IBM Selectric 1 typewriter, steel and plastic, designed by Eliot Noyes, United States, 1961

Typewriter with a curved steel casing, beige in colour, with a standard QWERTY keyboard, black keys with white letters, knobs, paper plate and an electric cord. A ruler and page margin setter is made in chrome and is set above the keyboard, which is recessed into the softly curved steel casing, shaped to narrow at the front. There are no corners on the model and there are rubber feet at the base to elevate the machine off the table surface.

The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful model line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on 31 July 1961.

Instead of the "basket" of individual type bars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a traditional typewriter, the Selectric had a type element (frequently called a "type ball", or more informally, a "golf ball") that rotated and pivoted to the correct position before striking. The type element could be easily changed so as to print different fonts in the same document, resurrecting a capability that had been pioneered by the Blickensderfer typewriter almost 70 years before. The Selectric also replaced the traditional typewriter's moving carriage with a paper roller ("platen") that stayed in position while the type ball and ribbon mechanism moved from side to side.

The Selectric mechanism was notable for using internal mechanical binary coding and two mechanical digital-to-analogue converters, called whiffletree linkages, to select the character to be typed.

Selectrics and their descendants eventually captured 75 percent of the United States market for electric typewriters used in business. IBM replaced the Selectric line with the IBM Wheelwriter in 1984 and transferred its typewriter business to the newly formed Lexmark in 1991.

For further information about the development of the IBM Selectric "golfball" typewriter, see references.

By the mid 1970s IBM Selectric typewriters accounted for around 75 percent of the US electric typewriter market however from that point on the challenge from other manufacturers and their various products and approaches to word processing would see a rapid decline in IBM's influence in this area. Xerox, Olivetti and later Apple all made inroads into this field to upset the established order.
IBM commenced the Selectric typewriter development program a good 14 years prior to its eventual unveiling. In that time the management of IBM's electric typewriter products industrial design moved from the office of Norman Bel Geddes (which closed in 1947) to Eliot Noyes who had been working for Geddes and open his own office and took over that work.
IBM underwent a complete overhaul of its products, packaging, stationary, advertising and corporate identity through the late 1950s to the early 1960s and Eliot Noyes was involved in this project alongside Marcel Breuer, Paul Rand and Charles Eames.

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