The font that carved its way through 20th-century America
The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)
In 2007, Marcin Wichary photographed the fonts he was supposed to love in New York City. Years later, he became obsessed with a font he hadn't noticed then—Gorton, a monoline sans-serif used on everything from computer keyboards to Apollo spacecraft. This article chronicles his discovery of Gorton's origins in George Gorton Machine Co.'s pantograph engravers, its surprising ubiquity, and the reasons behind its century-long dominance.
The text is not added atop heavy-duty material. The text is the material.
- ucyo
More like "The hardest website your browser will work on" ... will come back once it loads
- ReactiveJelly
> Carve something into plastic, on the other hand, and it can survive decades. Substitute plastic for metal, and you just turned decades into centuries.
"I write these words in steel, for anything not set in metal cannot be trusted."
- ggm
The site is killing my brave browser. Maybe long thin transoceanic paths, or phase of the moon.
So many partially loaded images.
But definitely worth the wait. A great read. I liked the almost mimetic quality of "which slightly broken font plate is being reused to make the broken "3" I keep seeing" which is a classic detective novel trope, e.g. Lord Peter Whimsey in "strong poison" and a typewriter glitch he recognises.
- Firehawke
I started reading the article with a feeling of "I don't recognize this at all" from the first few images that slowly loaded.
Then we got to the metal plates in elevators and the other uses, and my brain immediately turned around and said "Of course you know this; you've seen this a hundred thousand times.. you absolutely know it even if you don't consciously think about it."
A font forked at least a dozen times over the decades, with forks upon forks upon forks, full of nostalgia for times past.
- claiir
The Gorton machines being initially developed by a lens manufacturer made a lot of sense given the 1920s brochure material the author included earlier. That material (unlike the later versions presented) focused on the machine's ability to do circular engravings (exactly the speciality the lens text presumably needed)