Typewriter

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. It has many keys. When you press a key, it makes a letter or symbol appear on paper. This happens by moving an inked ribbon against the paper. It creates a clear written document.

The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874. They didn’t become common in offices in the United States until after the mid-1880s. Soon, typewriters were used everywhere — by writers, in offices, at home for letters, and by students for their written assignments. They were very important for writing that wasn’t done by handwritten means.

Typewriters were also helpful for people who were blind. They were a normal part of offices up until the 1980s. After that, personal computers with word processing software took over. But in some places, like many Indian cities and towns, typewriters are still used, especially where there isn’t always reliable electricity.

Even today, the QWERTY layout, created for typewriters in the 1870s, is the most common way to arrange keys on computer keyboards for English. Other keyboard layouts were also made for different languages, and they set their own standards too.

History

Many modern typewriters look similar, but they were invented slowly over many years by many different people. Like the automobile, telephone, and telegraph, many people shared ideas that helped create better machines. Historians think that some form of typewriter was invented 52 times as people tried to make a design that worked well.

Some early typing machines include:

• In 1575, an Italian printmaker made a machine to press letters onto paper.
• In 1714, a person in Great Britain got a patent for a machine that could press letters onto paper, making writing look neat.
• In 1802, someone made a typewriter to help his blind sister write.
• Between 1801 and 1808, another person invented a typewriter for his blind friend.
• In 1823, a new model called the tachigrafo was invented.
• In 1829, an American patented a machine called the "Typographer", which was called the "first typewriter".

By the mid-19th century, businesses needed to write faster, so machines became more important. Stenographers and telegraphers could write much faster than someone with a pen.

From 1829 to 1870, many machines for printing or typing were patented, but none were made to sell.

• An American got many patents, including one in 1843 to help blind people.
• In 1850, a British inventor made the Typograph, which had raised keys for blind people and was used in British schools for the blind.
• In 1855, an Italian made a typewriter that let the user see the writing as they typed.
• In 1861, a Brazilian priest made his own typewriter from simple materials.
• In 1865, an American built a machine called the Pterotype.
• Between 1864 and 1867, a carpenter from South Tyrol made several models and a working typewriter in 1867.

Hansen Writing Ball

Main article: Hansen Writing Ball

In 1865, a person from Denmark invented the Hansen Writing Ball, which began being sold in 1870. It was the first typewriter sold commercially and was used in Europe until 1909.

Sholes and Glidden typewriter

Main article: Sholes and Glidden typewriter

The first successful typewriter was patented in 1868 by Americans in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Production started in 1873 in Ilion, New York, and it had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which later became the standard.

Index typewriter

The index typewriter came out in the early 1880s. It used a pointer to choose a letter to print. These were simpler and lighter but were later replaced by keyboard typewriters.

Other typewriters

• 1884 – A typewriter with a curved keyboard became popular for its print quality.
• 1888 – A typewriter let users see and fix mistakes as they typed.
• 1893 – A typewriter was made smaller and cheaper with only 14 keys.
• 1896 – The first typewriter let the typist see the whole typing area while typing.

Standardization

By about 1910, the manual typewriter had a standard design. Most followed the idea that each key was attached to a typebar with the letter molded backward.

Electric designs

Although electric typewriters became popular later, the idea started in the 19th century. The first practical electric typewriter was invented in 1914.

IBM Selectric

Main article: IBM Selectric

In 1961, IBM introduced the IBM Selectric typewriter, which used a round ball instead of typebars. This design stopped jams and allowed changing typefaces.

Decline

Personal computers and new printing technologies caused typewriters to be used less. While they are rarely used today, some places like prisons still use them. Some people have also become interested in typewriters again for their special qualities.

Correction technologies

Business letters needed to be perfect, without any mistakes.

Typewriters used special erasers made of hard rubber. These came in different shapes, like small flat disks or pencil-like tools. They helped remove single typed letters from paper. A brush was also used to clean up any eraser bits and paper dust.

When correcting multiple copies made with carbon paper, a thin metal shield was used to prevent smudging on the lower copies. Special erasable paper was also made, which allowed ordinary pencils to erase mistakes easily.

In the 1950s and 1960s, correction fluid like Liquid Paper, Wite-Out, and Tipp-Ex became popular. This white paint covered mistakes and let people retype the corrected text.

