Hasta La Ideas

This Sunday will be the 50th Anniversary of the launch date of IBM’s Selectric typewriter, a game-changing design that represented mid-century American manufacturing prowess brought to market with a one-two engineering-&-industrial-design punch. A team of engineers led by Horace “Bud” Beattie worked the guts while industrial designer Eliot Noyes is given sole credit for the overall form, his Olivetti influence notwithstanding.

The engineering team’s brilliant innovation was to get rid of the type bars. Prior to the Selectric, each typewriter’s key worked a dedicated bar that slammed its imprint in the center of the typing area. A split-second was needed between keystrokes so that a type bar returning to its resting position had time to clear the next outgoing bar. If a typist was too fast, the bars would contact each other and jam.

Beattie and his team replaced the bars with a spherical head imprinted all around with letters, a sort of “golf ball” that precluded any timing overlaps:

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