Typewriter

Based on Wikipedia: Typewriter

The Machine That Taught the World to Write

Fifty-two times. That's how many times historians estimate the typewriter was invented. Across decades, across continents, tinkerers and dreamers kept arriving at the same basic insight: surely there must be a better way to put words on paper than dragging a pen across it, one painstaking letter at a time.

Some of them were trying to help blind friends communicate. Others saw business opportunity in the growing flood of commercial correspondence. A few were simply obsessed with the mechanical puzzle of it all. Most of them failed, their prototypes gathering dust in workshops or described in forgotten patents. But their collective fumbling eventually produced something that would reshape civilization: a machine that could print words as fast as a person could think them.

Why the World Needed Faster Writing

To understand why so many inventors were racing toward the same goal, you have to understand the bottleneck that 19th-century business was slamming into.

By the 1850s, telegraphers and stenographers could capture information at 130 words per minute. The spoken word flew across wires almost instantaneously. But when it came time to turn all that captured speech and transmitted data into readable documents, everything ground to a halt. The fastest writer with a pen could manage about 30 words per minute. That was the world record in 1853.

Think about that asymmetry. Information was arriving four times faster than it could be processed. Offices were drowning in a backlog of handwritten correspondence. Something had to give.

The Long Prehistory

The desire to mechanize writing goes back further than most people realize. In 1575, an Italian printmaker named Francesco Rampazetto invented something he called the scrittura tattile—a machine for impressing letters into paper. We don't know exactly how it worked, but it shows that people were already thinking about this problem during the Renaissance.

By 1714, an English inventor named Henry Mill had secured a patent for what sounds remarkably like a typewriter. The patent describes "an artificial machine or method for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, as in writing." Mill claimed his invention produced text "so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print." Unfortunately, no working model survives. We have only the tantalizing description in his patent application.

What's particularly touching about the early attempts is how many of them were motivated by love. In 1802, an Italian named Agostino Fantoni developed a typewriter specifically so his blind sister could write. A few years later, Pellegrino Turri invented another one for his blind friend, the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. These machines weren't commercial products—they were gifts, attempts to give someone the power of written communication.

The First Machine You Could Actually Buy

The honor of creating the first commercially sold typewriter goes to a Danish minister named Rasmus Malling-Hansen. In 1865, he invented something called the Hansen Writing Ball, and by 1870 you could actually purchase one.

The Writing Ball looked nothing like the typewriters we picture today. Imagine a hemisphere studded with keys, each positioned so that the most frequently used letters fell under the fastest fingers. The user's hands hovered over this dome, tapping out text on the paper beneath. It was elegant, if alien-looking to modern eyes.

The machine was a genuine success in Europe, with reports of offices using Writing Balls as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen kept improving his design throughout the 1870s and 1880s, winning first prize at world exhibitions in Vienna and Paris. He even experimented with a solenoid—an electromagnet—to return the carriage automatically, which might make him the inventor of the first electric typewriter, depending on how generous you want to be with definitions.

But the Writing Ball had limitations. It could only produce capital letters. And its unusual shape meant it never quite achieved the mass adoption its inventor hoped for.

The QWERTY Revolution

The typewriter that conquered the world came out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1868, a team including Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule patented a design that would eventually be manufactured by E. Remington and Sons—yes, the same company that made sewing machines and rifles.

The Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, as it was called, introduced something that would prove surprisingly durable: the QWERTY keyboard layout. You're almost certainly looking at a QWERTY keyboard right now, more than 150 years later. It's one of the most persistent design decisions in technological history.

Why QWERTY? The honest answer is that we're not entirely sure. The traditional explanation is that Sholes arranged the keys to prevent the mechanical typebars from jamming by separating commonly used letter pairs. But some historians dispute this, pointing out that the layout doesn't actually do a very good job of preventing jams. The truth may be lost to history—what we know for certain is that once QWERTY gained a critical mass of trained typists, it became nearly impossible to dislodge.

