just one word: Balloon Light and Ex-trabold, for example, both originated from theword .

Every year received hundreds of proposedtype faces from enthusiastic letterers. The origi-nal drawings they provided could seldom beused as working drawings because independentdesigners rarely realized the complexities of thetype manufacturing process. Most designs hadto be redrawn to conform to technical limita-tions and peculiar word combinations. For ex-ample, Bertram Goodhues drawings for Chel-tenham were not directly translated intopatterns for cutting matrices upon reception by

s design department. Morris Benton rsthad to adapt them to the appropriate specica-tions for typecasting.

Some designers were prepared to make theslight design changes that were needed to com-pensate for the di ff erent sizes of a face. D. B. Up-dike, for example, wrote that a design for a typealphabet that may be entirely successful for thesize for which it is drawn, cannot be successfully applied to all other sizes of the same series. Eachsize is a law unto itself, and is often bettered by modications in the original design made by the

feeling and taste of the designer. The concept can be illustrated easily by reduc-

ing -point type, for example, to nine or tenpoints. The serifs will start to disappear, thecounters may begin to close up, and conse-quently the letters will lose their appeal. Thoughtype designers understood the concept of opticalscaling, a article in The Inland Printer stated, The belief is widespread that a type faceoriginates by some designer submitting thedrawing of an alphabet to the founder who . . .then proceeds to photograph it to the varioussizes to make up a series. This was far from thecase. The original drawings were simply the

starting point for the design department.The Delineating Apparatus The next step in type production was to get thecharacters to an appropriate size for making pat-terns. Each drawing for a typeface was placed ina special delineating machine invented by LinnBoyd Benton where an enlarged outline wasmade so large, in fact, that all errors could beeasily seen and corrected.

The delineating machine was a rened panto-

graph with a microscope attachment, enablingthe operator to enlarge or reduce a single char-acter very accurately. Bentons patent applica-tion for the machine was at rst rejected by theUnited States Patent O ffice on the grounds thatit described a mechanical impossibility! But af-ter a demonstration on an delineating ma-chine that had been in operation for severalmonths, the patent was promptly granted.

The face of the microscope attached to the de-lineator held two single laments of silk, crossed

in the center of the focal point. Directly beneaththe focal point, a small bed or plate held thecharacter, clamped in place. The larger bed of the machine held a sheet of paper under the pan-tographs tracing point, which for enlarging op-erations held a small pencil. The cross-hairs of the microscope were focused on the outline of the character being traced. Then the operator,looking through the microscope, followed theoutline of the design by moving the pencilholder and, in so doing, traced an enlarged out-line of the character.

The bed of the holder on which the originalcharacter was clamped could be swiveled to any angle, thereby changing the style of the letter to


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vote for Wilkie, not Roosevelt, in the presi-

dential election. He was, claimed an Octoberletter to her that year, rmly and completely convinced that another four years of FDR[would] be the nish of the U.S. A few years af-ter the election he wrote, The doctor says thereis nothing the matter with me; but the multitudeof complications of the present times gets my goat easier than it would twenty years ago.

Morris Benton died of an embolism after abrief illness on June , , in All Souls Hospi-tal in Morristown, N.J., at the age of seventy-ve.

He had smoked heavily and, said Caroline, if hehadnt had an ulcer he probably would have hadlung cancer.

Brief obituaries of Morris Benton appeared inThe New York Times and The Inland Printer and,in each case, dwelled for a precious sentence ortwo on his fathers importance to the type-founding industry.

The two Bentons, in separate and equally im-portant ways, revived a moribund industry.Morriss outstanding program of type designhelped the American Type Founders Co. denenew markets for itself in the advertising commu-

nity, making its loss of body type sales to theLinotype and Monotype machines less painful.Linn Boyd, for his part, raised the standards of typemaking to levels that made type ad-mired throughout the world. Though the com-pany itself is no longer in business, much of itsBenton-designed or modied machinery wassaved from the scrap heap and still carries on itsprecision duties.

* * *How Type Was Made at ATF

In December , the American Machinist mag-azine published an article by W. J. Kaup on the

American Type Founders Company, noting thatthe making of type is an art where the littlethings, measured in fractions of a thousandth of an inch, are the big things as exemplied by [ ], whose system makes each small step a re-nement link in the whole chain of microscopicaccuracy. This accuracy was what both LinnBoyd and Morris Fuller Benton demanded of themselves and others. Father and son were per-fectly suited to this type of work, and the resultsthey achieved were phenomenal.

