The typewriter is a machine that prints characters one after the other on sheets of paper. Many attempts to design a character-printing machine were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially to create raised characters for reading by the blind. The first recorded patent for a typewriter was issued by Queen Anne (1665-1714) in January 1714 to an English engineer named Henry Mill. Mill described "An Artificial Machine or Method for the Impressing or Transcribing of Letters Singly or Progressively one after the other," but no drawing or model of the device exists.
The first United States patent for a typewriter was issued in 1829 to William A. Burt of Detroit, Michigan, for a "typographer." The letters on this table-size printer were set around a circular carriage, which was rotated by hand--a very slow process. When Burt failed to attract financial backing, he invented a very successful solar surveying compass instead. An improved circular-carriage machine was patented by Charles Thurber (1803-1886) in 1845; it rotated automatically and featured an inked roller. The ancestor of the type-bar machine was invented by Xavier Projean, a printer in Marseilles, France. His machine cryptographique had each character mounted on a single, separate bar. Projean proudly claimed that his machine would write almost as fast as a pen.
The invention of the modern commercial typewriter is credited to Christopher Latham Sholes, an American printer and editor, with the help of Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. Sholes and Soulé had been working to develop a machine to print book page numbers; Glidden suggested designing the machine to print letters of the alphabet as well. Glidden also pointed out to Sholes a Scientific American article about a typewriting machine recently invented by John Pratt of London. With help from Glidden and Soulé, Sholes designed a type-bar machine with a carriage that automatically moved one space to the left when a letter was printed, and keys that worked with "pianoforte" action--they all struck the platen at exactly the same point. Sholes built a working model of his machine in 1867. Glidden, Soulé, and Sholes patented their design in 1868. For the next five years, Sholes worked to improve his machine, driven by his financial backer, James Densmore. In particular, he struggled with the problem of colliding type bars when fast typing was attempted. He finally solved this by devising a unique keyboard arrangement, with the most-used letters spaced apart from each other. This QWERTY keyboard remains in standard use today, even though more efficient arrangements have been devised.
In 1873, Densmore and Sholes interested the Remington Arms company in their machine. Remington was struggling to find new products, since the arms manufacturing business had collapsed following the end of the Civil War. The company bought Sholes's patents for $12,000 and put the Remington Model 1 on the market in 1876. One of the first was purchased by Mark Twain (1835-1910), who used it to produce the first typed manuscript for a publisher. The typewriter did not catch on immediately. Remington gave up on it, selling their rights to it in 1886. By the early 1890s, however, business offices had discovered the new machine. The mass market in typewriters boomed, and with it came profound social change: women by the millions had a new, respectable form of employment.
Many improvements were soon made to the early Remington model. A shift-key mechanism was added in 1878 so lowercase as well as capital letters could be typed. Double keyboards, featuring separate keys for capital and small letters, also appeared, but they didn't work well for touch typing and eventually disappeared. American inventor John Williams developed the front-stroke machine in 1890 so typing could be seen as it was being produced. The first portable typewriter, the Blick, was available in the early 1890s. In the 1920s electricity was added to the typewriter, for more uniform, effortless, and faster operation; portable electrics were introduced in 1956. IBM came out with its spherical type element and stationary paper carriage in 1961. Typewriters with correction tape appeared on the market in 1973, and rotating print wheels were added in 1978. IBM introduced the first electric typewriter with a memory in 1965; Olivetti offered the portable electronic typewriter in 1980. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, voice-activated typewriters were being developed, but they could not create text nearly as quickly as a moderately speedy typist. By 1993, with personal computers becoming less expensive and more sophisticated word processing software available, typewritersÕ usefulness became increasingly limited. Only 800,000 typewriters were sold in the United States in 1992. By 1995, the once-preeminent American typewriter manufacturer, Smith Corona, declared bankruptcy. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, typewriters seem destined for oblivion.
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