Remington began manufacturing these machines on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York. The company's success slowly pressured other manufacturers to adopt the same keyboard layout, even if their internal mechanisms were completely different. This is what economists call a "network effect"—the more people who learned to type on QWERTY, the more valuable QWERTY keyboards became, which meant more people learned QWERTY, and so on.

Typing Blind

Here's something that seems almost unbelievable today: on most early typewriters, including the Remington, you couldn't see what you were typing.

The mechanical arrangement required the typebars—the metal arms with letters on them—to strike upward against the bottom of the platen, which is the cylindrical roller that holds the paper. This is called "understrike." The text you were producing was hidden beneath the machinery. You had to finish several lines, or lift the carriage to peek underneath, before you could see whether you'd made any mistakes.

Imagine writing an important business letter without being able to see the words appearing. You'd type an entire paragraph, pull up the carriage, and discover you'd misspelled the client's name in the opening line. The whole thing would have to be retyped from scratch.

This seems like an obvious problem, and inventors knew it. But the challenge was mechanical: typebars that struck from the front or above tended not to fall back into place reliably. The engineering solution took decades to perfect.

The breakthrough came in 1893 with the Daugherty Visible, one of the first "frontstrike" machines where the typebars hit the front of the platen. Two years later, Underwood refined the design into something that would become the template for nearly all typewriters to follow. The typist could finally watch the words appear, letter by letter, in real time.

The Index Typewriter: A Road Not Taken

Not every typewriter used a keyboard. Starting in the 1880s, a different breed of machine emerged: the index typewriter.

These worked on an entirely different principle. Instead of a separate key for each letter, an index typewriter had a pointer or stylus that the operator moved to select letters from a displayed alphabet. Press a lever, and the selected letter would print. It was slower than keyboard typing, but the machines were simpler, lighter, and much cheaper.

The Simplex Typewriter Company sold index typewriters for one-fortieth the price of a Remington. That made them attractive to travelers who didn't want to lug a heavy keyboard machine, and to small businesses that only occasionally needed to produce typed documents.

But the index typewriter's moment was brief. Keyboard typewriters got lighter and more portable. A thriving market in refurbished secondhand machines made full-featured typewriters affordable. By the 1930s, the index typewriter had largely vanished from Western markets.

Except it hadn't vanished entirely. Index typewriters found a lasting home in East Asia, where they were the only practical way to handle Chinese and Japanese writing. A Chinese typewriter might have thousands of characters, far too many for a keyboard. The index approach—selecting characters from a large tray—remained the standard until electronic word processing finally offered a better solution.

And here's a fact that might surprise you: the most common typewriters still manufactured today are index typewriters. They're just not what you'd typically think of as typewriters. Those plastic label makers with the rotating dial? They're the direct descendants of the index typewriter, simplified down to their essence. Spin the wheel to your letter, squeeze the trigger, and an embossed character appears on a strip of adhesive tape.

The Mechanics of Standardization

By about 1910, the typewriter had settled into something close to its final form. Different manufacturers added their own flourishes, but the basic concept was universal: each key connected to a typebar with a reversed letter molded into its head. Strike the key firmly, and the typebar would swing up to hit an inked ribbon pressed against paper wrapped around the cylindrical platen.

The platen sat on a carriage that moved leftward with each keystroke, automatically positioning the paper for the next character. When you reached the end of a line, you'd push the carriage-return lever to send it back to the starting position while simultaneously advancing the paper one line up. A small bell would ring when you were approaching the right margin—a warning to finish your word and prepare for the return.

This design was so successful that it persisted, essentially unchanged, for over seventy years. The manufacturers who dominated this period read like a roll call of industrial might: Remington, IBM, Underwood, Olivetti, Royal, Smith Corona, Olympia. These were serious companies building serious machines, heavy and durable, designed to pound out millions of keystrokes over decades of daily use.

The Golden Age of Clatter

From roughly 1910 until the 1980s, the typewriter was simply how words got onto paper. There was no alternative for anyone who needed documents that looked professional.

