The Typewriter That Replaced 44 Bars With One Golf Ball

On July 31, 1961, IBM put a typewriter on sale that had no typebars. In place of the 44 hammers that swung up to strike the page on every other machine, the Selectric had a single chrome-plated plastic ball about the size of a golf ball. The ball tilted and rotated to the right character, then snapped forward against the ribbon. The carriage no longer moved; the ball did.

The element could be swapped in seconds, which meant one machine could type in multiple typefaces and even multiple alphabets — a capability the Hammond and Blickensderfer typewriters had pioneered in the 1880s and that IBM was effectively reviving for the office.

The industrial design came from Eliot Noyes. Thomas Watson Jr. had hired him in 1956 to invent IBM's house style; Noyes brought in Paul Rand for the logo, Charles Eames for the films, and Marcel Breuer for the buildings, and kept the consulting director job for the next 21 years. For the Selectric he started in 1959 with clay. He and his staff built mirrored half-models, sanding the curves until the housing read as one continuous piece — "something like the shape of a stone," he said, deliberately echoing the Olivetti work he admired.

The machine sold. By 1978, IBM's electric-typewriter market share had reached 94%, and a Selectric sat on most office desks in America for the next decade. The CIA, the FBI, and the State Department kept buying them into the 1990s for documents that nobody wanted on a network. The typeball outlasted the company that built it.