Grab yourself a cup of coffee and carve out half an hour to read this fascinating (and beautiful—the essay includes 600 gorgeous photographs) typography deep dive into the 150-year history of a ubiquitous font that you've certainly seen but never paid much attention to. Once you know to look for it, though, you'll notice it everywhere—it's on old keyboards and carved into innumerable metal, wood, and plastic signs. But, unless you're a typophile, you probably don't know its name: Gorton.
Author and photographer Marcin Wichary traces the font to the early 1900s, where it was the default font used in the pantograph engraving machines produced by the George Gorton Machine Co., based in Wisconsin. These engraving machines:
. . . allowed you to install one or more letter templates and then trace their shape by hand. A matching rotating cutter would mimic your movements, and the specially configured arms would enlarge or reduce the output to the size you wanted.
In the United States, Gorton was used in industry and military settings, in engravings on traffic control devices, elevators, escalators, trains, subways, submarines, planes, fire engines, book covers, billiard balls, organ keys, toothbrushes, coffin plates, memorial plaques, wedding and class rings, bowling balls, medical jewelry, and much more—Gorton even went to the Moon, "as key legends on Apollo's onboard computer." The US military adopted Gorton as a standard font for aircraft and equipment dials, as did the US National Park Service for signage and more.
Gorton expanded beyond engraving, to ink on paper and paint on metal, via a company called Keuffel & Esser Co., which created smaller, cheaper, manual pantographic lettering sets called "Leroy." Wichary explains: "you'd mount a special pen and draw letters by tracing them". Other companies followed suit, producing similar sets and lettering guides. Leroy became popular with various comic companies in the 1940s and 1950s. And those felt boards with plastic letters you can create signs with are an offshoot of Gorton, as well.
In his travels, Wichary found the font being used in Spain, the UK, and Australia, and began wondering how and why a Wisconsin-based machine company made its way throughout the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Turns out, the fnot did not originate with the George Gorton Machine Co. Rather, the font was created in the UK by a photographic lens-making company called Taylor, Taylor, & Hobson, which crafted a new type of machine (and a new font to go along with it) in order to engrave markings into their lenses. Wichary speculates that this was possibly the first ever modern pantograph engraver, and "perhaps even the arrival of a concept of an engraving font – the first time technical writing was able to be replicated consistently via the aid of the machine."
In 1895, the Gorton Machine Co. in Wisconsin entered a patent licensing deal with Taylor, Taylor & Hobson, and the Gorton font made its way to the United States.
In the UK, Gorton was used on equipment in World War II, on British rifles and motorcycles, and throughout at least one UK National Park (Yorkshire Dales).
Wichary is currently on a quest to find out more about how widely Gorton spread throughout the world, and requests in the article for folks to send him any known examples from Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia.
I am now officially obsessed with Gorton and need to follow Wichary's journey to find out everything he can about the font. And I will now start looking for it in the wild and photographing it, of course.
I promise, even if you know nothing about fonts or typography, you will enjoy this article! And the photographs of Gorton are spectacular! Go read it here.
