Hansen Writing Ball
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The Hansen Writing Ball is one of the most finely crafted and impressive of the early typewriters. It 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 was called the skrivekugle. The Hansen ball was a combination of stunning design and ergonomic innovations, but like most of the early 19th century typewriters, it did not allow the paper to be seen as it passed through the device.
Its distinctive feature was an arrangement of 52 keys on a large brass hemisphere, causing the machine to resemble a giant pin cushion. From the book Hvem er Skrivekuglens Opfinder, written by Malling-Hansen's daughter Johanne Agerskov, we know how Malling-Hansen made experiments with a model of his writing ball made out of porcelain. He tried out different placements of the letters on the keys, to work out the placement that lead to the fastest writing speed. He ended up placing the most frequently used letters to be touched by the fastest writing fingers, and also placed most of the vowels to the left and the consonants to the right. This together with the short pistons which went directly through the ball, made the writing speed of the writing ball very fast.
The first models typed on a paper attached to a cylinder, and included an electromagnetic escapement for the Ball, thus making Malling-Hansen's machine the first electric typewriter. He made several improvements on his invention throughout the 1870's and -80's, and in 1874 he patented the next model, and now the cylinder was replaced by a flat mechanical paper-frame. The electromagnetic battery was still used to move the paper along as the Ball typed upon it, and the design was so ingenious that few errors were possible. Malling-Hansen improved further on his design, and created a semi-cylindrical frame to hold one sheet of paper. This best known model was first patented in 1875, and now the battery was replaced by a mechanical escapement. All these improvements made for a simpler and more compact writing apparatus.
Friedrich Nietzsche (who called it a schreibkugel) was the most famous user of the Hansen Ball. It was exhibited at a great industrial exhibition in Copenhagen in 1873, at the world exhibition in Vienna in 1873, and at the Paris exhibition or Exposition Universelle (1878). All through the 1870s it won several awards.
The writing ball was sold in many countries in Europe, and it's known that it was still in use in offices in London as late as 1909. But due to its hand crafted production, it was overtaken in the market by the mass produced Sholes-Glidden machine which E. Remington and Sons started to make in 1873.
Malling-Hansen also invented a very fast speed writing machine for stenography, called the Takygraf, and a copying teknique called the Xerografi- both invented in 1872.
More or less intact Hansen balls have fetched hundreds of thousands of Euros in auctions. Few remain in existence today.