Main article: Correction fluid

Legacy

Keyboard layouts

Main article: Keyboard layout

QWERTY

Main article: QWERTY

The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters made the "QWERTY" layout for letter keys. Sholes and his team tested other designs, but they are not well recorded. QWERTY became the most common way to arrange keys for English typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages that use the Latin alphabet sometimes have their own versions of QWERTY, like the French AZERTY, the Italian QZERTY, and the German QWERTZ.

The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient for the English language. Fast typists often need to move their fingers between rows to reach the most used letters. Even though QWERTY was the most common layout for typewriters, people kept looking for a better, easier keyboard through the late 1900s.

Other layouts for English

Many different layouts like Dvorak have been suggested to improve QWERTY, but none have replaced it. Supporters of these new layouts say they have big advantages, but none have become widely used. The Blickensderfer typewriter with its DHIATENSOR layout might have been one of the first tries to make a more efficient keyboard.

On modern keyboards, the exclamation point is found by pressing the shift key along with the 1 key because these were the last symbols added to become standard on keyboards. The ¢ symbol for cents was placed above the number 6 on American electric typewriters, while ANSI-INCITS-standard computer keyboards use ^ instead.

Keyboards for other languages

Keyboards for other Latin languages are mostly like QWERTY but changed to fit how those languages are written. Besides changing the order of some letters, you might notice precomposed characters and diacritics.

Many languages that do not use the Latin alphabet have keyboard layouts that are very different from QWERTY. The Russian layout, for example, places common letter groups like ыва, про, and ить next to each other so typists can move their fingers smoothly.

Text in the Arabic alphabet is written from right to left, so the paper moves to the right after each key press. Arabic letters change shape depending on where they are in a word. A special key lets the typist switch between single and connected letter shapes.

Typewriters were also made for East Asian languages with thousands of characters, like Chinese or Japanese. They were hard to use, but professional typists used them until electronic word processors and laser printers became common in the 1980s.

Typewriter conventions

Many typing habits come from the way old typewriters worked. For example, the QWERTY keyboard did not have keys for the en dash and em dash. To solve this, people would type more than one hyphen in a row to look like these special dashes. This old way is still sometimes used today, even though computers can easily make the correct dashes.

Other habits from typewriters that are still used today include putting two spaces between sentences, using straight quotation marks “ and ”, and underlining text instead of using italics. These all came from the limits of old typewriters.

Some older typewriters did not have keys for the number 1 or the symbol !, and some did not even have the number 0. People who learned on these machines would use the lowercase l for the number 1, and the uppercase O for zero. The exclamation point was made by typing an apostrophe and a period together.

Using the punctuation marks on a typewriter to make borders was common back then, and some legal documents still use this today.

Terminology repurposed for the computer age

Some words from the typewriter world are still used with computers today.

• backspace (BS) – a key that moves the cursor back one space so you can fix a mistake. On typewriters, this moved the paper backwards.
• carbon copy – a copy of a document made using carbon paper. The short form “cc:” is now used in emails to show who else got a copy.
• carriage return (CR) – moving back to the start of the line to type again. Most typewriters did this automatically, but computers control this differently.
• cursor – shows where the next letter will go. On typewriters, this was the moving paper.
• cut and paste – moving a piece of text or picture to put it somewhere else in a document. This term started when people used glue and scissors to move parts of typed pages.
• dead key – a key that does not move the paper, so you can type a second character on top of the first one. This was used to add special marks to letters, like accents.
• line feed (LF), also called "newline" – moves the cursor to the next line on a computer screen. Typewriters usually moved the paper forward automatically.
• shift – a key used to type big letters and other special symbols. Pressing it changes what the typewriter prints, like turning a small “d” into a big “D”. Computers use similar keys like Ctrl and Alt.
• tab (HT), short for "horizontal tab" – moves the cursor to the next tab stop, useful for making lists and tables.
  • The vertical tab (VT) was used with old printers to feed the paper to the next line.
• tty, short for teletypewriter – used in some computer systems to talk about screen displays.

Social effects

When typewriters were first made, they were very expensive. Some people thought it was rude to get a typed letter, thinking the sender thought they couldn't read handwriting. Companies taught people how to use typewriters and helped them find jobs. Schools also began teaching typing.

