Linn Boyd Benton was an American typeface designer and inventor who invented the Benton Pantograph

Pantograph

A pantograph is a mechanical linkage connected in a special manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen...

, an engraving machine which was capable not only of scaling a single font design pattern to a variety of sizes, but could also condense, extend, and slant the design. Mathematically, these are cases of affine transformation

Affine transformation

In geometry, an affine transformation or affine map or an affinity is a transformation which preserves straight lines. It is the most general class of transformations with this property...

, which is the fundamental geometric operation of most systems of digital typography today, including PostScript

PostScript

PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

.

Benton was joint owner of Benton, Waldo & Co. Type Foundry which became part of the original group of mergers forming the American Type Founders Company

American Type Founders

American Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...

 (ATF) in 1892, after which he was a director and chief consultant to ATF.

Benton invented many of the most important type founding technologies of the day, including a mould for casting (1882), self spacing type (1883), a punch cutter (1885), combination fractions (1895), a type dressing machine (1901), a matrix and punch-cutting machine (1906), and automatic type-caster (1907), and a lining device for engraving matrices of shaded letters (1913).

In 1894, at the commission of the publisher of the Century Magazine, Theodore Low De Vinne

Theodore Low De Vinne

Theodore Low De Vinne was an American printer and scholarly author on typography.De Vinne was born at Stamford, Connecticut, and educated in the common schools of the various towns where his father had pastorates. He developed the ability to be a printer while employed in a shop at Fishkill, New...

, he designed his only type-face, the original Century

Century Type Family

Century refers to a family of type faces derived from the original Century Roman cut by American Type Founders’ designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894. Despite originating in the nineteenth century, use of the typeface remains strong, for periodicals, textbooks, and literature...

. De Vinne wanted a blacker and more legible face than the typically thin type used before, and slightly condensed to fit the double-column format of the magazine. It was first used in 1895 and soon became enormously popular and many variations were later designed by his son Morris Fuller Benton

Morris Fuller Benton

Morris Fuller Benton was an influential American typeface designer who headed the design department of the American Type Founders , for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937...

.

Typefaces

• Century Roman
  Century Type Family
  Century refers to a family of type faces derived from the original Century Roman cut by American Type Founders’ designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894. Despite originating in the nineteenth century, use of the typeface remains strong, for periodicals, textbooks, and literature...
  
   (1894, ATF
  American Type Founders
  American Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
  
  )
• Century Roman Italic
  Century Type Family
  Century refers to a family of type faces derived from the original Century Roman cut by American Type Founders’ designer Linn Boyd Benton in 1894. Despite originating in the nineteenth century, use of the typeface remains strong, for periodicals, textbooks, and literature...
  
   (1894, ATF
  American Type Founders
  American Type Founders was a business trust created in 1892 by the merger of 23 type foundries, representing about 85% of all type manufactured in the United States...
  
  )

External links

• Linn Boyd Benton, Morris Fuller Benton, and Typemaking at ATF (PDF)