Linn Boyd Benton of USA
Born: Little Falls, New Jersey, 1844
Died: Plainfield, New Jersey, 1932
Late nineteenth century inventor of the pantographic punchcutting machine, patented in 1885, which altered the way in which letters were designed. With this device, for the first time, a single set of drawings could be traced to cut matrices at a wide range of sizes, without the skills of the punchcutter. Pure type design, as a profession of pen and paper, had begun; and with it scalable type, with its economically tempting compromise of using a single master design for all sizes, had arrived. The compromise has persisted through the phototype era to the present day, with a mere handful of digital typefaces available at more than one design size, despite Donald Knuth and the clever people at Adobe, Apple, Altsys and URW offering high-tech ways to overcome it.
Returning to the man who first offered the temptation, Linn Boyd Benton was also a type designer, and father of the prolific Morris Fuller Benton. He managed manufacturing at ATF from 1892 until 1932, the year of his death.
Fonts by Linn Boyd Benton
Century Expanded, Century Oldstyle, ITC Century Handtooled
Browse all fonts by Linn Boyd Benton
Activities
Type Design
Technology Invention
Punchcutting
Related Links
• APHA: The Bentons and Typemaking at ATF, by Patricia A. Cost [PDF]
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