A
typewriter is a
mechanicalA machine manages power to accomplish a task, examples include, a mechanical system, a computing system, an electronic system, and a molecular machine. In common usage, the meaning is that of a device having parts that perform or assist in performing any type of work...
or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause
charactersIn typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
to be printed on a medium, usually
paperPaper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....
. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the
pieces of cast metal type (called sorts)In typesetting by hand compositing, a sort is a piece of type representing a particular letter or symbol, cast from a matrix mould and assembled with other sorts bearing additional letters into lines of type to make up a forme from which a page is printed.-See also:* History of western typography*...
used in
movable typeMovable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document ....
letterpress printingLetterpress printing is relief printing of text and image using a press with a "type-high bed" printing press and movable type, in which a reversed, raised surface is inked and then pressed into a sheet of paper to obtain a positive right-reading image...
. From their invention in 1868 through much of the 20th century, typewriters were indispensable tools for recording the written word. Widely used by professional writers and in offices for decades, by the end of the 1980s,
word processorA word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s and
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s largely displaced typewriters in the settings where they previously had been ubiquitous in the western world.
Notable typewriter manufacturer companies have included
E. Remington and SonsE. Remington and Sons was a manufacturer of firearms and typewriters. Founded in 1816 by Eliphalet Remington in Ilion, New York, on March 1, 1873 it started manufacturing the first commercial typewriter.-Becoming "E. Remington & Sons":...
,
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
,
Imperial TypewritersImperial Typewriter Company was a former British manufacturer of typewriters based in Leicester, England.The company was founded by Hidalgo Moya, an American-Spanish engineer who lived in England...
,
Oliver Typewriter CompanyThe Oliver Typewriter Company was an American typewriter manufacturer headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The Oliver Typewriter was the first effective "visible print" typewriter, meaning text was visible to the typist as it was entered. Oliver typewriters were marketed heavily for home use,...
,
OlivettiOlivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, printers and other business machines.- Founding :The company was founded as a typewriter manufacturer in 1908 in Ivrea, near Turin, by Camillo Olivetti. The firm was mainly developed by his son Adriano Olivetti...
,
Royal Typewriter CompanyThe Royal Typewriter Company was a manufacturer of typewriters headquartered in New York City with its factory in Hartford, Connecticut.-History:...
,
Smith CoronaSmith Corona or the SCM Corporation is a US typewriter and calculator company. Once a large U.S. manufacturer, the company experienced sales declines in typewriters in the mid-1980s due to the introduction of PC-based word processing...
, and Underwood Typewriter Company.
Early innovations
Although many modern typewriters have one of several similar designs, their invention was incremental, provided by numerous inventors working independently or in competition with each other over a series of decades. As with the
automobileAn automobile, autocar, motor car or car is a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which also carries its own engine or motor...
,
telephoneThe telephone , colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that transmits and receives sounds, usually the human voice. Telephones are a point-to-point communication system whose most basic function is to allow two people separated by large distances to talk to each other...
, and
telegraphTelegraphy is the long-distance transmission of messages via some form of signalling technology. Telegraphy requires messages to be converted to a code which is known to both sender and receiver...
, a number of people contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in ever more commercially successful instruments. In fact, historians have estimated that some form of typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers tried to come up with a workable design.
In 1714,
Henry MillHenry Mill was an English inventor who patented the first typewriter in 1714. He worked as a waterworks engineer for the New River Company, and submitted two patents during his lifetime. One was for a coach spring, while the other was for a "Machine for Transcribing Letters"...
obtained a patent in Britain for a machine that, from the patent, appears to have been similar to a typewriter. The patent shows that this machine was actually created: "[he] hath by his great study and paines & expence invented and brought to perfection an artificial machine or method for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, as in writing, whereby all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print; that the said machine or method may be of great use in settlements and public records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased or counterfeited without manifest discovery."
Italian
Pellegrino TurriItalian Pellegrino Turri invented a mechanical typing machine, one of the first typewriters in 1801 for his blind lover Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. He also invented carbon paper to provide the ink for his machine. Although not much is known about the machine, some of the letters...
invented a typewriter in 1808. He also invented
carbon paperCarbon paper is paper coated on one side with a layer of a loosely bound dry ink or pigmented coating, usually bound with wax. It is used for making one or more copies simultaneous with the creation of an original document...
to provide the ink for his machine. Many early machines, including Turri's, were developed to enable the blind to write.
In 1829,
William Austin BurtWilliam Austin Burt was an American inventor, legislator, surveyor, and millwright. He was the inventor, maker and patentee of the first typewriter constructed in America...
patented a machine called the "
TypographerThe typographer, American's first typewriter, was first invented and made by William Austin Burt.- History :It was patented on July 23, 1829, as U.S. patent No. 5581X. United States Patent Office documents describes Burt's American machine as "the actual construction of a type writing machine for...
" which, in common with many other early machines, is listed as the "first typewriter". The
Science Museum (London)The Science Museum is one of the three major museums on Exhibition Road, South Kensington, London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is part of the National Museum of Science and Industry. The museum is a major London tourist attraction....
describes it merely as "the first writing mechanism whose invention was documented," but even that claim may be excessive, since Turri's invention pre-dates it. Even in the hands of its inventor, this machine was slower than handwriting. Burt and his promoter John D. Sheldon never found a buyer for the patent, and it was never commercially produced. Because the typographer used a dial, rather than keys, to select each character, it was called an "index typewriter" rather than a "keyboard typewriter." Index typewriters of that era resemble the squeeze-style
embosserEmbossing tape is a labelling medium usually of hard plastic. Embossing tape is used with embossing machines, often handheld.- Method :The machine features a wheel with raised characters, similar to a daisy wheel. The user turns the wheel to align the desired character with the tape and presses a...
from the 1970s more than they resemble the modern keyboard typewriter.
By the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need for mechanization of the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record).
From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production.
Charles ThurberCharles Thurber was an inventor who made important innovations in the early development of the typewriter. According to the book The Marvels of Modern Mechanism published in 1901, Charles invented and patented in 1843 the first practical typewriter, though it admits his machine was slow, crude and...
developed multiple patents, of which his first in 1843 was developed as an aid to the blind, such as the 1845
ChirographerA chirographer can refer to*Someone who studies chirography*a machine patented in 1842 by Charles Thurber which was an early form of typewriter....
. In 1855, the
ItalianItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
Giuseppe RavizzaGiuseppe Ravizza, a prolific typewriter inventor, was born in Novara, Italy in 1811 , and spent nearly 40 years of his life obsessively grappling with the complexities of inventing a usable writing machine. He called his invention , because of its piano-type keys and keyboard...
created a prototype typewriter called
Cembalo scrivano o macchina da scrivere a tasti ("Scribe
harpsichordA harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...
, or machine for writing with keys"). It was an advanced machine that let the user see the writing as it was typed. In 1861, Father Francisco João de Azevedo, a Brazilian priest, made his own typewriter with basic materials and tools, such as wood and knives. In that same year the Brazilian emperor
D. Pedro IIDom Pedro II , nicknamed "the Magnanimous", was the second and last ruler of the Empire of Brazil, reigning for over 58 years. Born in Rio de Janeiro, he was the seventh child of Emperor Dom Pedro I of Brazil and Empress Dona Maria Leopoldina and thus a member of the Brazilian branch of...
, presented a gold medal to Father Azevedo for this invention. Many Brazilian people as well as the Brazilian federal government recognize Fr. Azevedo as the real inventor of the typewriter, a claim that has been the subject of some controversy. In 1865, John Pratt, of Alabama, built a machine called the
Pterotype which appeared in an 1867
Scientific AmericanScientific American is a popular science magazine. It is notable for its long history of presenting science monthly to an educated but not necessarily scientific public, through its careful attention to the clarity of its text as well as the quality of its specially commissioned color graphics...
article and inspired other inventors. Between 1864 and 1867 Peter Mitterhofer, a carpenter from
South TyrolSouth Tyrol , also known by its Italian name Alto Adige, is an autonomous province in northern Italy. It is one of the two autonomous provinces that make up the autonomous region of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol. The province has an area of and a total population of more than 500,000 inhabitants...
(former part of
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
) developed several models and a fully functioning prototype typewriter in 1867.
Hansen Writing Ball
In 1865, Rev.
