Retro Tech: The Selectric Typewriter

Eliot Noyes was IBM’s director of corporate design in the 1950s and 60s. An architect and designer, he was influenced by his mentors the Bauhaus masters Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.

He was also a visionary in that he commissioned innovative designers including Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames to work with IBM. So it is no surprise that the Selectric typewriter is an excellent example of America’s modernist movement.

The ‘type ball’ that moved across the page meant the typewriter – now electrified – no longer needed a sliding carriage.

This allowed Noyes to come up with a streamlined case for the design, one that would be tinkered with regularly until the 1980s when the Selectric would become the model for IBM’s early word-processors – a development that would signal the demise of the typewriter.

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