IBM engineers and researchers labored for seven years to bring the Selectric to life—and to the production lines at IBM’s US Electric Typewriter Division manufacturing plant in Lexington, Kentucky, and the international manufacturing plant in Amsterdam. Behind that development timeframe lay the painstaking engineering efforts that resulted in the suite of innovative functions and capabilities that the Selectric touted.
Marvelous mechanics
“A brilliant new technology in typing”
IBM’s archival video demonstration of the original Selectric slows the “golf ball” typing element for the camera and demonstrates how it “rotates, tilts, selects and types with cobra-like speed.”
Behind tilt and rotate
Engineer, professor and media personality Bill Hammack—also known as “the engineer guy”—digs into the ingenious tilt and rotate mechanism of the type ball in this short video.
An advertisement for the Selectric depicts the type ball’s multiple-font capabilities. The golf balI sports four rows of 22 reverse-image raised letters, numerals and punctuation symbols—88 characters total—molded to its surface. Uppercase letters are molded on one hemisphere of each ball, and lower-case on the other.
Innovations that built the Selectric
The “golf ball”
The “golf ball” typing element shown here—also known as the type ball and “the single printing element” for its one-piece form—was the linchpin invention powering the Selectric. Thomas Watson Jr. called it “the most totally distinct invention we’ve ever made as a company.” The type balI worked by revolving and tilting—according to the direction of a sophisticated mechanism—as it moved across the page. Each character had a binary code, one for tilt and one for rotate. Before settling on the spherical shape, IBM engineers had experimented with a mushroom-shaped type element.
Changeable type
The Selectric typewriter’s interchangeable type ball snapped in and out of place easily, allowing users to employ different fonts and special characters even within the same document. By using various type balls, a user could type in Hebrew (from right to left), Thai (left to right and up and down), modern and ancient Greek, Japanese phonetic Katakana, and many others. Type balls were even created for scientific notation and for labanotation, the standardized system of symbols used to record choreography. Before type balls, users needed a separate typewriter for each font
Jam-free typing
The Selectric typewriter’s type ball eliminated the need for the typebar basket that was a standard feature in typewriters of the time, and which was prone to jams like the one pictured here. Typebars became tangled when users struck more than one key at once, a frequent error for speedy typists. The type ball essentially eliminated jams.
The Selectric II
Introduced a decade after the original Selectric, the Selectric II would become the most popular of all Selectric models. It offered enhanced functionality through several new breakthrough features.
Breakthroughs of the Selectric II
Dual pitch
The dual-pitch lever of the Selectric II—positioned at the top left side of its body—allowed users to type in both 10 and 12 characters-per-inch size, essentially offering a rudimentary desktop publishing capability. The model also included an “express” backspace key that backed the type ball up by an entire line of type.
A self-correcting function
Another innovation of the Selectric II line was its correcting tape, available in the 1973 model. The tape was activated by a correction key on the bottom right of the keyboard. The key backspaced the carriage by one space and put the machine in correction mode, so that the next character typed would spool from the correction tape and not advance the carriage. The correction function—another key feature that presaged later word processing capabilities—was beloved by users, and eliminated the need for messy and time-consuming correction fluids.