Rasmus Malling-HansenRasmus Malling-Hansen was a Danish inventor, minister and principal at the Royal Institute for the Deaf, and one of the true pioneers of the 19th century. He possessed a great urge to bring forward new ideas and new inventions, and to reveal the secrets of unknown connections in nature...
of
DenmarkDenmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...
invented the
Hansen Writing BallThe Hansen Writing Ball was invented in 1865 by the reverend and principal of the Royal Institute for the deaf-mutes in Copenhagen, Rasmus Malling-Hansen, 1835-1890. The writing ball was first patented and entered production in 1870, and was the first commercially produced typewriter. In Danish it...
, which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported as being used in offices in London as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen used a
solenoidA solenoid is a coil wound into a tightly packed helix. In physics, the term solenoid refers to a long, thin loop of wire, often wrapped around a metallic core, which produces a magnetic field when an electric current is passed through it. Solenoids are important because they can create...
escapement to return the carriage on some of his models which makes him a candidate for the title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter. According to the book
Hvem er skrivekuglens opfinder? (English:
Who is the inventor of the Writing Ball?), written by Malling-Hansen's daughter, Johanne Agerskov, in 1865, Malling-Hansen made a porcelain model of the keyboard of his writing ball and experimented with different placements of the letters to achieve the fastest writing speed. Malling-Hansen placed the letters on short pistons that went directly through the ball and down to the paper. This, together with the placement of the letters so that the fastest writing fingers struck the most frequently used letters, made the
Hansen Writing BallThe Hansen Writing Ball was invented in 1865 by the reverend and principal of the Royal Institute for the deaf-mutes in Copenhagen, Rasmus Malling-Hansen, 1835-1890. The writing ball was first patented and entered production in 1870, and was the first commercially produced typewriter. In Danish it...
the first typewriter to produce text substantially faster than a person could write by hand.
Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the paper was attached to a cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing head. Then, in 1875, the well-known "tall model" was patented, which was the first of the writing balls that worked without electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878 and he received the first-prize for his invention at both exhibitions.
Sholes and Glidden Type-writer
The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes,
Carlos GliddenCarlos Glidden , along with Christopher Sholes and Samuel W. Soule, invented the first practical typewriter at a machine shop located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.-References:...
and
Samuel W. SouleSamuel W. Soule along with Christopher Sholes and Carlos Glidden invented the first practical typewriter at a machine shop located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1869.- References :Samuel W...
in
Milwaukee, WisconsinMilwaukee is the largest city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, the 28th most populous city in the United States and 39th most populous region in the United States. It is the county seat of Milwaukee County and is located on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan. According to 2010 census data, the...
, although Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use, or even to recommend it. The working prototype was made by the machinist Matthias Schwalbach. The patent (US 79,265) was sold for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with
E. Remington and SonsE. Remington and Sons was a manufacturer of firearms and typewriters. Founded in 1816 by Eliphalet Remington in Ilion, New York, on March 1, 1873 it started manufacturing the first commercial typewriter.-Becoming "E. Remington & Sons":...
(then famous as a manufacturer of
sewing machineA sewing machine is a textile machine used to stitch fabric, cards and other material together with thread. Sewing machines were invented during the first Industrial Revolution to decrease the amount of manual sewing work performed in clothing companies...
s) to commercialize the machine as the
Sholes and Glidden Type-WriterThe Sholes and Glidden typewriter was the first commercially successful typewriter. Principally designed by the American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes, it was developed with the assistance of fellow printer Samuel W. Soule and amateur mechanic Carlos S. Glidden...
. This was the origin of the term
typewriter. Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in
Ilion, New YorkIlion is a village in Herkimer County, New York, United States. The population was 8,610 at the 2000 census. Ilion is a name for the ancient city of Troy.The Village of Ilion is at the north town line of the Town of German Flatts...
. It had a
QWERTYQWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
keyboard layout, which because of the machine's success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers.
Because the type bars of this typewriter strike upwards, the typist could not have seen characters as they were typed. This was the case in most early keyboard typewriters, as the type bars struck upward against the bottom of the
platenA platen is typically a flat metal plate pressed against a medium to cause an impression in letterpress printing...
and what was typed was not visible until a carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with any other arrangement was ensuring the type bars fell back into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called "visible typewriters", such as the
OliverThe Oliver Typewriter Company was an American typewriter manufacturer headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The Oliver Typewriter was the first effective "visible print" typewriter, meaning text was visible to the typist as it was entered. Oliver typewriters were marketed heavily for home use,...
, were introduced in 1895. The older style continued in production to as late as 1915.
Standardization
By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached a somewhat standardized design. There were minor variations from one manufacturer to another, but most typewriters followed the concept that each key was attached to a
typebarA typebar is an 'arm' inside a typewriter with a character on the end of it. There are generally two characters per typebar, one which will be printed if the corresponding key is struck by itself, the other of which will be printed if the corresponding key is struck while the shift key is depressed...
that had the corresponding letter molded, in reverse, into its striking head. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of
inkInk is a liquid or paste that contains pigments and/or dyes and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing and/or writing with a pen, brush, or quill...
ed fabric), making a printed mark on the paper wrapped around a cylindrical
platenA platen is typically a flat metal plate pressed against a medium to cause an impression in letterpress printing...
. The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved left or right, automatically advancing the typing position horizontally after each character was typed. The paper, rolled around the typewriter's platen, was then advanced vertically by the "carriage return" lever (at the far left, or sometimes on the far right) into position for each new line of text.
Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half the width and the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most machines allowed switching between colors, which was useful for bookkeeping entries where negative amounts had to be in red.
Shift key
A significant innovation was the
shift keyThe shift key is a modifier key on a keyboard, used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters. There are typically two shift keys, on the left and right sides of the row below the home row...
. This key physically "shifted" either the basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". Either mechanism caused a different portion of the typebar to come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying the internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case, but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent (%) and ampersand (&). With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models, such as the Barlet, had a double shift so that each key performed three functions. These little three-row machines were very portable and could be used by journalists, etc.
However, because the shift key required more force to push (its mechanism was moving a much larger mass than other keys), and was operated by the "pinky" finger (normally the weakest finger on the hand), it was difficult to hold the shift down for more than two or three consecutive strokes. The "shift lock" key (the precursor to the modern
caps lockCaps lock is a key on many computer keyboards. Pressing it sets an input mode in which typed letters are uppercase by default. The keyboard remains in caps lock mode until the key is pressed again...
) allowed the shift operation to be maintained indefinitely.
"Noiseless" designs
In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed under the name "Noiseless" and advertised as "silent". It was developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. An agreement with Remington in 1924 saw production transferred to Remington, and a further agreement in 1929 allowed Underwood to produce it as well. It failed to sell well, leading some observers to the conclusion that the "clickety-clack" of the typical typewriter was a consumer preference. A more likely reason is that the claims of silent operation were simply untrue.
In a conventional typewriter the type bars are decelerated at the end of their travel simply by impacting upon the ribbon and paper. So-called "noiseless" typewriters have a complex lever mechanism that decelerates the typebar mechanically and then presses it against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to render the process less noisy. It was not particularly successful; it certainly reduced the high-frequency content of the sound, rendering it more of a "clunk" than a "clack" and arguably less intrusive, but the grandiose claims of the advertising - such as
"a machine that can be operated a few feet away from your desk - And not be heard" - were entirely without foundation.
Electric designs
Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for the electric typewriter was laid by the Universal Stock Ticker, invented by
Thomas EdisonThomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
in 1870. This device remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end of a telegraph line.
Early electric models
The first electric typewriter was produced by the
Blickensderfer Manufacturing CompanyThe Blickensderfer Typewriter was designed by George C Blickensderfer in 1893. It was originally intended to compete with Remington desk typewriters, but ended up being known for its portability. Blickensderfer's typewriter contained only 250 parts compared to the 2,500 parts of a standard...
, of
Stamford, ConnecticutStamford is a city in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. According to the 2010 census, the population of the city is 122,643, making it the fourth largest city in the state and the eighth largest city in New England...
, in 1902. Like the manual Blickensderfer typewriters it used a cylindrical typewheel rather than individual typebars. It was not a commercial success, which may have been because at the time electricity had not been standardized and current differed from city to city. The next step in the development of the electric typewriter came in 1910, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical
teletypewriterA teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
. The Krums' machine, named the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. This machine was used for the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York City in 1910.
James Fields SmathersJames Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter.-Early life:...
of Kansas City invented what is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925 Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's motors.
