Linn Boyd Benton

Who was Linn 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. Mathematically, these are cases of affine transformation, which is the fundamental geometric operation of most systems of digital typography today, including PostScript.

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 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, self spacing type, a punch cutter, combination fractions, a type dressing machine, a matrix and punch-cutting machine, and automatic type-caster, and a lining device for engraving matrices of shaded letters.

In 1894, at the commission of the publisher of the Century Magazine, Theodore Low De Vinne, he designed his only type-face, the original Century.