Mangaya, Althea V.

BSBA MM 1

Keyboarding and Documents Processing 1

HISTORY OF TYPEWRITERS

The concept of a typewriter dates back at least to 1714, when Englishman Henry
Mill filed a vaguely-worded patent for "an artificial machine or method for the impressing
or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another." But the first typewriter
proven to have worked was built by the Italian Pellegrino Turri in 1808 for his blind friend
Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano; unfortunately, we do not know what the machine
looked like, but we do have specimens of letters written by the Countess on it.

Numerous inventors in Europe and the U.S. worked on typewriters in the 19th
century, but successful commercial production began only with the "writing ball" of Danish
pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1870). This well-engineered device looked rather like a
pincushion. Nietzsche's mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it.

Much more influential, in the long run, was the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer, which
began production in late 1873 and appeared on the American market in 1874. Christopher
L. Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaperman, poet, and part-time inventor, was the main creator
of this machine. The Sholes & Glidden typed only in capital letters, and it introduced the
QWERTY keyboard, which is very much with us today. The keyboard was probably
designed to separate frequently-used pairs of typebars so that the typebars would not clash
and get stuck at the printing point. The S&G was a decorative machine, boasting painted
flowers and decals. It looked rather like a sewing machine, as it was manufactured by the
sewing machine department of the Remington arms company.

The Sholes & Glidden had limited success, but its successor, the Remington, soon
became a dominant presence in the industry. The Sholes & Glidden, like many early
typewriters, is an understroke or "blind" writer: the typebars are arranged in a circular
basket under the platen (the printing surface) and type on the bottom of the platen. This
means that the typist (confusingly called a "typewriter" herself in the early days) has to lift
up the carriage to see her work. Another example of an understroke typebar machine is the
Caligraph of 1880, the second typewriter to appear on the American market.
 This Caligraph has a "full" keyboard -- separate keys for lower- and upper-case
letters. The Smith Premier (1890) is another example of a full-keyboard understroke
typewriter which was very popular in its day. The QWERTY keyboard came to be called the
"Universal" keyboard, as the alternative keyboards fought a losing battle against the
QWERTY momentum. (For more on QWERTY and to learn why "QWERTY is cool. But not
all early typewriters used the QWERTY system, and many did not even type with typebars.
Case in point: the ingenious Hammond, introduced in 1884. The Hammond came on the
scene with its own keyboard, the two-row, curved "Ideal" keyboard -- although Universal
Hammonds were also soon made available. The Hammond prints from a type shuttle -- a C-
shaped piece of vulcanized rubber. The shuttle can easily be exchanged when you want to
use a different typeface. There is no cylindrical platen as on typebar typewriters; the paper
is hit against the shuttle by a hammer. The Hammond gained a solid base of loyal
customers. These well-engineered machines lasted, with a name change to Varityper and
electrification, right up to the beginning of the word-processor era. Other machines typing
from a single type element rather than typebars included the gorgeous Crandall (1881).
And the practical Blickensderfer.

The effort to create a visible rather than "blind" machine led to many ingenious
ways of getting the typebars to the platen. Examples of early visible writers include the
Williams and the Oliver. The Daugherty Visible of 1891 was the first frontstroke typewriter
to go into production: the typebars rest below the platen and hit the front of it. With the
Underwood of 1895, this style of typewriter began to gain ascendancy. The most popular
model of early Underwoods, the #5, was produced by the millions. By the 1920s, virtually
all typewriters were "look-alikes": frontstroke, QWERTY, typebar machines printing
through a ribbon, using one shift key and four banks of keys. (Some diehards lingered on.
The huge Burroughs Moon-Hopkins typewriter and accounting machine was a blind writer
that was manufactured, amazingly enough, until the late 1940s).

Let's return for a moment to the 19th century. The standard price for a typewriter
was $100 -- several times the value of a good personal computer today, when we adjust for
inflation. There were many efforts to produce cheaper typewriters. Most of these were
index machines: the typist first points at a letter on some sort of index, then performs
another motion to print the letter. Obviously, these were not heavy-duty office machines;
they were meant for people of limited means who needed to do some occasional typing. An
example is the "American" index typewriter, which sold for $5. Index typewriters survived
into the 20th century as children's toys; one commonly found example is the "Dial"
typewriter made by Marx Toys in the 1920s and 30s.