TYPEWRITER

TYPEWRITER. The idea of the typewriter emerged long before the technology existed for its practical or economical production. A patent was issued in England in 1714 to Henry Mill, "engineer to the New River Water Company," for "an Artificial Machine or Method for the Impressing or Transcribing of Letters Singly or Progressively one after another, as in Writing, whereby all Writings whatsoever may be Engrossed in Paper or Parchment so Neat and Exact as not to be distinguished from Print." No drawing or other description has survived, and it is not known if a machine was actually made.

Subsequently, inventors in many countries planned and produced writing machines. The most notable were Friedrich von Knauss in Germany and Pierre Jacquet-Droz of Switzerland in the late eighteenth century and Pietro Conti in early-nineteenth-century Italy.

William A. Burt of Detroit, Michigan, received the first U.S. patent for a writing machine in 1829 for his typographer. This was an indicator type machine using printer's type arranged on a swinging sector. It was slow but surprisingly effective. The tempo of such inventions increased as the century advanced, many of them made to aid blind persons, some to record telegraph messages. Giuseppe Ravazza in Italy in 1855, William Francis in the United States in 1857, and Peter Mitterofer in Austria in 1866 used individual keys for each character, and type bars pivoted around an arc so that all printed at the common center.

The first really successful machine used the same general arrangement of bars pivoted around an arc. The inventor was Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who had already pioneered new methods for addressing newspapers and numbering pages. Sholes acquired two patents in 1868, and James Densmore, a longtime friend of Sholes's, had fifteen machines made in Chicago. These machines were failures, but under Densmore's dominating personality Sholes was induced to continue tests and improvements. By 1872 what essentially became the modern key arrangement had been developed to permit speed without the interference of one letter with another. Production began again in that year at Milwaukee but was not profitable. In 1873 Densmore convinced E. Remington and Sons, arms manufacturers of Ilion, New York, to build and sell the machine. Their first act was to redesign the component parts, adapting them to more economical manufacture. The first examples, completed in 1874 and priced at $125, typed only capital letters. Not until 1878, with the introduction of a smaller machine with a shift key, could both uppercase and lower-case characters be typed. The American inventor Luciean S. Crandall perfected the means for shifting the cylinder, or platen; another American, Byron A. Brooks, developed multicharacter type bars. These features added so much to the versatility of typing that all subsequent machines had to offer similar writing ability.

In order to avoid the specifics of preexisting patents, inventors had to be clever in finding other means to a similar end. Out of this effort came the large class of type-wheel machines, of which the Hammond and the Blickensderfer were the most widely accepted. Both this class of machine and the type bar machines often used a double-shift design, in which there were separate shift keys—one for capitals and another for characters and numbers. This double shift reduced the number of parts and thus the cost, and in the case of type-wheel machines reduced the mass of moving parts, thus increasing speed and lessening wear. Another approach, popular for a time, used a double keyboard with a separate key for each character, typified by such once-popular machines as the Caligraph and the Smith-Premier. During the formative years there were many other varieties of keyboard as well, some with the keys disposed on circular arcs instead of in straight rows, and others with such accessories as the space bar in different locations. Through all of this period the basic arrangement, used since 1874 on Remington machines, remained popular and eventually became standard with the Underwood typewriter, which appeared about 1895. It was not until 1908 that Remington adopted a fast visible-writing machine, in which the carriage did not have to be lifted up in order to read the written line.

Meanwhile, typewriting had become so extensively accepted by the public that a host of slow, primitive machines, such as the Odell, found a wide market. These machines required the use of one hand to select the letter or character to be printed and the other hand to make the impression. Their only justification was a very low selling price; they appealed to those whose need for typewritten copy was only occasional and who did not require speed. Although often mistaken for pioneer machines, these primitive typewriters did not appear until practical machines had created a market for them.

The early years of the twentieth century saw the universal acceptance of visible writing, a uniform keyboard, and the scaling down of size to create portable machines. Several electric machines were introduced; the most successful was made by Blickensderfer in Stamford, Connectinut, prior to 1909. Beginning in 1930, with the introduction of a motor-driven variety by Electromatic Typewriters, Inc., of Rochester, New York, electric typewriters

gradually replaced manual typewriters. The electric typewriter introduced in 1961 by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) eliminated the heavy sliding carriage and the basket of type bars. Instead, the type was on a swiveling ball-shaped shuttle on a light carriage that traveled inside the framework of the machine. Printing was by means of a wide carbon ribbon in a readily changeable cartridge. Errors were corrected by striking over with a correction ribbon.

IBM's "memory" typewriter, introduced in 1974, reflected the company's role in the development of the personal computer. Seven years later IBM introduced its IBM PC, using integrated chips from its memory typewriters. Thereafter, personal computers with powerful word-processing programs, hooked up to fast dot matrix—and, later, laser—printers, replaced the electric typewriter for the favored spot on the desks of clerical workers. The role of typewriters quickly waned.

TYPEWRITER

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