The aesthetic design of the Selectric was the responsibility of Eliot Noyes, an architect and industrial designer who served as consulting design director to IBM for 21 years. With the addition in 1964 of a magnetic tape system for storing characters, the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) model became the first, albeit analog, word-processor device. By making the golf ball interchangeable, the Selectric enabled different fonts, including italics, scientific notation and other languages, to be swapped in. Although it is not documented, it is believed that the Selectric name was inspired by adding this changeable typeface selection to an electric typewriter. One other innovation in the design-a changeable typeface-was borrowed from a turn-of-the-century model, the Blickensderfer typewriter.
The team members, according to a 1961 advertisement for the Selectric, “began their search by forgetting the past fifty years of typewriter design.” The first type head design had been shaped more like a mushroom, but under Beattie’s direction, IBM engineer John Hickerson revised the type head toward its ultimate spherical configuration.
The golf ball typing element was designed by an engineering team led by Horace “Bud” Beattie. And with no bars to jam, typists’ speed and productivity soared. The design eliminated the bane of rapid typing: jammed type bars. It took seven years to work out the manufacturing and design challenges before the first Selectric was ready for sale.Īt the physical heart of the Selectric typewriter’s innovation was a golf-ball-shaped type head that replaced the conventional typewriter’s basket of type bars. With 2800 parts, many designed from scratch, the Selectric was a radical departure even for IBM, which had been in the typewriter business since the 1930s and was already a market leader. For more than 25 years, the Selectric was the typewriter found on most office desks. And by 1986, more than 13 million Selectric typewriters had been sold. By the end of 1961, they had orders for 80,000.
The manufacturing facility expected to make 20,000 Selectric typewriters in its first year. USA Today in 1986 for a story about the typewriter’s 25th anniversary. We figured in our branch office that we’d sell 50 or 60 and sold 500 to 600,” IBM salesman John Vinlove told
“Sales of in the first 30 days exceeded the forecast for six months. The Selectric typewriter, launched in 1961, was an overnight hit.
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