William Starling Burgess
Massachusetts yacht designer and builder (three Americas Cup winners and other designs that greatly advanced yacht design), aeroplane designer (he built the Wright brothers’ planes under license, and designed seaplanes for the US Navy), experimental car designer (the three-wheeled aerodynamic Dymaxion with R. Buckminster Fuller, 1933). Since Mike Parker’s well-documented announcement at the 1994 ATypI conference in San Francisco, he has also been regarded as a strong contender to being the true designer of that ubiquitous typeface, Times New Roman. Stanley Morison certainly never admitted it was anything other than the work of himself and the draftsman Victor Lardent. In obscure journals the controversy rages on... His daughter is Tasha Tudor (b. 1915), the writer and illustrator of children’s books.

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