Late nineteenth century inventor of the pantographic punchcutting machine, patented in 1885, which altered the way in which letters were designed. With this device, for the first time, a single set of drawings could be traced to cut matrices at a wide range of sizes, without the skills of the punchcutter. Pure type design, as a profession of pen and paper, had begun; and with it scalable type, with its economically tempting compromise of using a single master design for all sizes, had arrived. The compromise has persisted through the phototype era to the present day, with a mere handful of digital typefaces available at more than one design size, despite Donald Knuth and the clever people at Adobe, Apple, Altsys and URW offering high-tech ways to overcome it.

Returning to the man who first offered the temptation, Linn Boyd Benton was also a type designer, and father of the prolific Morris Fuller Benton. He managed manufacturing at ATF from 1892 until 1932, the year of his death.