After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast asked Remington for a firm contract for the next batch. However, Remington was engaged in merger talks which would eventually result in the creation of
Remington RandRemington Rand was an early American business machines manufacturer, best known originally as a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation as the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers but with antecedents in Remington Arms in the early nineteenth century. For a time, the...
and no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in 1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter.
In 1928,
DelcoDelco Electronics Corporation was the automotive electronics design and manufacturing subsidiary of General Motors based in Kokomo, Indiana.The name Delco came from the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co., founded in Dayton, Ohio by Charles Kettering and Edward A...
, a division of
General MotorsGeneral Motors Company , commonly known as GM, formerly incorporated as General Motors Corporation, is an American multinational automotive corporation headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and the world's second-largest automaker in 2010...
, purchased Northeast Electric, and the typewriter business was spun off as the Electromatic Typewriters, Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired by IBM, which then spent $1 million on a redesign of the Electromatic Typewriter, launching the
IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01 in 1935. By 1958 IBM was deriving 8% of its revenue from the sale of electric typewriters.
In 1931, an electric typewriter was introduced by Varityper Corporation. It was called the
Varityper, because a narrow cylinder like wheel could be replaced to change the
fontIn typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...
.
Electrical typewriter designs removed the
direct mechanical connection between the keys and the element that struck the paper. Not to be confused with later
electronic typewriters, electric typewriters contained only a single electrical component: the motor. Where the keystroke had previously moved a typebar directly, now it engaged mechanical linkages that directed mechanical power from the motor into the typebar.
In 1941, IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a printed page, an effect that was further enhanced by a typewriter ribbon innovation that produced clearer, sharper words on the page. The proportional spacing feature became a staple of the IBM Executive series typewriters.
IBM Selectric models
IBM and Remington Rand electric typewriters were the leading models until IBM introduced the
IBM Selectric typewriterThe IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful model line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on July 31, 1961.Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a traditional typewriter, the Selectric had a type element that rotated and...
in 1961, which replaced the typebars with a spherical element (or typeball) slightly smaller than a golf ball, with reverse-image letters molded into its surface. The Selectric used a system of latches, metal tapes, and pulleys driven by an electric motor to rotate the ball into the correct position and then strike it against the ribbon and platen. The typeball moved laterally in front of the paper, instead of the previous designs using a platen-carrying carriage moving the paper across a stationary print position.
Due to the physical similarity, the typeball was sometimes referred to as a "golfball" in the case of the
IBM Selectric typewriterThe IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful model line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on July 31, 1961.Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a traditional typewriter, the Selectric had a type element that rotated and...
s, and indeed for other similar designs. The typeball design had many advantages, especially the elimination of "jams" (when more than one key was struck at once and the typebars became entangled) and in the ability to change the typeball, allowing multiple fonts to be used in a single document.
The IBM Selectric became a commercial success, dominating the office typewriter market for at least 2 decades. IBM also gained an advantage by marketing more heavily to schools than did Remington, with the idea that students who learned to type on an IBM Electric would later choose IBM typewriters over the competition in the workplace as businesses replaced their old manual models. By the 1970s, IBM had succeeded in establishing the Selectric as the de facto standard typewriter in mid- to high-end office environments, replacing the raucous "clack" of older typebar machines with the quieter sound of gyrating typeballs.
Later models of IBM Executives and Selectrics replaced inked fabric ribbons with "carbon film" ribbons that had a dry black or colored powder on a clear plastic tape. These could be used only once, but later models used a cartridge that was simple to replace. A side effect of this technology was that the text typed on the machine could be easily read from the used ribbon, raising issues where the machines were used for preparing classified documents (ribbons had to be accounted for to ensure that typists did not carry them from the facility).
A variation known as "Correcting Selectrics" introduced a correction feature, where a sticky tape in front of the carbon film ribbon could remove the black-powdered image of a typed character, eliminating the need for little bottles of white dab-on correction fluid and for hard erasers that could tear the paper. These machines also introduced selectable "pitch" so that the typewriter could be switched between pica type (10 characters per inch) and elite type (12 per inch), even within one document. Even so, all Selectrics were monospaced—each character and letterspace was allotted the same width on the page, from a capital "W" to a period. Although IBM had produced a successful typebar-based machine with five levels of proportional spacing, called the IBM Executive, proportional spacing was not provided with the Selectric typewriter or its successors the Selectric II and Selectric III.
The only fully electromechanical Selectric Typewriter with fully proportional spacing and which used a Selectric type element was the expensive Selectric Composer, which was capable of right-margin justification and was considered a typesetting machine rather than a typewriter.
In addition to its electronic successors, the Magnetic Tape Selectric Composer (MT/SC), the Mag Card Selectric Composer, and the Electronic Selectric Composer, IBM also made electronic typewriters with proportional spacing using the Selectric element that were considered typewriters or word processors instead of typesetting machines.
The first of these was the relatively obscure Mag Card Executive, which used 88-character elements. Later, some of the same typestyles used for it were used on the 96-character elements used on the IBM Electronic Typewriter 50 and the later models 65 and 85.
By 1970, as
offset printingOffset printing is a commonly used printing technique in which the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket, then to the printing surface...
began to replace letterpress printing, the Composer would be adapted as the output unit for a typesetting system. The system included a computer-driven input station to capture the key strokes on magnetic tape and insert the operator's format commands, and a Composer unit to read the tape and produce the formatted text for photo reproduction.
Selectric mechanisms were widely incorporated into computer terminals in the 1960s and 1970s, as they possessed obvious advantages:
- reasonably fast, jam-free, and reliable
- relatively quiet, and more importantly, free of major vibrations
- could produce high quality lower- and upper-case output, compared to competitors such as Teletype
The Teletype Corporation, a part of American Telephone and Telegraph Company's Western Electric manufacturing arm since 1930, came into being in 1928 when the Morkrum-Kleinschmidt Company changed its name to the name of its trademark equipment...
machines
- could be activated by a short, low-force mechanical action, allowing easier interfacing to electronic controls
- did not require the movement of a heavy "type basket" to shift between lower- and upper-case, allowing higher speed without heavy impacts
- did not require the platen roller assembly to move from side to side (a problem with continuous-feed paper used for automated printing)
The
IBM 2741The IBM 2741 was a printing computer terminal introduced in 1965.It combined a ruggedized Selectric typewriter mechanism with IBM SLT electronics and an RS-232-C serial interface. It operated at about 14.1 characters per second with a data rate of 134.5 bits/second...
terminal was a popular example of a Selectric-based computer terminal, and similar mechanisms were employed as the console devices for many IBM System/360 computers. These mechanisms used "ruggedized" designs compared to those in standard office typewriters.
Later electric models
Some of IBM's advances were later adopted in less expensive machines from competitors. For example,
Smith-CoronaSmith Corona or the SCM Corporation is a US typewriter and calculator company. Once a large U.S. manufacturer, the company experienced sales declines in typewriters in the mid-1980s due to the introduction of PC-based word processing...
electric typewriters of the 1970s used interchangeable ribbon cartridges, including fabric, film, erasing, and two-color versions. At about the same time, the advent of photocopying meant that carbon copies and erasers were less and less necessary; only the original need be typed, and photocopies made from it.
Typewriter/printer hybrids
Towards the end of the commercial popularity of typewriters in the 1970s, a number of hybrid designs combining features of printers were introduced. These often incorporated keyboards from existing models of typewriters and printing mechanisms of dot-matrix printers. The generation of
teleprinterA teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
s with impact pin-based printing engines was not adequate for the demanding quality required for typed output, and alternative
thermal transferIn regards to printing a thermal transfer is when a specialized printer melts wax within its print-heads and uses it to print a design or text onto paper...
technologies used in thermal
label printerA label printer is a computer printer that prints on self-adhesive label material and/or card-stock . Label printers with built-in keyboards and displays, for stand-alone use , are often called label makers...
s had become technically feasible for typewriters.
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
produced a series of typewriters called Thermotronic with letter-quality output and correcting tape along with printers tagged Quietwriter.
Brotheris a diversified Japanese company that produces or imports a wide variety of products including printers, sewing machines, large machine tools, label printers, and typewriters, fax machines, and other computer-related electronics. It markets its multifunction printers as Multi-Function Centers...
extended the life of their typewriter product line with similar products.