Journalists pounded out stories on typewriters, the clatter of newsrooms becoming one of the iconic sounds of the twentieth century. Novelists sat at typewriters for hours, the physical act of typing becoming intertwined with the creative process. Secretaries—a profession that barely existed before the typewriter and would be transformed by the computer—became the hidden infrastructure of business communication.

Students typed term papers. Lawyers typed briefs. Scientists typed research papers. Screenwriters typed scripts in a very specific format, the physical constraints of the typewriter page helping to define what a screenplay looked like. Letters, memos, forms, applications, receipts, labels, envelopes—if it had text on it and needed to look official, someone had probably typed it.

The typewriter even changed language. "Carbon copy," abbreviated as "cc," originally meant a literal copy made by placing carbon paper between sheets while typing. We still use "cc" on emails today, even though there's no carbon involved and no one under forty has probably ever used carbon paper. The phrase "in black and white" gained force from the crisp authority of typed documents.

The Machine That Opened Doors

The typewriter had enormous social consequences that its inventors never anticipated.

Most significantly, it created a new category of office work that was deemed acceptable for women. Before the typewriter, clerical work was almost exclusively male. But typing was new—it had no established tradition of who should do it. Companies discovered that women could be hired at lower wages, and typing became coded as feminine.

This was a mixed blessing. On one hand, it gave women access to paid employment outside the home at a time when their options were severely limited. On the other hand, it funneled them into subordinate roles. The female typist became a fixture of offices for most of the twentieth century, essential but rarely in charge.

The profession of "typewriter" (yes, the word originally referred to the person, not just the machine) opened a narrow doorway that would eventually widen. Women who entered offices as typists sometimes became office managers, and a few broke through to higher positions. The typing pool was constraining, but it was inside the building.

When "Typewriter" Meant a Person

This linguistic quirk deserves a moment of attention. Through the late 1800s, if someone said "I need a typewriter," they might mean the machine or the person who operated it. Help wanted ads sought "experienced typewriters." Companies employed a "room full of typewriters."

The word gradually shifted to refer primarily to the machine, while the operator became a "typist." But for several decades, the ambiguity was real and somewhat revealing. The human and the machine were almost interchangeable—both were tools for converting thought into printed text. The person became an extension of the mechanism.

The Weird and Wonderful

Alongside the mainstream typewriters, inventors kept experimenting with stranger variations.

The Hammond typewriter, introduced in 1884, used a curved keyboard that looks bizarre to modern eyes but actually made ergonomic sense. Instead of typebars, it used interchangeable rotating sectors that carried the letters. A small hammer pushed the paper against the ribbon and type to make each impression. The Hammond was popular because it produced exceptionally clean type and allowed users to swap out fonts—something almost no other typewriter could do without expensive modifications.

The Gardner typewriter, patented in 1893, took minimalism to an extreme. Although it could print 84 different symbols, it had only 14 keys plus two shift keys. Multiple characters were indicated on each key, and the position of the shift keys determined which one would print. It was slower than a full keyboard, but remarkably compact.

The Fitch typewriter, made in Brooklyn and later in the United Kingdom, was one of the early "visible" machines. Its typebars were positioned behind the paper, striking forward so the user could see the text immediately. A curved frame kept the emerging paper from blocking the view of the keyboard. It was clever, but the paper feed was awkward, and the Fitch was soon eclipsed by better designs.

The Sound of Thinking

Writers developed complicated relationships with their typewriters. Some found the machine liberating—the speed of typing allowed thoughts to flow more freely than the laborious process of handwriting. Others found it constraining, the mechanical rhythm imposing itself on their prose.

Many writers became almost superstitiously attached to specific machines. Jack Kerouac typed On the Road on a continuous scroll of paper, feeding it through his typewriter so he wouldn't have to stop and change pages. Hunter S. Thompson allegedly retyped The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms on his typewriter just to feel what it was like to write those sentences.

