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VIDEORequiem For The Typewriter
By
Scott Reeves Jul 08, 2008 10:52 am
A history of those marvelous machines.
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A newspaper did a good job telling folks what happened yesterday. Then you could wrap fish in it.
Sadly, typewriters have gone the way of the dodo bird - or newspapers, come to think of it. This is unfortunate. When the typewriter was new, it changed the way folks lived and worked, freeing women from hoop skirts and housework or crushing hours at a factory. Personal computers manufactured by Apple (AAPL), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) long ago knocked the typewriter from its once lofty perch as the supreme office productivity tool. Kids who’ve never known a world without Intel (INTC) or AMD (AMD) semiconductors consider the trusty old clackers a notch or two below the slide rule on the evolutionary scale. But many writers had an emotional connection with their typewriters that doesn’t exist with a PC.
Typewriters were once a novelty and a source of awe that sparked endless conversation the way a high-end stereo from Sony (SNE) or a classic muscle car such as the Pontiac GTO, a product of General Motors (GM) does today.
Mark Twain is said to be the first major author to use a typewriter: The manuscript for Life on the Mississippi arrived at his publisher neatly typed. But Twain, who frequently had his differences with machinery, didn’t want anyone to know that he used one of the newfangled devices. Remington, which pioneered manufacture of the typewriter, received this hot note from Twain:
"Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, for the reason that I never could write a letter to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only describe the machine but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc. etc. I don’t like to write letters, so I don’t want people to know that I own this curiosity breeding little joker.”
The origin of Twain’s torment began in 1714 when Queen Anne awarded a patent to engineer Henry Mill for:
“An artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, whereby all writings whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so that the said machine or method may be of great use in settlements and publick records, the impression being deeper and more lasting than any other writing, and not to be erased, or counterfeited without manifest discovery.”
But the machine was a bust. It wasn’t until 1829 when American William Austin Burt received a patent for a “typographer” that the idea became more or less -- mostly less -- practical. The monstrosity looked like a butcher’s block and performed its intended purpose about as well as one.
The use of metal levers to strike letters, numerals, punctuation marks and symbols came later. The moveable carriage was the bright idea of Charles Thurber in 1843, but nothing much changed at the office because a man dipping a pen into an inkwell and writing by hand could outpace the machine.
In 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer in Milwaukee, worked with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule to develop a machine that could print numbers on the pages of a book. They soon asked a basic question: Why not letters? By 1873, they had a workable “Type-Writer” and contacted E. Remington, & Sons, best known for its guns and sewing machines, to manufacture it. The first model had the general shape of later manual machines, but a foot-treadle returned the carriage. The new machine was billed as “the size of a sewing machine, and an ornament to an office, study or sitting room.”
The contraption printed on the underside of the platen, forcing the typist to remove the paper from the machine to see if any mistakes had been made. Corrections were impossible. The machine also typed only in capital letters. In 1878, Remington introduced a new model that included upper- and lowercase letters and the soon-to-be-standard hand-operated return bar. (This was a godsend to reporters, who could now triumphantly announce the completion of a line by returning the carriage with a slam and flourish worthy of Liberace.)
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