Editing IBM Electric (section)

==Executive==
{{Redirect|IBM Executive|a list of IBM chief executive officers|List of IBM CEOs}}
{{Refimprove section|date=March 2025}}
<!-- This subheader is linked from [[Sentence spacing]]. If you change or remove this section header, please visit that page and redirect the link (in the history section) to the main title of this article-->IBM announced proportional letter spacing for typewriters in 1941, but IBM's World War II effort delayed the introduction of a typewriter model, the Executive, with this capability until 1944. Standard typewriters have a fixed letter pitch, so, for example the letter "i" occupies the same space as the letter "m". The Executive model differed in having a multiple escapement mechanism and four widths for characters, allowing it to simulate [[Point (typography)|12 point]] '[[Justification (typesetting)|ragged right]]' [[Typesetting#Letterpress_era|typesetting]]. A skilled typist, by carefully counting letters on each line, could even produce fully justified layouts on the Executive.

According to Darren Wershler-Henry:

<blockquote>In 1944, IBM launched the Executive, a proportionally spaced typewriter. Characters on the Executive typewriter occupied between two and five units per grid cell, depending on the width of the letter. Beeching relates an anecdote that demonstrates the significance of this achievement. The proportionally spaced typewriter immediately leaped to the apex of the world bureaucracy and administrative culture when President Roosevelt was presented with the first machine off the line. The Armistice documents that ended World War Two were typed on an IBM, as was the original United Nations Charter. To a world accustomed to monospaced typewritten documents, a page of typewriting produced with an Executive...was indistinguishable from a page of typeset text. Prime Minister Churchill allegedly responded to Roosevelt that "although he realized their correspondence was very important, there was absolutely no need to have it printed".<ref>Wilfred A. Beeching. ''Century of the Typewriter''. London: Heinemann, 1974. 124., cited in {{cite book|title= The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting|last= Wershler-Henry|first= Darren|year= 2005|publisher= Cornell University Press|location= Ithaca and London|isbn= 978-0-8014-4586-6|page= [https://archive.org/details/ironwhim00wers/page/254 254]|url-access= registration|url= https://archive.org/details/ironwhim00wers/page/254}}</ref></blockquote>

The [[font]]s available for the IBM Executive typewriters helped to convey the impression of typeset text. Fonts on monospaced typewriters usually have very wide [[serif]]s on narrow letters such as "i" so that they visually fill the same horizontal space as letters such as "m" and "w". So that these letters do not look out of place, most of the others are given strong serifs as well. Along with the constant spacing, these serifs give a distinctive "typewriter look" to documents. With proportional spacing, the IBM Executive typewriters could abandon the wide serifs and use fonts that closely resembled those used in typesetting.

IBM's Executive typewriters introduced a feature lacking in many mechanical typewriters: the top row included the digits "one" and "zero"; other typewriters generally omitted these. The IBM design obviated substitutions taught by many typing instructors: the letter "o" or "O" for "zero", and lowercase "l" for "one". These substitutions were easily identified when compared to an adjacent line typed with the digit keys. Worse, digits in columns of typed numbers would not have lined up properly on the Executive if the typist used the letter substitutions. A full set of dedicated digit keys allowed the Executive's digits to all be the same width as each other, so that a typed figure of a given number of digits was always the same total width, regardless of what the digits were. This change also allowed IBM greater flexibility in font design, as the lowercase "l" and uppercase "o" did not have to be usable as the corresponding digits. Having introduced them on the Executive, IBM maintained the separate digit keys on later non-proportional-spacing typewriter models, including the [[IBM Selectric|Selectric]] series.