During World War I and World War II, many men went to fight, so women took on more office jobs. Typewriters became common tools for women in these jobs. In the United States, many women started their careers as typists, which was seen as a good job for them.

Typewriters were also important during times when governments controlled books and writings. In places like the Soviet Union, people used typewriters to secretly copy and share books that were not allowed. Laws tried to track who owned typewriters, but people still found ways to share forbidden books.

Writers with notable associations with typewriters

Early adopters

Mark Twain bought a Remington typewriter in 1874 after seeing it in a store. He used it for personal letters and said he was the first important writer to give a publisher a typed manuscript for his book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. Later, people found out the first typed book was Life on the Mississippi in 1883, also by Twain.

The novelist R. L. Stine began writing when he found a typewriter in his attic and used it for many early stories.

Others

William S. Burroughs thought a machine he called the "Soft Typewriter" was helping him write books. In a movie based on his book Naked Lunch, his typewriter looks like a living, insect-like creature that tells him what to write.

J. R. R. Tolkien often typed while balancing his typewriter on his bed because his desk was too small.

Jack Kerouac typed his famous book On the Road very quickly, using a long roll of paper so he wouldn’t have to stop to change pages. He finished the whole book in just two weeks.

Don Marquis wrote stories as if a cockroach named “Archy” was typing them by jumping on the keys of a typewriter. Because of this, all the words were in lower case, except for one special poem.

Late users

Richard Polt, a professor who loves collecting typewriters, writes a magazine about historic writing machines.

William Gibson wrote his famous book Neuromancer on a manual typewriter before switching to a computer.

Harlan Ellison always used typewriters and even fixed them himself when they broke. He believed computers were bad for writing.

Cormac McCarthy wrote his books on a special typewriter until he passed away. In 2009, his old typewriter was sold for a lot of money, but he bought an identical one to keep writing.

Will Self uses a manual typewriter because he thinks it helps him think more deeply before writing.

Actor Tom Hanks collects and uses manual typewriters, giving some away as gifts to fans and repair shops.

Historian David McCullough wrote his books on a Royal typewriter.

Biographer Robert Caro used Smith Corona typewriters to write his books about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson.

Typewriters in popular culture

In music

The composer Leroy Anderson wrote a piece called The Typewriter in 1950. A musician would play the typewriter as part of the show. Comedian Jerry Lewis made this piece famous in his shows and movies, including the 1963 film Who's Minding the Store?.

In Stephen Sondheim's musical Merrily We Roll Along from 1981, a typewriter is used on stage. The song Wordy Rappinghood by the group Tom Tom Club starts with the sound of a typewriter. Typewriter sounds are also in the song "Dissidents" from Thomas Dolby's 1984 album The Flat Earth. The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is a musical group that uses typewriters as instruments. In Max Richter's The Blue Notebooks from 2004, the sound of a typewriter can be heard. A South Korean artist named Ryu Hankil often performs using typewriters.

Other

The 2012 French comedy movie Populaire is about a young secretary who tries to win typewriting contests. The manga and anime series Violet Evergarden from 2015 to 2020 features a character who learns to type. The 2016 documentary film California Typewriter looks at people who love and collect typewriters.

Forensic examination

People who study documents can look at papers printed on a typewriter to learn what kind of typewriter was used. They can even tell if a certain typewriter wrote a specific document.

There are special ways to figure this out, like the Haas Typewriter Atlases and systems made by police groups such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Interpol. Famous writers, like Arthur Conan Doyle, wrote stories about this idea over 100 years ago.

Some real cases, like those involving Leopold and Loeb and Alger Hiss, used these document checks to help solve problems.

In the past, places like Romania had special rules about who could own a typewriter. Owners had to let police see samples of their typing once a year.

Collections

People all over the world have collected typewriters and put them in special places. Some of these collections are in buildings you can visit, like the Schreibmaschinenmuseum Peter Mitterhofer in Parcines, Italy, or the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts, US. Others are only online, where you can see pictures and learn about typewriters on websites like the Virtual Typewriter Museum.

These collections help us remember how people used to write before computers. They show the many different kinds of typewriters made in countries such as China, Germany, and Switzerland. Whether you visit a real museum or look online, these places let us see the history of typing.