One of s advertising devices, used as early as , was a piece of type on which was cast theentire Lords Prayer: sixty-six words, made up of

characters, including punctuation. On aneight-point version of the Lords Prayer, thelower case letters were . " in height; the ma-trix was cut by a tool measuring . " in diam-eter and its area was constrained to a six-pointsquare, that is, a square measuring / th of aninch on each side. Amazingly, the words are en-tirely legible under a microscope (g. ).also cast and distributed another version of theLords Prayer on a -point body.

The microscopic detail of this advertisingpiece was made possible by Linn Boyd Bentonsgreatest invention: the matrix-engraving ma-chine. But an accurate matrix engraver would beof little use if the design of the type was not alsoprecise. And type design was Morris Bentons job he oversaw the design department atwith a zeal and passion for quality that equaledhis fathers. As independent type designer Fred-eric W. Goudy said, The machine itself may behard and uncompromising, but its product isentirely within the control of the pattern if the

Fig. . Microphotograph of the Lords Prayer cast on the end of an -point piece of type. The matrix was cut so that the text would be right-reading. This exhibition of the precision of Bentons matrix engraving machine was used for advertising purposes. (Photo credit, Sheila Donnelley).


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wide, narrow, back slope or italic, both the italicand back slope being produced through thecombination of angles, explained Kaup in theAmerican Machinist (g. ).

In his essay The Making of Type, LinnBoyd Benton noted that, with the aid of the de-

lineating machine, the operator, besides beingable to produce an accurately enlarged outlinepencil tracing of a design, is also enabled, by var-ious adjustments, to change the form of the pen-cil tracing in such a manner that it becomes pro-portionately more condensed or extended, andeven italicized or back-sloped.

The resulting enlarged outline drawing wasnormally made about ten inches high, and thedesigner now evaluated it. Judging an enlargedletter and visualizing it in a text size requiredconsiderable skill. Inevitably the drawings of anindependent letter designer not thoroughly trained and experienced in typemaking alwayshad to be adjusted by a trained specialist. Be-lieve me, it isnt easy, Richard Marder ex-plained.

The enlarged outline drawings were modiedto meet the limits of the standard lining andpoint systems, and from there went back to thedelineating machine. This time, however, themicroscope attachment was removed, and asmall pencil arm was attached to trace a small-scale outline of the letter by moving the longarm pencil over the large outline. The operatorreduced the design to a practical size, say, -

point or less. This reduced outline was inked in,giving it the appearance of a sharp impressionfrom a piece of type. A solid letter so made lentitself more readily to further evaluation. If thereduced image was not satisfactory, the ten-inchoutline drawing was again altered, and the

process was repeated until the letter was ap-proved.Thus the delineator was used both to enlarge

and reduce characters. If the original drawingscame in very large, the process was simply re-versed, rst reducing the image and inking it in,and then making the appropriate ten-inch out-line drawings. The focal length of the delin-eators magnier could be changed to meet therequirements of the changes in the size of theletter.

Design Considerations The three-dimensional nature of type imposedlimitations on its design. Hairlines and serifshad to be well supported to prevent breakage.Counters had to be deep enough, especially inthe smaller sizes, to prevent being lled up withink and paper dust during printing. In short, de-signers had to consider a number of mechanicalfactors in designing practical, useable type.

Working Drawings

Before nal drawings were released by the designdepartment, they were worked and reworkedmany times. The delineating machine enabled a

Fig. . The delineating machine. A, tracing point; B, ngers for clamping the pattern character; C, bed plate show-ing angle possibilities. Note that the character shown is clamped at an angle, enabling the operator to produce a

condensed version of the original. (Redrawn from an illustration in the American Machinist, December .)


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designer to reduce the original ten-inch outlinedrawings to various sizes and study them with-out the expense of actually casting the type.Thus adjustments could easily be made at thedrawing stage for di ff erent type sizes.

The approved traced outline of a characterwas used to make its actual working drawing. If the designer wanted a vertical line to be perfectly straight, for example, he would use a straightedge on the working drawing. Each such draw-ing was marked with measurements that wouldbe helpful during later processes.

The Pattern

Once the ten-inch working drawings were ap-proved, the next step was to create a pattern platefor each character. These were made either inwax and then electrotyped, or directly in metal,depending on whether a punch or a matrix wasrequired. Another Linn Boyd Benton panto-graph machine was used to make the patterns(g. ). Henry Lewis Bullen called one early ver-sion Bentons Wax Plate Machine.

