Morris Fuller Benton (November 30 1872 – June 30 1948) was one of the most prolific and influential type designers in history, but is relatively little known today.
Morris was the chief type designer of the American Type Founders from 1900 to 1937, and designed a great many typefaces, ranging from revivals of historical originals (the famed ATF Bodoni series) to new faces of existing fonts such as Goudy and Cheltenham, to strikingly bold and original designs such as Hobo and Broadway. In addition, his "gothics" such as Franklin Gothic are much more similar to modern sans-serif fonts such as Helvetica than the crude, grotesque versions of his contemporaries.
In addition to his strong aesthetic design sense, Morris was a master of the technology of his day. His father, Linn Boyd Benton , invented the pantographic 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, which is the fundamental geometric operation of most systems of digital typography today, including PostScript). Morris worked on many of these machines with his father at ATF, during which these machines were refined to an impressive level of precision. As an advertising device, in 1922 ATF manufactured a piece of type eight points tall containing the entire Lord's Prayer in 13 lines of text, using a cutting tool roughly equivalent to a 2000 dpi printer.
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