Typwriters

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Typewriter patents date back to 1713, and the first typewriter proven to have worked was built by Pellegrino Turri in 1808 for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Commercial production, however, began only with the “writing ball” of Danish pastor Malling Hansen (1870). This device looked rather like a pincushin. Nietzsche’s mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it. More significant is the sholes and &Glidden Type Writer, which began production in late 1873an appeared on the American market in 1874:
Christopher L. Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaperman, poet, and part-time inventor, was the main creator of this machine. The Sholes & Glidden typed only in capitol letters, and it introduced the QWERTY keyboard, which is very much with us today. The keyboard was probably designed to separate frequently- used pairs of typebars sop that the typebars would not clash and get stuck at the printing point. The S&G was a decorative machine, boasting painted flowers and decals .I looked rather like a sewing machine, as it was manufactured by the sewing machine department of the Remington arms company. For an in-depth look at this historic device , visit Darryl Rehr’s Web site “ The First Typewriter.” The Sholes & Glidden had limited success, but its successor, the Remington, soon became a dominant presence in the industry.

The Sholes & Glidden, like many early typewriters, is an understroke or “blind” writer: the typebars are arranged in a circular basket under the platen(the printing surface) and type on the bottem of the platen. This means that the typist( confusingly called a “typewriter” herself in the early days) has to lift up the carrige to see her work. Another example of a understroke typebar machine is the caligraph of the 1880,the second typewriter to appear on the American market.

This Caligraph #3 has a “full” keyboard—separate keys for lower- and upper-case l...