The physical act of typing became part of the creative process in a way that's hard to replicate with computers. The resistance of the keys, the mechanical clatter, the impossibility of easy revision—all of it shaped how writers thought about sentences. You couldn't just delete a paragraph; you had to retype the whole page. This encouraged a certain discipline, a tendency to think before committing words to paper.

The Decline

The typewriter's dominance began to crack in the 1980s. Personal computers were getting cheaper and more powerful. Word processing software offered something the typewriter never could: the ability to revise and rearrange text before printing.

This was revolutionary. For the first time in the history of writing technology, you could see your work before committing it to paper. You could move paragraphs around, fix typos without retyping entire pages, experiment with different phrasings. The cursor blinked, waiting patiently for you to make up your mind.

At first, computers supplemented typewriters rather than replacing them. Offices might have a computer for some tasks while keeping typewriters for forms and envelopes. But the economics were relentless. Word processors got better; typewriters didn't. By the mid-1990s, the typewriter had been pushed to the margins of Western office life.

The Typewriters That Remain

But the typewriter never completely disappeared.

In India, typewriters remain common in many cities and towns. Walk through the commercial districts of Chennai or Kolkata, and you'll find typists sitting at small desks on the sidewalk, banging out legal documents and official forms. The reasons are practical: electricity supply is unreliable in many areas, and a mechanical typewriter needs no power. For a court document or government form that must be submitted on paper, a typewriter is often the most reliable option.

There's also a small but persistent community of writers who prefer typewriters. Some find that the inability to easily revise forces them to think more carefully. Others appreciate the tactile experience—the resistance of the keys, the snap of the typebars, the ding of the margin bell. A few are simply nostalgic, finding romance in a technology that connects them to Hemingway and Thompson and the great newsrooms of the past.

And then there are the security-conscious. Typewriters leave no digital trail. You can't hack a piece of paper. When Edward Snowden's revelations exposed the extent of electronic surveillance, some organizations reportedly dusted off their old typewriters for sensitive communications. The Russian Federal Security Service was said to have purchased typewriters for certain document preparation. Low-tech isn't always inferior tech.

The Keyboard That Wouldn't Die

Perhaps the typewriter's strangest legacy is the keyboard layout you're probably using right now.

QWERTY was designed in the 1870s for a mechanical typewriter that no one has manufactured in decades. The specific arrangement of letters was determined by constraints that no longer exist—the need to prevent typebars from jamming, the particular mechanical linkages of the Sholes design. By any rational measure, we should have adopted a more efficient layout long ago.

August Dvorak designed one in 1936. His Simplified Keyboard put the most common letters on the home row where fingers naturally rest. Studies suggested it was faster to learn and faster to use once mastered. Yet hardly anyone switched. The cost of retraining, the need to match existing typists, the chicken-and-egg problem of keyboards and training—all the forces that made QWERTY dominant in 1890 kept it dominant in 1990 and keep it dominant today.

When you tap out a text message on your phone's virtual keyboard, you're using a layout designed to prevent mechanical jams in a machine that hasn't been manufactured in most of our lifetimes. The ghosts of those Milwaukee inventors are still with us, their arbitrary decisions embedded in the muscle memory of billions of fingers.

Fifty-Two Inventions Later

The typewriter, as a product category, was invented fifty-two times. Most of those inventions failed. A few succeeded partially. And one lineage—running from Sholes through Remington through a hundred competitors and refinements—conquered the world for a century before gracefully yielding to its digital successors.

What the typewriter represents, perhaps more than any other technology, is the iterative nature of invention. There was no single eureka moment, no lone genius in a workshop. There were dozens of geniuses, across decades, each solving part of the puzzle. A blind woman's brother in Italy. A Danish minister with electromagnetic coils. A Wisconsin newspaper editor who partnered with a sewing machine company.

The typewriter they collectively invented changed how we work, how we write, who gets to work, and—through the bizarre persistence of QWERTY—how our fingers move across keyboards we haven't stopped to think about in years. Not bad for a machine most people consider obsolete.