DECDigital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
meanwhile had the DECwriter. The development of these proprietary printing engines provided the vendors with exclusive markets in consumable ribbons and the ability to use standardised printing engines with varying degrees of electronic and software sophistication to develop product lines. Although these changes reduced prices - and greatly increased the convenience - of typewriters, the
technological disruptionA disruptive technology or disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network , displacing an earlier technology there...
posed by
word processorA word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s left these improvements with only a short-term low-end market. To extend the life of these products, many examples were provided with communication ports to connect them to computers as printers.
Electronic Typewriters
The final major development of the typewriter was the "electronic" typewriter. Most of these replaced the typeball with a metal or plastic daisy wheel mechanism (a disk with the letters molded on the outside edge of the "petals"). A plastic daisy-wheel was much simpler and cheaper than the metal typeball, but it also wore out more easily. Some electronic typewriters were in essence dedicated
word processorA word processor is a computer application used for the production of any sort of printable material....
s with single line LCD displays, built-in
line editorA line editor is a text editor computer program that manipulates text primarily by the display, modification, and movement of lines. Line editors precede screen-based text editors and originated in an era when a computer operator typically interacted with a teleprinter , with no video display, and...
s in ROM, a spelling and
grammar checkerA grammar checker in computing terms, is a program, or part of a program, that attempts to verify written text for grammatical correctness. Grammar checkers are most often implemented as a feature of a larger program, such as a word processor, but are also available as stand-alone application that...
, a few kilobytes of internal
RAM-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
and optional cartridge, magnetic card or diskette external memory-storage devices. Text could be entered a line or paragraph at a time and edited using the display and built-in software tools before being committed to paper. Unlike the Selectrics and earlier models, these really were "electronic" and relied on integrated circuits and multiple electromechanical components. These typewriters were sometimes called
display typewriters (cf. US patent 4,620,808) or
word-processing typewriters, though the latter term was also frequently applied to less sophisticated machines that featured only a tiny, sometimes just single-row display.
End of an era
The 1970s and early 1980s were a time of transition for typewriters and word processors. In a given year, most small-business offices would be completely old-style, while large corporations and government departments would already be all new-style; other offices would have a mixture. The pace of change was so rapid that it was common for clerical staff to have to learn several new systems, one after the other, in just a few years. While such rapid change is commonplace today, and is taken for granted, this was not always so; in fact, typewriting technology changed very little in its first 80 or 90 years.
Due to falling sales, IBM sold its typewriter division in 1990 to
LexmarkLexmark International, Inc. is an American corporation which develops and manufactures printing and imaging products, including laser and inkjet printers, multifunction products, printing supplies, and services for business and individual consumers...
.
As of 2009, typewriters were still used by some U.S. government agencies. As an example, it was reported that in 2008 New York City purchased a few thousand typewriters, mostly for use by New York Police Department, at the total cost of $982,269; another $99,570 were spent in 2009 for the maintenance of the existing typewriters. New York police officers use the machines to type property and evidence vouchers on
carbon paperCarbon paper is paper coated on one side with a layer of a loosely bound dry ink or pigmented coating, usually bound with wax. It is used for making one or more copies simultaneous with the creation of an original document...
forms.
Russian typewriters use the
Cyrillic alphabetThe Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, which has made the ongoing Azerbaijani reconversion from Cyrillic to Roman alphabet more difficult. In 1997, the government of Turkey offered to donate western typewriters to the Republic of Azerbaijan in exchange for more zealous and exclusive promotion of the Roman alphabet for the Azerbaijani language; this offer, however, was declined.
In Latin America, India, and Africa, mechanical typewriters are still common because they can be used without electrical power. In Latin America, the typewriters used are most often Brazilian models – Brazil continues to produce mechanical (Facit) and electronic (Olivetti) typewriters to the present day. In the U.S., Swintec Corporation still produces typewriters aimed at prisons. In April 2011, Godrej and Boyce, a
MumbaiMumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...
-based manufacturer of mechanical typewriters, closed its doors, leading to a flurry of erroneous news reports that the "world's last typewriter factory" had shut down. The reports were quickly debunked.
The increasing dominance of
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s,
desktop publishingDesktop publishing is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal computer.The term has been used for publishing at all levels, from small-circulation documents such as local newsletters to books, magazines and newspapers...
, the introduction of low-cost, truly high-quality,
laserA laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process, but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced...
and
inkjet printerAn inkjet printer is a type of computer printer that creates a digital image by propelling droplets of ink onto paper. Inkjet printers are the most commonly used type of printer and range from small inexpensive consumer models to very large professional machines that can cost up to thousands of...
technologies, and the pervasive use of web publishing,
e-mailElectronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
and other electronic communication techniques have largely replaced typewriters in the United States.
Correction technologies
According to the standards taught in secretarial schools in the mid-20th century, a
business letterA commercial business letter is a letter written in formal language, usually used when writing from one business organization to another, or for correspondence between such organizations and their customers, clients and other external parties. The overall style of letter will depend on the...
was supposed to have no mistakes and no visible corrections. Accuracy was prized as much as speed. Indeed, typing speeds, as scored in proficiency tests and typewriting speed competitions, included a deduction of ten words for every mistake. Corrections were, of course, necessary, and many methods were developed.
In practice, several methods would often be combined. For example, if six extra copies of a letter were needed, the fluid-corrected original would be photocopied, but only for the two recipients getting "c.c."s; the other four copies, the less-important file copies that stayed in various departments at the office, would be cheaper, hand-erased, less-distinct bond paper copies or even "flimsies" of different colors (tissue papers interleaved with black carbon paper) that were all typed as a "carbon pack" at the same time as the original.
Typewriter erasers
The traditional erasing method involved the use of a special
typewriter eraserAn eraser or rubber is an article of stationery that is used for rubbing out pencil markings. Erasers have a rubbery consistency and are often white or pink, although modern materials allow them to be made in any color. Many pencils are equipped with an eraser on one end...
made of hard rubber that contained an
abrasiveAn abrasive is a material, often a mineral, that is used to shape or finish a workpiece through rubbing which leads to part of the workpiece being worn away...
material. Some were thin, flat disks, pink or gray, approximately 2 inches (5.1 cm) in diameter by 1/8 in thick, with a brush attached from the center, while others looked like pink pencils, with a sharpenable eraser at the "lead" end and a stiff nylon brush at the other end. Either way, these tools made possible erasure of individual typed letters. Business letters were typed on heavyweight, high-rag-content bond paper, not merely to provide a luxurious appearance, but also to stand up to erasure. Typewriter eraser brushes were necessary for clearing eraser crumbs and paper dust, and using the brush properly was an important element of typewriting skill; if erasure detritus fell into the typewriter, a small buildup could cause the typebars to jam in their narrow supporting grooves.
Eraser shield
Erasing a set of carbon copies was particularly difficult, and called for the use of a device called an
eraser shield (a thin stainless-steel rectangle about 2 by with several tiny holes in it) to prevent the pressure of erasing on the upper copies from producing carbon smudges on the lower copies. To correct copies, typists had to go from carbon copy to carbon copy, trying not to get their fingers dirty as they leafed through the carbon papers, and moving and repositioning the eraser shield and eraser for each copy.
Erasable bond
Paper companies produced a special form of typewriter paper called
erasable bond (for example,
Eaton's Corrasable BondEaton's Corrasable Bond is a trademarked name for a brand of erasable typing paper. Erasable paper has a glazed or coated surface which is almost invisible, is easily removed by friction, and accepts typewriter ink fairly well. Removing the coating removes the ink on top of it, so mistakes can be...
). This incorporated a thin layer of material that prevented ink from penetrating and was relatively soft and easy to remove from the page. An ordinary soft pencil eraser could quickly produce perfect erasures on this kind of paper. However, the same characteristics that made the paper erasable made the characters subject to smudging due to ordinary friction and deliberate alteration after the fact, making it unacceptable for business correspondence, contracts, or any archival use.
Correction fluid
In the 1950s and 1960s,
correction fluidA correction fluid is an opaque, white fluid applied to paper to mask errors in text. Once dried, it can be written over. It is typically packaged in small bottles, and the lid has an attached brush which dips into the bottle...
made its appearance, under brand names such as
Liquid PaperLiquid Paper is a brand of the Newell Rubbermaid company that sells correction fluid, correction pen and correction tape. Mainly used to correct typewriting in the past, correction products now mostly cover handwriting mistakes.- Brand history :...