If a punch was required, the pantograph ma-chine was tted with a glass or brass plate coated

with wax. The operator used a follower totrace the ten-inch outline drawing, while thecutting tool engraved a smaller outline of thischaracter entirely through the wax. The charac-ter was reduced in this process to about a third of the working drawings size, or about " high.

A thin layer of copper was electrically de-posited on the plate, which was then backed upwith metal, trimmed, and nished. The resultwas now called the pattern; it had a raised out-line image, and was ready to be used on Bentonspunch cutting machine.

Pattern plates to be used for matrix engravingwere of lead or zinc into which the characterswere incised. Later, copper electro wax shells(backed with lead) were done by outside con-tract. During the war materiels shortage years of

, Gorton-engraved brass plates wereused; after photoengraved zinc plates wereused. When the plant in Elizabeth, New Jer-sey, closed in , many hundreds of such pat-terns were scattered helter-skelter over tablesand cabinets.

Matrices of all the regular type sizes could becut from these pattern plates. As Linn Boyd Ben-ton explained in The Making of Type, the pat-

tern determined the shape of the letter, but itssize and any design variations from the patternwere determined later by means of adjustmentson the engraving machine.Engraving a Matrix

While still in Milwaukee, Benton had invented apantographic machine to cut punches fromwhich matrices would be struck and used to castthe self-spacing types sold by Benton, Waldo& Co. The matrix engraver was an adaptation of the punch-cutting machine and was developedin the early s when decided that engrav-ing directly into a matrix blank was more practi-

cal than either cutting a punch or cutting amodel from which new matrices could be grownelectrolytically.

The matrix engraver consisted of two hous-ings between which a long pendulum swung(g. ). The pendulum was suspended, as de-scribed in the American Machinist , in a com-pound yoke by means of gimbal screws whichgave it a toggle-joint eff ect. The free end of thispendulum could be moved all around a pattern,which was placed on the bed of the machine, di-

rectly in front of the operator. Matrices could becut for di ff erent point sizes of a given type designsimply by adjusting the reproduction ratio be-tween the pattern and the cutting tool.

The nickel brass matrix blank was xed in a jigand inserted into the cutting platform of the en-graver; there it was held fast by a thumbscrewabove the operators head. This blank orplanchet became the matrix after the cuttingprotocol was completed. Minute cutters, spin-ning in ball-bearing races within the quill as-sembly, cut the character step by step.

The quill, or the head which housed the cut-ting tool, was perhaps the most highly developedpart of the engraving machine. The steel is spe-cially selected and machined and then laid away for three or four months for seasoning or adjustment of the various strains inherent in allsteels, the American Machinist explained. Only after such time was it tted into its guides. Theallowable tolerance in the construction of thishead was within . ".

There were three kinds of cutting tools, eachused in turn to engrave the matrix: the rst orroughing cutter (also used to cut the counter ar-eas of a character); the medium tool; and, third,



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Fig. . The wax-plate delineator. D, tracing point inverted; E, frame for holding plate. (Redrawn from an illus-tration in the American Machinist, December .)

Fig. . The matrix engraving machine. F, pendulum; G, yoke; H, quill; I, exible shaft drive; J, matrix; K, microme-ter adjustment; L, follower. (Redrawn from an illustration inthe American Machinist, December .)


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the nishing tool. When Theodore LowDeVinne described Bentons earlier punch-cut-ting machine, he was especially impressed withthe precision of the cutting tools: The cuttingtools are exceedingly minute, but they are madewith the nicest accuracy, and are rotated at highspeed by steam power.

Once in place, the cutting tool was driven by aexible shaft spinning at a speed of , to

, revolutions per minute. The dimensionof the facet of the cutting edge of each tool var-ied from . " to . " in width (dependingon the amount of metal to be removed). Thelargest was used to rough out the major portion

of the design, while the smallest was used for n-ishing.A follower was inserted in the taper-end collet

of the pendulum, and used by the operator totrace around the edges of the pattern. Therewere large followers which t into a ball-endshank, and smaller, nisher-followers with ta-pered shanks to t the collet. The American Ma-chinist described the precision required to cut anaccurate matrix: a light spring in tensionagainst the end of the pin holds the follower al-

ways in position. The size of the follower is in di-rect ratio with the size of the tool, as for exam-ple, the pendulum arm with a ratio of to ,using a tool with a . -inch face, would re-quire a follower ten times as large, or . -inchdiameter.

