Biography

I know almost nothing about Dr. Hershey. I wish I knew more, as his work is fascinating.

From the Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data in [Wolcott & Hilsenrath 1976] I know that he was born in 1910. I do not know if he is alive at the time I write this (2003). From the same source, I know that his full name is Allen Vincent Hershey.

This means that when he published "Calligraphy for Computers" in 1967 [Hershey 1967] he was already about 57 years old. His most recent publication of which I am aware, "Cartography and Typography with True Basic" [Hershey 1995], dates from 1995.

His bibliography indicates that he was at the US Naval Weapons Laboratory at Dahlgren, Virginia, and involved in digital typography, from at least 1960, ("Subroutines for the NORC CRT Printer" [Hershey 1960]) through 1979 (by which time it had become the Naval Surface Weapons Center; see "Terrestrial and Celestial Cartography" [Hershey 1979]). In "Cartography and Typography with True BASIC" [Hershey 1995] he indicates that his typographic and cartographic system was transferred to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in 1979. I assume that his move to this institution (as a "Research Affiliate" [Hershey 1981]) occurred at about the same time.

Another way of looking at this is to realize that his work on typography, all done in the public service, spans a period of at least 35 years which began at an age at which some people might have been considering retirement.

In working with the Hershey glyphs, I was struck repeatedly by something suggested briefly in [Wolcott & Hilsenrath 1976, p. 1-2]: Dr. Hershey must have been an extraordinary man.

Every style of lettering or of printing type is commonly evaluated in the context of the technology used originally to produce it: the chisel of the Roman stonecutter, the brush of the oriental calligrapher, the nibbed pen of the Renaissance scribe, the Bézier spline of the digital typographer. Hershey's glyphs were made initially for rendering with vector plotting devices.

In the decades since his work, we have become dependent upon typesetting technologies that often rely upon brute force: significant computing power, and devices approaching the limits of visual acuity. While Dr. Hershey did in fact work with the most powerful computers of the 1950s and 1960s, these were not powerful systems by current standards. More importantly, he used with straight lines at workable resolutions on vector plotters. The "resolution" of the glyphs is at most 99 units per glyph (and often much less).

Instead of computationally intensive technologies, Hershey relied upon a sensitive appreciation of both letterforms and his medium (vectors over a 99 x 99 grid of integers). His glyphs are impressive creations from a purely aesthetic point of view. As a combination of aesthetics and technology ("calligraphy for computers," as Hershey said) this achievement is one that may not have been exceeded until Prof. Knuth's remarkable METAFONT® type creating system [Knuth 1986] together with typefaces such as Computer Modern (Knuth's "reinterpretation" of Monotype Modern No. 8A [Knuth 1986, Vol. E, p. ix]).