,
Wite-OutWite-Out is a trademark for a line of correction fluid, originally created for use with photocopies, and manufactured by the BIC Corporation.-History:...
and
Tipp-ExTipp-Ex is a brand of correction fluid and other related products that is popular throughout Europe. It was also the name of the German company that produced the products in the Tipp-Ex line. Tipp-Ex is a trademark for correction products...
; it was invented by
Bette Nesmith GrahamBette Claire Graham was an American typist, commercial artist, the inventor of Liquid Paper, and mother of musician and producer Michael Nesmith.-Biography:...
. Correction fluid was a kind of opaque, white, fast-drying paint that produced a fresh white surface onto which, when dry, a correction could be retyped. However, when held to the light, the covered-up characters were visible, as was the patch of dry correction fluid (which was never perfectly flat, and never a perfect match for the color, texture, and luster of the surrounding paper). The standard trick for solving this problem was photocopying the corrected page, but this was possible only with high quality photocopiers. Not surprisingly, given the demand, photocopier quality improved quickly.
Dry correction
Dry correction products (such as
correction paperCorrection paper, or correction film, its plastic based equivalent, is a tab of plastic with one side coated with white correction material. It is used to correct typing errors made when using a typewriter. When inserted between the paper and the typebar, and the ribbon select switched to...
) under brand names such as "Ko-Rec-Type" were introduced in the 1970s and functioned like white carbon paper. A strip of the product was placed over the letters needing correction, and the incorrect letters were retyped, causing the black character to be overstruck with a white overcoat. Similar material was soon incorporated in carbon-film electric typewriter ribbons; like the traditional two-color black-and-red inked ribbon common on manual typewriters, a black and white correcting ribbon became commonplace on electric typewriters. But the black or white coating could be partly rubbed off with handling, so such corrections were generally not acceptable in legal documents.
The pinnacle of this kind of technology was the
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
Electronic Typewriter series. These machines, and similar products from other manufacturers, used a separate correction ribbon and a character memory. With a single keystroke, the typewriter was capable of automatically backspacing and then overstriking the previous characters with minimal marring of the paper. White cover-up ribbons were used with fabric ink ribbons, or an alternate premium design featured plastic lift-off correction ribbons which were used with carbon film typing ribbons. This latter technology actually lifted the carbon film forming a typed letter, leaving nothing more than a flattened depression in the surface of the paper, with the advantage that no color matching of the paper was needed.
Keyboard layouts: "QWERTY" and others
The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "
QWERTYQWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
" layout for the letter keys. During the period in which Sholes and his colleagues were experimenting with this invention, other keyboard arrangements were apparently tried, but these are poorly documented. The near-alphabetical sequence on the "home row" of the QWERTY layout (a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l) demonstrates that a straightforward alphabetical arrangement was the original starting point. The QWERTY layout of keys has become the
de factoDe facto is a Latin expression that means "concerning fact." In law, it often means "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established." It is commonly used in contrast to de jure when referring to matters of law, governance, or...
standard for English-language typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages written in the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
sometimes use variants of the QWERTY layouts, such as the French
AZERTYAZERTY is a specific layout for the characters of the Latin alphabet on typewriter keys and computer keyboards. The layout takes its name from the first six letters to appear on the first row of alphabetical keys...
, the Italian QZERTY and the German
QWERTZthumb|175px|A computer QWERTZ keyboardThe QWERTZ or QWERTZU keyboard is a widely used computer and typewriter keyboard layout that is mostly used in Central Europe...
layouts.
The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient layout possible, since it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows to type the most common letters.
The most likely explanation is that the QWERTY arrangement was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine. This allowed the user to type faster without jamming. In a mechanical typewriter, the arrangement of bars is tied to the arrangement of the keys, and the two adjacent bars are much more likely to clash if engaged together or in a rapid sequence.
Another story is that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress their customers by being able to easily type out the example word "typewriter" without having learnt the full keyboard layout, because "typewriter" can be spelled purely on the top row of the keyboard.
A number of radically different layouts such as
DvorakThe Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is a keyboard layout patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey. Over the years several slight variations were designed by the team led by Dvorak or by ANSI...
have been proposed to reduce the perceived inefficiencies of QWERTY, but none have been able to displace the QWERTY layout; their proponents claim considerable advantages, but so far none has been widely used. The
Blickensderfer typewriterThe Blickensderfer Typewriter was designed by George C Blickensderfer in 1893. It was originally intended to compete with Remington desk typewriters, but ended up being known for its portability. Blickensderfer's typewriter contained only 250 parts compared to the 2,500 parts of a standard...
with its DHIATENSOR layout may have possibly been the first attempt at optimizing the keyboard layout for efficiency advantages.
Many non-Latin alphabets have keyboard layouts that have nothing to do with QWERTY. The Russian layout, for instance, puts the common trigrams ыва, про, and ить on adjacent keys so that they can be typed by rolling the fingers. The Greek layout, on the other hand, is a variant of QWERTY.
Typewriters were also made for
East Asian languagesEast Asian languages describe two notional groupings of languages in East and Southeast Asia:* Languages which have been greatly influenced by Classical Chinese and the Chinese writing system, in particular Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese .* The larger grouping of languages includes the...
with thousands of characters, such as
ChineseThe Chinese typewriter is an electromechanical typewriter invented and patented by Dr. Lin Yutang. The patent, No. 2613795, was filed on April 17, 1946 by Lin, and was issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 14, 1952. One of Lin's intentions was to help modernize China...
or
JapaneseThe first Japanese typewriter was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1929.- External links :*...
. They were not easy to operate, but professional typists used them for a long time until the development of electronic word processors and
laser printerA laser printer is a common type of computer printer that rapidly produces high quality text and graphics on plain paper. As with digital photocopiers and multifunction printers , laser printers employ a xerographic printing process, but differ from analog photocopiers in that the image is produced...
s in the 1980s. See the "Gallery" at the end of this article for pictures of East Asian mechanical typewriters.
On modern keyboards, the exclamation point is the shifted character on the 1 key, a direct result of the historical fact that these were the last characters to become "standard" on keyboards. Holding the spacebar pressed down usually suspended the carriage advance mechanism (a so-called "dead key" feature), allowing one to superimpose multiple keystrikes on a single location. The ¢ symbol (meaning cents) was located above the number 6 on old typewriters, while modern keyboards now have ^ instead.
Typewriter conventions
A number of typographical conventions originate from the widespread use of the typewriter, based on the characteristics and limitations of the typewriter itself. For example, the QWERTY keyboard typewriter did not include keys for the en dash and the em dash. To overcome this limitation, users typically typed more than one adjacent hyphen to approximate these symbols. This typewriter convention is still sometimes used today, even though modern computer word processing applications can input the correct en and em dashes for each font type. Other examples of typewriter practices that are sometimes still used in desktop publishing systems include inserting a double space at the end of a sentence, and the use of straight quotes (or "dumb quotes") as quotation marks and prime marks. The practice of underlining text in place of italics and the use of all capitals to provide emphasis are additional examples of typographical conventions that derived from the limitations of the typewriter keyboard that still carry on today.
Many older typewriters did not include a separate key for the numeral 1 or the exclamation point, and some even older ones also lack the numeral zero. Typists who trained on these machines learned the habit of using the lowercase letter l ("ell") for the digit 1, and the uppercase O for the zero. A cents symbol (¢) was created by combining a lower case 'c' with a slash character. The exclamation point was a three-stroke combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. These characters were omitted to simplify design and reduce manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys.
Computer jargon
Some terminology from the typewriter age has survived into the personal computer era. Examples include:
- backspace
Backspace is the keyboard key that originally pushed the typewriter carriage one position backwards, and in modern computer displays moves the cursor one position backwards, deletes the preceding character, and shifts back the text after it by one position....
(BS) – a keystroke that moved the cursor backwards one position (on a physical platen, this is the exact opposite of the space key), for the purpose of overtyping a character. This could be for combining characters (e.g. an apostrophe, backspace, and period make an exclamation point—a character missing on some early typewriters), or for correction such as with the correcting tape that developed later.
- carriage return
Carriage return, often shortened to return, refers to a control character or mechanism used to start a new line of text.Originally, the term "carriage return" referred to a mechanism or lever on a typewriter...
(CR) – indicating an end of line and return to the first column of text.
- cursor – a marker used to indicate where the next character will be printed. The cursor, however, was originally a term to describe the clear slider on a slide rule
The slide rule, also known colloquially as a slipstick, is a mechanical analog computer. The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but is not normally used for addition or subtraction.Slide rules come in a...