The operator guided the follower along theinside edges of the pattern, while simultaneously the cutting tool above cut the outline of thecharacter on the matrix. The matrix moved inunison (but at a proportionately reduced scale)with the follower and was pushed against thexed tool in the cutting head assembly. Thework moved, not the cutting tool, which rotatedat high speed in place, perpendicular to the ma-trix blank. A rough character was made rst, andthe surplus metal removed. After an adjustment,another circuit of the pattern was made, reningthe incision and removing more metal. The op-erator also guided the follower/cutting tool overthe inner area of the pattern between the charac-ters outlines. Di ff erent tools were used for many successive cuts, and nally a nishing tool wasused to make the last precision cuts.

The operator periodically examined the cut-ting tools through a microscope, since the accu-

racy of the matrix depended to a large extent onthe accuracy of the cutting tools. So perfectly or-dered was the procedure that only if a tool wasdamaged was the resulting matrix faulty. Inthose cases where a tool edge was broken ordamaged, necessitating its removal in the middleof the operation, it was essential that somemeans of grinding or renewing the edge be avail-able to the operator, to ensure that the tool re-mained within proper tolerances.

Typically when faced with challenges of thiskind, Linn Boyd Benton invented a special ma-chine. In this case, he designed a device to grindthe cutting tools automatically and with extraor-

dinary accuracy when a gauge on the machinewas properly set. Any desired width of tool facecould thus be obtained.

The cutting tools, after being re-ground, wereinspected under a microscope. Across the cen-ter of the face or lens of the microscope, isarranged a ne scale reading in . of aninch, the American Machinist explained. This isabout half the thickness of a cigarette paper. Acutting tool looks like a heavy nail under this mi-croscope, and so the cutting tools could easily be

gauged by eye the . " tool covered lineson the scale, and the . " tool covered twolines.

The Benton engraving machine was hailed by type foundries around the world as a miracle of accuracy. Though Benton had leased out someof his early machines while still in Milwaukee, helater had to reacquire them as part of his hiringagreement with . In the early s, many companies copied its design for themselves. TheStempel foundry in Frankfurt, Germany, hadone, and most American composing machinemanufacturers used modied versions of it.

Cutting Slips At , engraving instructions, or cutting slipswere written out for each size of a typeface (g.

). These slips guided the engraving machineoperator in choosing the proper followers, cuttingtools, and precision steel adjustment standards.

Apparently Benton used such cutting slipsfrom the very beginning. An advertisementfor Bentons punch-cutting machine reads, Theoperator is provided with a card on which isprinted a series of numbers, corresponding withnumbers stamped on the followers, opposite



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which are a series of gures identical with gureson the micrometer. This card indicates to theoperator the order in which the di ff erent follow-ers should be used, and the number to which the

micrometer is to be set for each succeedingchange of follower.

Adjusting the Machine While the Benton matrix engraver could accu-rately reproduce the image on the pattern platein any type size, it was also capable of alteringthat image, deviating from exactly proportionalreproductions, when the operator so adjustedthe machine. Henry Lewis Bullen explained in

that it was capable of innitesimal grada-tions in all directions. Thus, Bentons matrixengraver could be adjusted to compensate forthe optical variables that occur when letter sizeschange.

Dr. James Eckman, an avid historian of Amer-ican type foundries, conrmed that such adjust-ments were made at . In the matrix-engrav-ing department of the American Type FoundersCompany, he wrote, I have seen, on the walls,great charts of trigonometric projections of curves for use in correcting aberrations pro-duced by magnication of letter forms from abeginning prototype of one size of a letter. Ithink there is, therefore, no doubt that bothBentons accepted and employed magnication

to obtain di ff erent sizes of a given design. Beatrice Warde, in an article on machine-cut

typefaces published in the Dolphin No. , men-tioned Bentons device in a footnote: [T]here

exists an ingenious mechanism by which a cer-tain amount of reproportioning can be done by adjusting the machine. Opinions di ff er as to thewisdom (from the designers point of view) of using the adjustment.

D. B. Updike was among those who were ap-prehensive of such machine adjustments. Inpoint of fact, he wrote in Printing Types , therst types produced by punch-cutting machinesdid seem to show a certain rigidity from thepoint of view of design. That there has been animprovement of late in type cut by machine isundeniable, and yet there has been practically nochange in its mechanism. This improvement, Ilearn, has come to pass through a more sympa-thetic and subtle manipulation of the machineitself, and by modications of rules by the eye of the workman who operates it. Updike con-cluded that the trained eye must remain the pri-mary judge of good design, and that machine al-terations must be made by operators with asense of good design.

