Morris Fuller Benton
Encyclopedia
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), for which he was the chief type designer from 1900 to 1937. Benton was America's most prolific type designer, having completed 221 typefaces, ranging from revivals of historical models like ATF Bodoni, to adding new weights to existing faces such as Goudy Old Style and Cheltenham
Cheltenham (typeface)
Cheltenham is a display typeface, designed in 1896 by architect Bertram Goodhue and Ingalls Kimball, director of the Cheltenham Press. The original drawings were known as Boston Old Style and were made about 14" high. These drawings were then turned over to Morris Fuller Benton at American Type...
, and to designing original designs such as Hobo, Bank Gothic
Bank Gothic
Bank Gothic is a rectilinear geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton for the American Type Founders in 1930. The typeface is an exploration of geometric forms, and is contemporary with the rectilinear slab serif typeface City by Georg Trump...
, and Broadway
Broadway (typeface)
Broadway is a decorative typeface, perhaps the archetypal Art Deco typeface. The original face was designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1927 for ATF as a capitals only display face. It had a long initial run of popularity, before being discontinued by ATF in 1954. It was re-discovered in the Cold...
. Benton's large family of related neogrotesque sans-serif
Sans-serif
In typography, a sans-serif, sans serif or san serif typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....
typefaces, known as "gothics" as was the norm at the time, includes Alternate Gothic, Franklin Gothic
Franklin Gothic
Franklin Gothic and its related faces are realist sans-serif typefaces originated by Morris Fuller Benton in 1902. “Gothic” is an increasingly archaic term meaning sans-serif. Franklin Gothic has been used in many advertisements and headlines in newspapers. The typeface continues to maintain a...
, and News Gothic
News Gothic
News Gothic is a realist sans-serif typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton, and released by the American Type Founders in 1908. The typeface was originally drawn in two lighter weights, a medium text weight using the title News Gothic, and a closely related light weight marketed under the name...
. These typefaces better anticipated and were more similar to later realist sans-serif
Sans-serif
In typography, a sans-serif, sans serif or san serif typeface is one that does not have the small projecting features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. The term comes from the French word sans, meaning "without"....
typefaces such as Helvetica
Helvetica
Helvetica is a widely used sans-serif typeface developed in 1957 by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann.-Visual distinctive characteristics:Characteristics of this typeface are:lower case:square dot over the letter i....
than the other early grotesque types of his contemporaries.
Technology
In addition to his strong aesthetic design sense, Morris was a master of the technology of his day. His father, Linn Boyd BentonLinn Boyd Benton
Linn Boyd Benton was an American typeface designer and inventor who invented the Benton Pantograph, 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...
, invented the 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...
ic 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...
). Morris worked on many of these machines with his father at ATF, during which these machines were refined to an impressive level of precision.
Theo Rehak
Theo Rehak
Theo Rehak is a typefounder and the author of Practical Typecasting , The Fall of ATF; a Serio-Comedic Tragedy and co-author of The Music and Life of Theodore "Fats" Navarro" . He is one of the few remaining craftsmen in the field of metal typefounding...
, the current owner of most ATF equipment and author of the definitive treatise "Practical Typecasting", explains that the Bentons demanded that any deviation in machining or casting be within two ten thousands of an inch. Most modern machine shops are equipped to measure down to a one thousandth inch variance. As an advertising device, in 1922 ATF manufactured a piece of type eight points tall containing the entire Lord's Prayer
Lord's Prayer
The Lord's Prayer is a central prayer in Christianity. In the New Testament of the Christian Bible, it appears in two forms: in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the discourse on ostentation in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the Gospel of Luke, which records Jesus being approached by "one of his...
in 13 lines of text, using a cutting tool roughly equivalent to a 2000 dpi printer.