.
- cut and paste
In human-computer interaction, cut and paste and copy and paste offer user-interface interaction techniques for transferring text, data, files or objects from a source to a destination. Most ubiquitously, users require the ability to cut and paste sections of plain text...
– taking text, a numerical table, or an image and pasting it into a document. The term originated when such compound documents were created using manual paste upPaste up refers to a method of creating or laying out publication pages that predates the use of the now-standard computerized page design desktop publishing programs. Completed, or camera-ready, pages are known as mechanicals or mechanical art...
techniques for typographic page layoutPage layout is the part of graphic design that deals in the arrangement and style treatment of elements on a page.- History and development :...
. Actual brushes and paste were later replaced by hot-wax machines equipped with cylinders that applied melted adhesive wax to developed prints of "typeset" copy. This copy was then cut out with knives and rulers, and slid into position on layout sheets on slanting layout tables. After the "copy" had been correctly positioned and squared up using a T-square and set square, it was pressed down with a brayer, or roller. The whole point of the exercise was to create so-called "camera-ready copy" which existed only to be photographed and then printed, usually by offset lithography.
- dead key
A dead key is a special kind of a modifier key on a typewriter or computer keyboard that is typically used to attach a specific diacritic to a base letter. The dead key does not generate a character by itself but modifies the character generated by the key struck immediately after...
– describes a key that when typed, does not advance the typing position, thus allowing another character to be overstruck on top of the original character. This typically was used to combine diacritical marks with letters they modified (e.g. è can be generated by first pressing ` and then e). The dead key feature was often implemented mechanically by having the typist press and hold the space bar while typing the characters to be superimposed.
- line feed (LF), also called "newline" – moving the cursor
In computing, a cursor is an indicator used to show the position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input from a text input or pointing device. The flashing text cursor may be referred to as a caret in some cases...
to the next on-screen line of text in a word processor document.
- shift
Shift generally means to change . Shift may refer to: * Gear shift, to change gears in a car* Shift work, an employment practice* Shift * Shift , a change of level in music...
– a modifier keyIn computing, a modifier key is a special key on a computer keyboard that modifies the normal action of another key when the two are pressed in combination....
used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper case" characters; when pressed and held down, would shift a typewriter's mechanism to allow a different typebar impression (such as 'D' instead of 'd') to press into the ribbon and print on a page. The concept of a shift key or modifier key was later extended to Ctrl, Alt, and Super ("Windows" or "Apple") keys on modern computer keyboards. The generalized concept of a shift key reached its apotheosis in the MIT space-cadet keyboardThe space-cadet keyboard is a keyboard used on MIT Lisp machines and designed by Tom Knight, which inspired several still-current jargon terms in the field of computer science and influenced the design of Emacs...
.
- tab (HT), shortened from "horizontal tab" or "tabulator stop" – caused the print position to advance horizontally to the next pre-set "tab stop". This was used for typing lists and tables with vertical columns of numbers or words. The related term "vertical tab" (VT) never came into widespread use.
- tty
tty is a Unix command that prints to standard output the name of the terminal connected to standard input. The name of the program comes from teletypewriter, abbreviated "TTY".When the program runs, it will output something like this:$ tty/dev/pts/4...
, short for teletypewriter – used in Unix-likeA Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
operating systems to designate a given "terminal".
In the above listing, the two-letter codes in parentheses are abbreviations for the
ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
characters derived from typewriter usage.
Early social effects
When Remington first started marketing typewriters, the company assumed the machine would not be used for composing but for transcribing dictation, and that the person typing would be a woman. Flowers were printed on the casing of early models to make the machine seem more comfortable for women to use.
In the United States, women often started in the professional workforce as typists (called "typewriters" then); in fact, according to the 1910 U.S. census, 81 percent of typists were female. With more women coming out of the home and into offices, there was some concern about the effects this would have on the morals of society. The "typewriter girl" became part of the iconography of the early-20th-century office. The "
Tijuana bibleTijuana bibles were pornographic comic books produced in the United States from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Their popularity peaked during the Great Depression era...
s" — adult comic books produced in Mexico for the American market, starting in the 1930s — often featured women typists. In one panel, a businessman in a three-piece suit, ogling his secretary’s thigh, says, "Miss Higby, are you ready for—ahem!—er—dictation?"
In spite of these jokes, becoming a typist was one of the few "respectable" jobs an unmarried woman could hold outside the home; the few other choices included teaching, and possibly retail salesgirl.
The famous quote by Marcus Glenn, "Live by the typewriter, die by the typewriter!" also dates from this period.
Early adopters
The philosopher
Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
used a typewriter in an attempt to stem his migraine headaches and his incipient blindness.
Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
claimed in
his autobiographyAutobiography of Mark Twain or Mark Twain’s Autobiography refers to a lengthy set of reminiscences, dictated, for the most part, in the last few years of American author Mark Twain's life and left in typescript and manuscript at his death...
that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewritten manuscript, for
The Adventures of Tom SawyerThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the Town of "St...
(1876). Typewriter collector and historian Darryl Rehr challenges his claim by stating that Twain's memory was faulty and that the first novel submitted in typed form was
Life on the MississippiLife on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain, of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi many years after the War....
(1883, also by Twain).
Henry JamesHenry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
dictated to a typist.
English actress Fanny Kemble, after settling in the United States, wrote regularly for the Atlantic Monthly. She used the earliest Remington typewriter to produce typescripts. In correspondence between Kemble and her nephew Owen Wister (later author of "The Virginian") he asks about - and she describes - her "writing machine."
Others
E. E. CummingsEdward Estlin Cummings , popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings , was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright...
may have been the first poet to deliberately use a typewriter for poetic effect. His grasshopper poem is perhaps the most famous example.
William S. BurroughsWilliam Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
wrote in some of his novels — and possibly believed — that "a machine he called the 'Soft Typewriter' was writing our lives, and our books, into existence," according to a book review in
The New Yorker. And, in the film adaptation of his novel,
Naked Lunch, his typewriter is a living, insect-like entity (voiced by Canadian actor Peter Boretski) and actually dictates the book to him.
Writer Zack Helm and director Mark Forster explored the potential mechanics of the "Soft Typewriter" philosophy in the movie
Stranger than Fiction ... in which the very act of typing up her handwritten notes gives a fiction writer the power to kill or otherwise manipulate her main character in real life.
Ernest HemingwayErnest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
used to write his books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter suitably placed on a tall bookshelf. This typewriter, still on its bookshelf, is kept in
Finca VigiaFinca Vigía was the home of Ernest Hemingway in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, , and now houses a museum.-History of the property :...
, Hemingway's
HavanaHavana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
house (now a museum) where he lived until 1960, the year before his death.
Jack KerouacJean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
, a fast typist at 100 words per minute, typed
On the RoadOn the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. It is a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. It is often considered a defining work of...
on a roll of paper so he would not be interrupted by having to change the paper. Within two weeks of starting to write
On the Road, Kerouac had one single-spaced paragraph, 120 feet long. Some scholars say the scroll was shelf paper; others contend it was a Thermo-fax roll; another theory is that the roll consisted of sheets of architect’s paper taped together.
Another fast typist of the
Beat GenerationThe Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
was
Richard BrautiganRichard Gary Brautigan was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America.- Early life :...
, who said that he thought out the plots of his books in detail beforehand, then typed them out at speeds approaching 90 to 100 words a minute.
Tom RobbinsThomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins Thomas Eugene "Tom" Robbins (born July 22, 1936 is an American author. His best-selling novels are serio-comic, often wildly poetic stories with a strong social and philosophical undercurrent, an irreverent bent, and scenes extrapolated from...
waxed philosophical about the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write
Still Life with WoodpeckerStill Life With Woodpecker is the third novel by Tom Robbins, concerning the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. As with most of Robbins's books, it encompasses a broad range of topics, from aliens and redheads to consumerism, the building of bombs, romance, royalty,...
. He eventually did away with it because it is too complicated and inhuman for the writing of
poetryPoetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
.
After completing the novel
Beautiful LosersBeautiful Losers is a novel by Leonard Cohen. Published in 1966 by McClelland and Stewart, it was the Canadian novelist-poet's second novel, and precedes his career as a singer-songwriter...