Morris Benton used cutting slips to make cer-tain that s engraving machine operators pre-cisely and consistently adjusted the machine forevery point size. The operators were not permit-

Fig. . The ATF cutting slip for -point Bernhard Gothic Light. (Photo taken by author at ATF, November ).


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ted to deviate from the cutting slip specicationswhen preparing replacement blanks, thereby en-suring continuity and uniformity. The repro-duction tolerance for replacement work was

. ". Consulting the cutting slips, the opera-tors made the optical changes for the di ff erentpoint sizes based on previously determined cal-culations.

These adjustments are all established foreach size of each face on the cutting slips,Richard Marder explained. Precision steel stan-dards were used to adjust the machine to pro-duce either narrower than normal or wider thannormal matrices from the same pattern plate.

Linn Boyd Benton himself wrote: The adjust-ments are such that the operator is enabled toengrave the letter proportionately more ex-tended or condensed, and lighter or heavier inface, than the pattern. All these variations arenecessary for the production of a properly graded modern series containing the usual sizes.In fact, on account of the laws of optics, whichcannot be gone into here, only one size of a se-ries is cut in absolutely exact proportion to thepatterns.

For example, only the -point size of thetypeface News Gothic was cut exactly propor-tional to the pattern plate. Going down in size,the face was actually extended in width but notin height. Above -point, the letters were con-densed relative to the standard. On the otherhand, Richard Marder recalled that s Amer-ican Caslon, cut in sizes from - to -point, wasnot adjusted at all from size to size. Each size,then, was photographically proportional to thepattern plate.

In the s, the great contemporary type de-signer Hermann Zapf was designing type for theStempel foundry while it still used a Benton ma-trix engraver. He explained that the normalpractice at Stempel was to produce three sets of patterns for each typeface. Adjustments on themachine itself were only used to widen charac-ters in the very smallest point sizes.

Fitting, or JusticationThe adjusting of the matrix to the mould istechnically called tting, Linn Boyd Benton ex-plained, and requires great skill. If type is castfrom untted matrices, be the letters ever socleverly designed and perfectly cut, when assem-

bled in the printed page they will present a very ragged appearance. Some letters will appearslanting backwards, some be above the line, oth-ers below; some will perforate the paper, whileothers will not print at all; the distances betweenthe letters will everywhere be unequal, and somewill print on but one edge. Indeed, a single lettermay have half of these faults, but when the ma-trices are properly tted, the printed page pre-sents a smooth and even appearance.

So the unnished matrix went to a tter, whomade nal adjustments on yet another Bentoninvention, the matrix tting machine. Accordingto Richard Marder, the matrix as delivered

from the Benton engraving machine requiredvery precise trimming in order to place the en-graved letter cavity exactly central to the to-be-cast body and absolutely straight and on theproper baseline.

The tter had to know where the baseline of the type fell in relation to its set of matrices, aposition not always apparent when dealing withcharacters such as o or c. If all the letters wereplaced exactly on the types true baseline, they would appear to be bouncing up and down on it,

because letter combinations and shapes give riseto optical illusions. Deviations have to be madeto trick the eye into believing that all the lettersin a font of type sit on a common baseline. Theseirregularities cannot be systematized, but vary with each new alphabet design, and, to an ex-tent, with every size of a given design.

The left and right edges of the matrix deter-mined the set of the letter, or, how much spacewould appear around that letter when it wasplaced beside another character in the font. Asnew designs were readied for production, proofswere made for each letter in combination withevery other letter, and the results would be stud-ied for legibility and beauty. Certain letters, suchas H, O, o, and m, because of their shapes andproportions, were used as standards and printedbeside each character in the font to judge the set.

Casting s type was cast from a mixture of tin, anti-

mony, lead, and a small amount of copper. Themixture was proportioned so that, according toLinn Boyd Benton, the expansion of the anti-mony will practically counteract the shrinkageof other ingredients. In actuality, antimony



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does not expand but rather acts as a retardant inthe shrinking process of the alloy. The propor-tion of the mixture was even varied according tothe size and style of the type and the purposesfor which it would be used.

