This Day in American History: IBM Introduces the Selectric Typewriter
- ForAmerica
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1961, IBM replaced a century of jamming, misaligned typewriters with a spinning "golf ball" and changed the American office forever.
Every typewriter since 1873 had worked the same basic way: a nest of individual type bars, one per character, swinging up to strike the ribbon, while a heavy carriage lugged the paper back and forth. It worked, but fast typists knew the tradeoff -- type bars jammed constantly, and a jarring carriage return could knock a whole line out of alignment. IBM set out to fix it, tasking a design team led by engineer Horace "Bud" Beattie, later refined by John Hickerson, with building something completely different.
The result, introduced on July 31, 1961, was the IBM Selectric. Instead of type bars, it used a single interchangeable, chrome-plated "typeball" -- quickly nicknamed the "golf ball" -- that rotated and tilted into position before striking the page, while a stationary carriage let the ball and ribbon glide across a paper roller that stayed put. Internally, the Selectric used mechanical binary coding and a pair of digital-to-analog linkages to figure out exactly how to spin and tip the ball for each keystroke -- a genuinely clever piece of pre-digital engineering credited to designer Eliot Noyes.
The machine was an immediate hit -- IBM had orders for 80,000 units by the end of 1961 alone -- and its swappable typeballs let offices switch fonts, languages, and scientific notation in seconds, something no ordinary typewriter could do. By 1978, the Selectric commanded 94% of the American electric typewriter market, and by the time production ended in 1986, IBM had sold more than 13 million of them. It remained the default machine on American office desks for a quarter century, and its underlying design work later helped pave IBM's path into word processors and personal computers.
Also on this day:
1790 -- President Washington signs the first U.S. patent, issued to Samuel Hopkins for a potash-making process.
1957 -- Ringo Starr makes his live debut at Liverpool's Cavern Club, years before joining The Beatles.
1964 -- The unmanned Ranger 7 space probe reaches the Moon, transmitting photos before impact.
1971 -- Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin become the first to drive a lunar rover on the Moon.
1978 -- Pete Rose ties Willie Keeler's 81-year-old NL record with a 44-game hitting streak.
A spinning golf ball replaced a century of jammed type bars -- and quietly ruled American desks for 25 years.
Source: IBM, Wikipedia. Typewriter photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
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