,
Leonard CohenLeonard Norman Cohen, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships...
is said to have flung his typewriter into the
Aegean SeaThe Aegean Sea[p] is an elongated embayment of the Mediterranean Sea located between the southern Balkan and Anatolian peninsulas, i.e., between the mainlands of Greece and Turkey. In the north, it is connected to the Marmara Sea and Black Sea by the Dardanelles and Bosporus...
.
Don MarquisDonald Robert Perry Marquis was a humorist, journalist, and author. He was variously a novelist, poet, newspaper columnist, and playwright. He is remembered best for creating the characters "Archy" and "Mehitabel", supposed authors of humorous verse.-Life:...
purposely used the limitations of a typewriter (or more precisely, a particular typist) in his
archy and mehitabelArchy and Mehitabel is the title of a series of newspaper columns written by Don Marquis beginning in 1916. Written as fictional social commentary and intended as a space-filler to allow Marquis to meet the challenge of writing a daily newspaper column six days a week, archy and mehitabel is...
series of newspaper columns, which were later compiled into a series of books. According to his literary conceit, a
cockroachCockroaches are insects of the order Blattaria or Blattodea, of which about 30 species out of 4,500 total are associated with human habitations...
named "Archy" was a reincarnated
free-verseFree verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
poet, who would type articles overnight by jumping onto the keys of a manual typewriter. The writings were typed completely in lower case, because of the cockroach's inability to generate the heavy force needed to operate the shift key. The lone exception is the poem "CAPITALS AT LAST" from
archys life of mehitabel, written in 1933.
Late users
Andy Rooney and William F. Buckley Jr. (1982) were among many writers who were very reluctant to switch from typewriters to computers.
David McCulloughDavid Gaub McCullough is an American author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award....
bought himself a second-hand Royal typewriter in 1965 and it has been the sole piece of technology in producing the manuscripts of every book this two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author has published.
Hunter S. ThompsonHunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...
kept a typewriter in his kitchen and is believed to have written his "Hey, Rube!" column for ESPN.com on a typewriter. He used a typewriter until his suicide in 2005.
Theodore KaczynskiTheodore John "Ted" Kaczynski , also known as the "Unabomber" , is an American mathematician, social critic, anarcho-primitivist, and Neo-Luddite who engaged in a mail bombing campaign that spanned nearly 20 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois,...
, the Unabomber, wrote his manifesto as well as his letters on a manual typewriter.
David SedarisDavid Sedaris is a Grammy Award-nominated American humorist, writer, comedian, bestselling author, and radio contributor....
used a typewriter to write his essay collections through
Me Talk Pretty One DayMe Talk Pretty One Day, published in 2000, is a bestselling collection of essays by American humorist David Sedaris. The book is separated into two parts...
at least.
William GibsonWilliam Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
used a Hermes 2000 model manual typewriter to write
NeuromancerNeuromancer is a 1984 novel by William Gibson, a seminal work in the cyberpunk genre and the first winner of the science-fiction "triple crown" — the Nebula Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Hugo Award. It was Gibson's debut novel and the beginning of the Sprawl trilogy...
and half of
Count ZeroCount Zero is a science fiction novel written by William Gibson, originally published 1986. It is the second volume of the Sprawl trilogy, which begins with Neuromancer and concludes with Mona Lisa Overdrive, and is a canonical example of the cyberpunk sub-genre.Count Zero was serialized by Isaac...
before a mechanical failure and lack of replacement parts forced him to upgrade to an
Apple IIcThe Apple IIc, the fourth model in the Apple II series of personal computers, was Apple Computer’s first endeavor to produce a portable computer. The end result was a notebook-sized version of the Apple II that could be transported from place to place...
computer.
Harlan EllisonHarlan Jay Ellison is an American writer. His principal genre is speculative fiction.His published works include over 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays, a wide range of criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media...
has used typewriters for his entire career, and when he was no longer able to have them repaired, learned to do it himself; he has repeatedly stated his belief that computers are bad for writing ("Art is not supposed to be easier!").
Author
Cormac McCarthyCormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and modernist genres. He received the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road...
continues to write his novels on an
Olivetti Lettera 32The Olivetti Lettera 32 is a portable mechanical typewriter designed by Marcello Nizzoli for Olivetti in 1963 as the successor of the popular Olivetti Lettera 22...
typewriter to the present day. In 2009, the Lettera he obtained from a pawn shop in 1963, on which nearly all his novels and screenplays have been written, was auctioned for charity at
Christie'sChristie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house.- History :The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766...
for $254,500 USD; McCarthy obtained an identical replacement for $20 to continue writing on.
Will SelfWilliam Woodard "Will" Self is an English novelist and short story writer. His fictional style is known for being satirical, grotesque, and fantastical. He is a prolific commentator on contemporary British life, with regular appearances on Newsnight and Question Time...
explains why he uses a manual typewriter: "I think the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head.".
In music
- The composer Pablo Sorozábal
Pablo Sorozábal Mariezcurrena was a Basque-Spanish composer.Trained in San Sebastián, Madrid and Leipzig; then in Berlin, where he preferred Friedrich Koch as composition teacher to Arnold Schönberg, whose theories he disliked. It was in Germany that he made his conducting debut, and the rostrum...
includes in a scene of his zarzuelaZarzuela is a Spanish lyric-dramatic genre that alternates between spoken and sung scenes, the latter incorporating operatic and popular song, as well as dance...
La eterna canción (1945) a typewriter, accompanied by an orchestra and vocal soloists: the scene is in a police station, where a policeman is deposing witnesses, and is singing while he types the report.
- The composer Leroy Anderson
Leroy Anderson was an American composer of short, light concert pieces, many of which were introduced by the Boston Pops Orchestra under the direction of Arthur Fiedler...
wrote The Typewriter, for orchestra and typewriter, in 1950. It has since been used as the theme for numerous radio programs. The solo instrument is a real typewriter played by a percussionist.
- A suite of songs entitled "Green Typewriters" is on The Olivia Tremor Control's album Dusk At Cubist Castle, and the sounds of typewriters can be heard in a few of the sections.
- Estonian prog-rock band In Spe features typewriter as a rhythmic instruments in their album Typewriter Concerto in D.
- American singer-songwriter Marian Call accompanies herself on a typewriter on "Nerd Anthem"
Other
- The word "typewriter" is often cited as the longest English word that can be typed using only one row of keys of a QWERTY keyboard. This is untrue, since "rupturewort" (a kind of flowering plant) has 11 letters, while "typewriter" has only 10. Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary defines "uropyoureter" (12 letters).
- Typewriters are used to write typecast blogs in which text is typed on a manual typewriter and then scanned for posting on blogs, a practice called typecasting
A typecast is a form of blogging by media type and publishing in the format of a blog, but differentiated by the predominant use of and focus on text created with a typewriter and then scanned rather than text entered directly into a computer...
.
- A sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram, that is, a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet...
" can be used to check typewriters quickly.
- The early Resident Evil video games used a typewriter as the save feature, and used one ink ribbon per save.
- The opening title sequence
A Title Sequence is the method by which cinematic films or television programs present their title, key production and cast members, or both, utilizing conceptual visuals and sound...
of Murder She Wrote prominently features Jessica FletcherJessica Fletcher is a fictional character portrayed by veteran Tony-winning actress Angela Lansbury on the American television series Murder, She Wrote...
touch typing a manuscript with a 1940's style Royal Typewriter. Although in one episode Fletcher rejects a character's offer to sell her a computer to replace the old Royal (which he calls a "dinosaur"), towards the series end, she, too begins using a computer and word processing typewriter.
Forensic examination
Typewritten documents may be examined by
forensic document examinersQuestioned document examination is the forensic science discipline pertaining to documents that are in dispute in a court of law...
. This is done primarily to determine 1) the make and/or model of the typewriter used to produce a document, or 2) whether or not a particular suspect typewriter might have been used to produce a document. In some situations, an ink or correction ribbon may also be examined.
The determination of a make and/or model of typewriter is a 'classification' problem and several systems have been developed for this purpose. These include the original Haas Typewriter Atlases (Pica version) and (Non-Pica version) and the TYPE system developed by Dr. Philip Bouffard, the
Royal Canadian Mounted PoliceThe Royal Canadian Mounted Police , literally ‘Royal Gendarmerie of Canada’; colloquially known as The Mounties, and internally as ‘The Force’) is the national police force of Canada, and one of the most recognized of its kind in the world. It is unique in the world as a national, federal,...