The casting machine was a marvel of engi-neering. Invented in by Henry Barth, presi-dent of the Cincinnati Type Foundry, the Barthautomatic type caster not only cast the type, butbroke off the jets, ploughed grooves to form thefeet, cut four trimmed edges on each type char-acter at the mold/matrix interface, and deliveredthem in lines ready for inspection. Soon after theformation of the American Type Founders

Company, Barth was made a director with hisson Henry O. Barth as assistant. After the seniorBarths death in , Linn Boyd Benton madeseveral improvements to the machine and re-ceived patents for them.

Each Barth machine at was set up to casta single body size. The matrices for a font of, say,

-point Cheltenham, were held rmly and ac-curately in turn against the Barth machines ad- justable mold, which allowed each charactersset width to be properly xed. After every cast,

the matrix was pulled away from the mold andthe type sent on its way to a series of nishingoperations.

Benton described the casting sequence thusly:The melted type metal is forced by a pump intothe mould and the matrix, and when solidied,the type is ejected from the mould and moved be-tween knives which trim all four sides. The type isdelivered side by side on a specially grooved pieceof wood, three feet long, called a stick, on whichthey are removed from the machine for inspec-tion. Type is cast at the rate of from one to twohundred and forty per minute, according to thesize, the speed being limited only by the time ittakes metal to solidify. To accelerate this, a streamof cold water is forced through passages surround-ing the mould, and a jet of cold air is blown againstthe outside.

An inspector then examined the type under amagnifying glass, and discarded any awed type.The perfect type was sent to the fonting room,where it was weighed, counted, and packaged forsale.

* * *

The story of the Bentons given here is far from

complete. Morris Fuller Benton spent his entireworking life at , while his father devotedsome forty years of his own career to the samecompany. Their inuence on the type-makingindustry was far-reaching and of a signicancestill not truly appreciated.

The author is grateful to Richard C. Marder, TheoRehak, and Dan Carr for reading and comment-ing on the the technical aspects of this article. She also wishes to express her sincere thanks to KarenReimringer, whose editorial expertise and encour-agement enabled this project to be resurrected after many years of dormancy.

Notes . Alexander Lawson, Morris Fuller Benton Deserves More than

Obscurity, The Inland Printer/American Lithographer (October): .

. M. F. McGrew, The Bentons, Father & Son, Typographic i (March ): [ ].. Colonel Charles S. Benton Called from the Scene of Action,

[LaCrosse newspaper, ca. May ].. Henry Lewis Bullen, Linn Boyd Benton The Man and His

Work, The Inland Printer (Oct. ): .. James Eckman, The Immortal Century Type Face and the Ben-

tons, Father and Son, The Printers Digest (Nov. ): .. Henry Lewis Bullen, Discursions of a Retired Printer, No. VII,

The Inland Printer (Jan. ): .. Of Interest to the Craft, The Inland Printer (Sept. ): .. Caroline Benton Gregg, interview with author, Milwaukee,

March, . Subsequent recollections quoted in this article arebased on the same interview.. Richard C. Marder, interview with author, Plaineld and Eliza-

beth, New Jersey, November .. Bullen, Linn Boyd Benton, .. Little Life Stories of Live Men Known to the Printers of Amer-

ica. Linn Boyd Benton: Typefounder, Inventor, The AmericanPrinter (March , ): .. Hails Linn Bentons Type Invention as One of Greatest of Pres-

ent Era, Plaineld Courier-News , October .. Resolution recorded in the minutes of the American Type

Founders Company board meeting, October . (Typewrit-ten).

. J. L. Frazier, Achievements of Linn Boyd Benton Vital to In-dustrys Progress, The Inland Printer (August ): .

. W. J. Kaup, Modern Automatic Type Making, American Ma-chinist (December , ): .

. Frederic W. Goudy, Type Design: A Homily, Ars Typographica (Autumn ): .. Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms,

and Use (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), .. A. Raymond Hopper, Fitting: A Vital Step in the Perfection of

a Type Face, The Inland Printer (April ): .



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. Linn Boyd Benton, The Making of Type, in The Building of a Book, d ed. (New York: R. R. Bowker, ), .

. Theodore Low DeVinne, The Practice of Typography (NewYork: The Century Co., ), p. .

. American Type Founders Co., Bentons Punch Engraving Ma-chine. [Advertising brochure, n.d.], p. .

. Personal letter from James Eckman to the author, July , .

. Beatrice L. Warde, Cutting Types for the Machines: A Lay-mans Account, in The Dolphin ( ): .

. Updike, .

. Benton, .. Ibid., .

. Personal letter from Richard C. Marder to the author, May .

Documents

Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, and Typemaking at ATF