The hardest working font in Manhattan

Marcin Wichary 14 February 2025 / 6,100 words / 600 photos In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign. But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me. Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only. The font’s name is Gorton. 1 It’s hard to believe today that there was a time before I knew of Gorton and all its quirks and mysteries. The first time I realized the font even existed was some time in 2017, when I was researching for my book about the history of typing. Many keyboards, especially older ones, sported a particular distinctive font on their keycaps. It was unusually square in proportions, and a weird mélange of “mechanical” and “childish.” The more I looked at it, the more I realized how bizarre and amateurish it was. The G always felt like it was about to roll away on its side. There was a goofy wavy hook sticking out of Q. P and R were often too wide. & and @ symbols would be laughed away in a type crit, and the endings of C felt like grabbing something next to it – a beginning of a ligature that never came. The strangeness extended to the digits. There was a top-flatted 3 resembling common Cyrillic styling, 7 sloping down in a unique way, a very geometric 4, an unusual – perhaps even naïve – symmetry between 6 and 9, and a conflation of O with 0 that would be a fireable offense elsewhere. Looking at just a few keyboards, it was also obvious that it wasn’t just one rigid font. There were always variations, sometimes even on one keyboard. 0 came square, dotted, or slashed. The usually very narrow letter I sometimes sported serifs. The R and the 6 moved their middles higher or lower. There also seemed to be a narrower version of the font, deployed when a keycap needed a word and not just a letter. (Lowercase letters existed too, but not very often.) My first thought was: What a mess. Is this how “grotesque” fonts got their name? Then, the second thought: I kind of like it. The most distinctive letterforms of Gorton (Press a key!) But what font was it? What The Font website posited TT Rounds, Identifont suggested it could be Divulge, my early guess was DIN Rounded or something related to road signage. Whatever it was, a flat R clearly separated it from Helvetica, and the shapes were not as round as even the un-rounded Gotham’s. A few places for keyboard nerds referred to the font as “Gorton,” but that phrase yielded zero results anywhere I typically looked for fonts I could download and install. I originally thought this had to do with how keys were made. Only in newer keyboards are the letters printed on top of the keys, or charred from their surface by a laser. In older ones – those from the early 1960s laboratory computers, or the 1980s microcomputers – the way every key was constructed was by first molding the letter from plastic of one color, and then grabbing a different plastic and molding the key around the letter. A Gorton letter was as physical as the key itself. It made the keys virtually indestructible – the legend could not wear off any more than its key – and I imagined required some specialized keyboard-making machinery that came with the “keyboard font” already there. An example of a “double-shot” key from above and from below 2 But then, I started seeing Gorton in other places. Hours of looking at close-ups of keys made me sensitive to the peculiar shapes of some of its letters. No other font had a Q, a 9, or a C that looked like this. One day, I saw what felt like Gorton on a ferry traversing the waters Bay Area. A few weeks later, I spotted it on a sign in a national park. Then on an intercom. On a street lighting access cover. In an elevator. At my dentist’s office. In an alley. These had one thing in common. All of the letters were carved into the respective base material – metal, plastic, wood. The removed shapes were often filled in with a different color, but sometimes left alone. At one point someone explained to me Gorton must have been a routing font, meant to be carved out by a milling machine rather than painted on top or impressed with an inked press. Some searches quickly led me to George Gorton Machine Co., a Wisconsin-based company which produced various engraving machines. The original model 1 led to model 1A and then 3U and then, half a decade later, P1-2. They were all pantograph engravers: They 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. Edited from a video Saving The Machine the World Forgot with kind permission from Inheritance Machining The first font in the 1952’s company catalogue was called Gorton Normal and I felt I already knew it by heart. This immediately explained both the metaphorical and literal rough edges of Gorton. A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough. But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory. Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font. 3 It seemed at this point that perhaps P1-2 and its predecessors were a somewhat popular machining product during the 20th century’s middle decades. But casual research through materials preserved by some of George Gorton Machine Company’s fans – including the great-grandson of the founder – revealed something even more interesting. Gorton the font was a lot older than I expected. I found a 1935 catalog showing the very same font. Then one from 1925. And then, there was one all the way from 1902, showing the shapes I was starting to be mildly obsessed with. To put it in perspective: the font I first assumed was a peer to 1950s Helvetica was already of retirement age the day Helvetica was born. Gorton was older than Gill Sans, Futura, or Johnston’s London Underground font. It was contemporaneous to what today we recognize as the first modern sans serif font, Akzidenz-Grotesk, released but three years before the end of the century. This 1902 catalogue is so old it still has telegraph codes Imagine how stripped down and exotic Gorton must have felt right next to George Gorton Machine’s then-current logo! Now I was interested. I started researching Gorton more. Unfortunately, as I already suspected, no one ever wrote “I used Gorton to typeset this,” because Gorton was a tenuous name at best. It was the first font, and perhaps originally the only font that came with the engraver, so it suffered a nameless fate, familiar later to many bespoke bitmap fonts adorning the screens of early computers. The difference from these fonts, however, was that Gorton was meant to travel. And so, since searching for it by name was impossible, for months and years I just kept looking around for the now-familiar shapes. And I found… a lot. Gorton wasn’t just on computer keyboards, intercom placards, and sidewalk messages visited by many shoes. Gorton was there on typewriter keyboards, too. And on office signs and airline name tags. On boats, desk placards, rulers, and various home devices from fridges to tape dispensers. It was also asked to help in situations other fonts rarely did. I spotted Gorton on overengineered buttons that were put to heavy industrial and military use. I saw it carved into surfaces of traffic control devices, elevators and escalators, locomotives and subway trains, submarines and jet fighters. Gorton made its way to peace- and wartime nuclear facilities, it was there on the elevator at the Kennedy Space Center with labels marked EARTH and SPACE… and it went to actual space, and then the Moon, as key legends on Apollo’s onboard computer. But why? Why would anyone choose this kind of an ugly font where so many nicer fonts have already been around for ages? Some of it might be the power of the default. Popular engraving equipment comes with a built-in font that’s so standard it reuses the router’s name? Of course you will see it, the same way you saw a lot of Arial in the 1990s, or Calibri today. An example of a typical range of reductions. More range was available when needed Gorton was also convenient. If your previous engraving work required you do to the routing equivalent of handwriting or lettering – every letter done by hand – then a modern font you could simply copy, and one designed with “a minimum of sharp corners for rapid tracing with a smooth stroke,” must have felt like a breath of fresh air. But why engraving to begin with? Because the affordable and casual printing options we enjoy today – the office laser printers and home inkjets, the FedEx Kinko’s, the various cheap labelers – weren’t there. Even things that today feel obsolete, like dot matrix printers, Letraset, and popular letter stencils, were yet to be invented. Often, your only realistic option was the complicated and time-consuming lettering by hand. On top of that,