's Termatrex Typewriter classification system, and the
InterpolInterpol, whose full name is the International Criminal Police Organization – INTERPOL, is an organization facilitating international police cooperation...
's Typewriter classification system, among others.
Because of the tolerances of the mechanical parts, slight variation in the alignment of the letters and their uneven wear, each typewriter has an individual "signature" or "
fingerprintA fingerprint in its narrow sense is an impression left by the friction ridges of a human finger. In a wider use of the term, fingerprints are the traces of an impression from the friction ridges of any part of a human hand. A print from the foot can also leave an impression of friction ridges...
", which may permit a typewritten document to be
traced backForensic identification is the application of forensic science, or "forensics", and technology to identify specific objects from the trace evidence they leave, often at a crime scene or the scene of an accident. Forensic means "for the courts"....
to the typewriter on which it was produced. For devices utilizing replaceable components, such as a typeball element, any association may be restricted to a specific element, rather than to the typewriter as a whole.
The earliest reference in fictional literature to the potential identification of a typewriter as having produced a document was by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote "A Case of Identity" in 1891. In non-fiction, the first document examiner to describe how a typewriter might be identified was William E. Hagan who wrote, in 1894, "All typewriter machines, even when using the same kind of type, become more or less peculiar by use as to the work done by them". Other early discussions of the topic were provided by A.S. Osborn in his 1908 treatise,
Typewriting as Evidence, and again in his 1929 textbook,
Questioned Documents. A modern description of the examination procedure is laid out in ASTM Standard E2494-08 (Standard Guide for Examination of Typewritten Items).
Typewriter examination was used in the
Leopold and LoebNathan Freudenthal Leopold, Jr. and Richard Albert Loeb , more commonly known as "Leopold and Loeb", were two wealthy University of Michigan alumni and University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life imprisonment.The duo were...
and
Alger HissAlger Hiss was an American lawyer, government official, author, and lecturer. He was involved in the establishment of the United Nations both as a U.S. State Department and U.N. official...
cases. In the
Eastern BlocThe term Eastern Bloc or Communist Bloc refers to the former communist states of Eastern and Central Europe, generally the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...
, typewriters (together with
printing pressA printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
es, copy machines, and later computer printers) were a controlled technology, with
secret policeSecret police are a police agency which operates in secrecy and beyond the law to protect the political power of an individual dictator or an authoritarian political regime....
in charge of maintaining files of the typewriters and their owners. In the
Soviet UnionThe Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, the
First DepartmentThe First Department was in charge of secrecy and political security of the workplace of every enterprise or institution of the Soviet Union that dealt with any kind of technical or scientific information or had printing capabilities .Every branch of the Central Statistical Administration and its...
of each organization sent data on organization's typewriters to the
KGBThe KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
. This posed a significant risk for
dissidentA dissident, broadly defined, is a person who actively challenges an established doctrine, policy, or institution. When dissidents unite for a common cause they often effect a dissident movement....
s and
samizdatSamizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...
authors.
The ribbon can be read vertically, although only if it has not been typed over more than once. This can be very hard to do as it does not include spaces, but can be done, giving even a typewriter a "memory".
See also
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- Carbon paper
Carbon paper is paper coated on one side with a layer of a loosely bound dry ink or pigmented coating, usually bound with wax. It is used for making one or more copies simultaneous with the creation of an original document...
- Correction paper
Correction paper, or correction film, its plastic based equivalent, is a tab of plastic with one side coated with white correction material. It is used to correct typing errors made when using a typewriter. When inserted between the paper and the typebar, and the ribbon select switched to...
- Duplicating machines
Duplicating machines were the predecessors of modern document-reproduction technology. They have now been replaced by digital duplicators, scanners, laser printers and photocopiers, but for many years they were the primary means of reproducing documents for limited-run distribution.Like the...
- Liquid Paper
Liquid Paper is a brand of the Newell Rubbermaid company that sells correction fluid, correction pen and correction tape. Mainly used to correct typewriting in the past, correction products now mostly cover handwriting mistakes.- Brand history :...
- Sentence spacing
- Typewriter desk
A typewriter desk is an antique desk form meant to hold a typewriter in an efficient position for the typist. This position is usually a few inches lower than the 29 inch height of the typical antique desktop....
- Typing
Typing is the process of inputting text into a device, such as a typewriter, cell phone, computer, or a calculator, by pressing keys on a keyboard. It can be distinguished from other means of input, such as the use of pointing devices like the computer mouse, and text input via speech...
- Word processing
Word processing is the creation of documents using a word processor. It can also refer to advanced shorthand techniques, sometimes used in specialized contexts with a specially modified typewriter.-External links:...
- Writing
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
Printers and fonts
- Daisy wheel printer
Daisy wheel printers use an impact printing technology invented in 1969 by David S. Lee at Diablo Data Systems. It uses interchangeable pre-formed type elements, each with typically 96 glyphs, to generate high-quality output comparable to premium typewriters such as the IBM Selectric, but two to...
- Line printer
The line printer is a form of high speed impact printer in which one line of type is printed at a time. They are mostly associated with the early days of computing, but the technology is still in use...
- Teleprinter
A teleprinter is a electromechanical typewriter that can be used to communicate typed messages from point to point and point to multipoint over a variety of communication channels that range from a simple electrical connection, such as a pair of wires, to the use of radio and microwave as the...
- Typeface
In typography, a typeface is the artistic representation or interpretation of characters; it is the way the type looks. Each type is designed and there are thousands of different typefaces in existence, with new ones being developed constantly....
- Typesetting
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types.Typesetting requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner...
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Alphanumeric keyboards
- Alphanumeric keyboard
- AZERTY
AZERTY is a specific layout for the characters of the Latin alphabet on typewriter keys and computer keyboards. The layout takes its name from the first six letters to appear on the first row of alphabetical keys...
- Chorded keyboard
A keyset or chorded keyboard is a computer input device that allows the user to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together, like playing a "chord" on a piano...
- Dvorak Keyboard
- Key
A push-button or simply button is a simple switch mechanism for controlling some aspect of a machine or a process. Buttons are typically made out of hard material, usually plastic or metal. The surface is usually flat or shaped to accommodate the human finger or hand, so as to be easily depressed...
s
- Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
- Modifier key
In computing, a modifier key is a special key on a computer keyboard that modifies the normal action of another key when the two are pressed in combination....
- Projection keyboard
A projection keyboard is a form of computer input device whereby the image of a virtual keyboard is projected onto surface: when a user's fingers are placed on the projected "keys", the device translates them into keystrokes.- History :...
- QWERTY
QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...
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Corporations and typewriters
- IBM Executive series typewriter
- IBM Selectric typewriter
The IBM Selectric typewriter was a highly successful model line of electric typewriters introduced by IBM on July 31, 1961.Instead of the "basket" of individual typebars that swung up to strike the ribbon and page in a traditional typewriter, the Selectric had a type element that rotated and...
- Smith Corona
Smith Corona or the SCM Corporation is a US typewriter and calculator company. Once a large U.S. manufacturer, the company experienced sales declines in typewriters in the mid-1980s due to the introduction of PC-based word processing...
- Xerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
Used as
computerA computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
peripherals
- Friden Flexowriter
The Friden Flexowriter was a teleprinter, a heavy duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape....
- JOHNNIAC
The JOHNNIAC was an early computer built by RAND that was based on the von Neumann architecture that had been pioneered on the IAS machine. It was named in honor of von Neumann, short for John v. Neumann Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer...
- Teletype ASR-33
- UNIVAC 1102
The UNIVAC 1102 or ERA 1102 was designed by Engineering Research Associates for the United States Air Force's Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tullahoma, Tennessee in response to a request for proposal issued in 1950...
Non-Latin typewriters
- Chinese typewriter
The Chinese typewriter is an electromechanical typewriter invented and patented by Dr. Lin Yutang. The patent, No. 2613795, was filed on April 17, 1946 by Lin, and was issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 14, 1952. One of Lin's intentions was to help modernize China...
- Japanese typewriter
The first Japanese typewriter was invented by Kyota Sugimoto in 1929.- External links :*...
Patents
– Type Writer Machine – typewriter ribbon, by George K. Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee.
Further reading
- Adler, M.H. (1973). The Writing Machine: A History of the Typewriter. Allen and Unwin.
- Beeching, Wilfred A. (1974). Century of the Typewriter. St. Martin's Press. pp. 276 Beeching was the Director of the British Typewriter Museum.
External links