Typewriter

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

The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but 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 almost all kinds of writing that wasn’t done by handwritten means.

Typewriters were also helpful for people who were blind, and this need helped improve the machine. 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

Although many modern typewriters have similar designs, their invention developed slowly over many decades by many inventors working independently. Like the automobile, telephone, and telegraph, several people contributed ideas and inventions that led to more successful machines. Historians think that some form of typewriter was invented 52 times as people tried to create a workable design.

Some early typing machines include:

• In 1575, an Italian printmaker invented a machine to impress letters in papers.
• In 1714, a person in Great Britain got a patent for a machine that could impress letters on paper, making writing look neat and exact.
• In 1802, someone developed 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 of typewriter called the tachigrafo was invented.
• In 1829, an American patented a machine called the "Typographer", which was listed as the "first typewriter".

By the mid-19th century, the need to mechanize writing grew because business communication was speeding up. Stenographers and telegraphers could write much faster than someone with a pen.

From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented, but none went into production.

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

Hansen Writing Ball

Main article: Hansen Writing Ball

In 1865, a person from Denmark invented the Hansen Writing Ball, which went into production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was successful in Europe and was used in offices as late as 1909.

Sholes and Glidden typewriter

Main article: Sholes and Glidden typewriter

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

Index typewriter

The index typewriter came into the market in the early 1880s. It used a pointer to choose a letter, which was then printed. These were simpler and lighter but were eventually replaced by keyboard typewriters.

Other typewriters

• 1884 – A typewriter with a curved keyboard became popular for its print quality.
• 1888 – A typewriter allowed users to see and correct mistakes as they typed.
• 1893 – A typewriter reduced size and cost with only 14 keys.
• 1896 – The first typewriter that let the typist see the typing area fully as they typed.

Standardization

By about 1910, the manual typewriter had a somewhat standard design. Most followed the concept that each key was attached to a typebar with the corresponding letter molded in reverse.

Electric designs

Although electric typewriters would not become popular until much later, the groundwork was laid in the 19th century. The first practical power-operated typewriter was invented in 1914.

IBM Selectric

Main article: IBM Selectric

In 1961, IBM introduced the IBM Selectric typewriter, which used a spherical element instead of typebars. This design eliminated jams and allowed for changing typefaces.

Decline

The rise of personal computers and new printing technologies led to the decline of typewriters. While they are rarely used today, they are still used in some places like prisons and for filling out forms. There has also been a revival of interest in typewriters among certain groups for their unique qualities.

Correction technologies

Business letters were expected to be perfect, with no mistakes or corrections.

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

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, though it could be easily smudged.

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. However, the covered text could still be seen when held up to the light.

Main article: Correction fluid

Legacy

Keyboard layouts

Main article: Keyboard layout

QWERTY

Main article: QWERTY

The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters created the "QWERTY" layout for letter keys. During the time Sholes and his team were testing this idea, they tried other keyboard designs, but these are not well recorded. The QWERTY layout 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. People who type quickly 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.

One common but incorrect idea is that QWERTY was made to stop the parts inside the typewriter from hitting each other too hard by placing commonly used letter pairs far apart.

Other layouts for English

Many different layouts like Dvorak have been suggested to make QWERTY better, 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. Holding down the spacebar usually stopped the paper from moving, allowing someone to type more than one character in the same spot. 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 and if they connect to the letter before them. 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 cents symbol ¢ was made by typing a lowercase c and then a slash on top of it. 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, it was hard for companies to sell them because they cost much more than a simple pen. Some people who received letters typed on a typewriter felt it was rude, thinking the sender believed they couldn’t read handwritten words. Companies had to teach people how to use these machines and even helped connect typists with jobs. Schools began offering classes to teach typing skills.

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

Typewriters also played an important role during times when governments controlled what books and writings people could read. In places like the Soviet Union, people used typewriters to secretly copy and share books that were not allowed by the government. Laws were made to track who owned typewriters and what they could produce, but people still found ways to use them to share forbidden literature.

Writers with notable associations with typewriters

Early adopters

Mark Twain wrote that in 1874 he bought a Remington typewriter after seeing it in a store window. He used it for personal letters and claimed to be the first important writer to give a publisher a typed manuscript for his book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. Later research showed that the first typed book was actually 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 that a machine he called the "Soft Typewriter" was writing books for him. In a movie based on his book Naked Lunch, his typewriter is shown as 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 for orchestra and a real typewriter. A musician would play the typewriter as part of the performance. Comedian Jerry Lewis later 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 an important part of the song "Opening Doors" and is used as a prop on stage. The song Wordy Rappinghood by the group Tom Tom Club from 1981 starts with the sound of a typewriter. Typewriter sounds are also part of the song "Dissidents" from Thomas Dolby's 1984 album The Flat Earth. The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is a fun musical group that has performed since 2004, using typewriters as percussion instruments. In Max Richter's The Blue Notebooks from 2004, the sound of a typewriter can be heard during the narration spoken by Tilda Swinton. A South Korean artist named Ryu Hankil often performs using typewriters, especially in his 2009 album Becoming Typewriter.

Other

The 2012 French comedy movie Populaire tells the story of a young secretary in the 1950s who tries to win typewriting speed contests. The manga and anime series Violet Evergarden from 2015 to 2020 features a character who learns to type after her handwriting is damaged. The 2016 documentary film California Typewriter looks at people who love and collect typewriters, including a repair shop in Berkeley, California.

Forensic examination

People who study documents can look at typewritten papers to find out what kind of typewriter was used. They can even tell if a certain typewriter made 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 and required owners to let police see samples of their typing once a year.

Collections

All around the world, people have gathered typewriters into special places called collections. 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 different kinds of typewriters made in many countries, such as China, Germany, and Switzerland. Whether you visit a real museum or explore online, these places let us see the history of typing.