Typewriter

Mechanical desktop typewriters, such as this Underwood Five, were long-time standards of government agencies, newsrooms, and offices.

Old style Hermes typewriter with jammed typebars

A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with a set of keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. From their invention before 1870 through much of the 20th century, typewriters were indispensable tools for many professional writers and in business offices. By the end of the 1980s, word processors and personal computers had largely replaced the tasks previously accomplished with typewriters in the western world. Typewriters, however, remain in use in various areas of the world.

Notable typewriter manufacturer companies have included E. Remington and Sons, IBM, Imperial Typewriters, Oliver Typewriter Company, Olivetti, Royal Typewriter Company, Smith Corona, and Underwood Typewriter Company.

History

Early innovations

Even though many modern typewriters have one of several similar familiar designs, the invention of the typewriter was incremental, provided by numerous inventors working independently or in competition with each other over a series of decades. As with the automobile, telephone, and telegraph, 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.^[1]

In 1714, Henry Mill obtained a patent in Britain for a machine that, from the patent, appears to have been similar to a typewriter, but nothing further is known. Other early developers of typewriting machines include Pellegrino Turri, who also invented carbon paper. Many of these early machines, including Turri's, were developed to enable the blind to write.

In 1829, William Austin Burt patented a machine called the "Typowriter" which, in common with many other early machines, is listed as the "first typewriter". The Science Museum (London) 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.^[2] 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 embosser from the 1970s more than they resemble the modern keyboard typewriter.

By the mid-1800s, 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 Thurber developed multiple patents, of which his first in 1843, was developed as an aid to the blind, such as the 1845 Chirographer. In 1855, the Italian Giuseppe Ravizza created a prototype typewriter called Cembalo scrivano o macchina da scrivere a tasti ("Scribe harpsichord, 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 I, 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 American article^[3] and inspired other inventors. Between 1864 and 1867 Peter Mitterhofer, a carpenter from South Tyrol (then part of Austria) developed several models and a fully functioning prototype typewriter in 1867.

Hansen Writing Ball

In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented the Hansen Writing Ball, 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 solenoid 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 Ball 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.^[4][5][6]

The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1867 by C. Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 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.^[7][8][9] The patent (US 79,265) was sold for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons (then famous as a manufacturer of sewing machines) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. This was the origin of the term typewriter. Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York. It had a QWERTY 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, however, as the type bars struck upward against the bottom of the platen 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 that 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 Oliver typewriter, were introduced in 1895. The older style continued in production to as late as 1915.

Proportional Spacing: 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.

Standardization

Typebars which became entangled when the six keys operating the typebars were pressed simultaneously

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 typebar that had the corresponding letter molded, in reverse, into its striking head. To have letters typed in exact location, the typebar was guided all its way till the ribbon by segment. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of inked fabric) stretched in front of a cylindrical platen that moved back and forth. The paper was rolled around by the typewriter's platen, which was then rotated by the "carriage return" lever (at the far left, and sometimes on the far right) into position for each new line of text.

A significant innovation was the Shift key. This key physically "shifted" either the basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the whole carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". This means that a different portion of the bar would 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 Lock) allowed the shift operation to be maintained indefinitely. Unlike today's Caps Lock, however, the Shift Lock was a two-key operation: Shift would be held down, and the Shift Lock (normally directly above) would be pressed simultaneously, triggering a simple lock mechanism. To unlock, Shift was tapped again, releasing both keys and unshifting the basket.

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.

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.^[10] It failed, leading some observers to the conclusion that the "clickety-clack" of the typical typewriter was a consumer preference.^[11] 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^[10] 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 Edison 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.

The first electric typewriter was produced by the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company, of Stamford, Connecticut, 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 due to the fact that 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 1909, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletype machine. The Krums' machine also used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. While innovative, neither of these machines reached business or personal consumers.

James Fields Smathers 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 Rand 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, Delco, a division of General Motors, 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.

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.

IBM and Remington Rand electric typewriters were the leading models until IBM introduced the IBM Selectric typewriter 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 former platen-carrying carriage moving the paper across a stationary print position.

IBM Selectric II (dual Latin/Hebrew typeball and keyboard)

Selectric II dual Latin/Hebrew Hadar typeball

Replaceable IBM typeballs with clip, 2 Euro coin for scale

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. Selectric mechanisms were widely incorporated into computer terminals in the 1960s, as they possessed obvious advantages:

• The mechanism was reasonably fast and jam-free
• It could produce high quality output compared to competitors such as Teletype machines
• It could be initiated by a short, low-force mechanical action
• It did not require the movement of a heavy "type basket" to shift between lower- and upper-case
• It did not require the platen roller assembly to move from side to side (a problem with continuous-feed paper)

The IBM 2741 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 commercial typewriters.

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.

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 didn't carry them from the facility).^[12]

Composer output showing Roman, Bold and Italic fonts available by changing the type ball

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,^[13] no proportionally spaced Selectric office typewriter was ever introduced. There were, however, two other machines with fully proportional spacing: the expensive Selectric Composer, which was capable of right-margin justification and was considered a typesetting machine rather than a typewriter, and the more reasonably priced IBM Electronic Typewriter 50, which was capable of proportional spacing but not right-justifying. By 1970, as offset printing 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.

Some of IBM's advances were later adopted in less expensive machines from competitors. For example, Smith-Corona 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 was typed, and copies were then made from it.

Electronic typewriter - the final stage in typewriter development. A 1989 Canon Typestar 110

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 processors with internal memory and cartridge, magnetic card or diskette external memory-storage devices. 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.

Due to falling sales, IBM sold its typewriter division in 1990 to Lexmark.

In short, as far as typewriters and word processors are concerned, the 1970s and early 1980s were a time of transition. 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. It was common for clerical staff to have to learn several new systems, one after the other, in just a few years, the pace of change was so rapid. 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.

Typewriter/printer hybrids

Towards the end of the commercial popularity of typewriters in the 1980s, 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 teletypes with impact pin-based printing engines was not adequate for the demanding quality required for typed output and alternative thermal transfer technologies used in thermal label printers had become technically feasible for typewriters.

IBM produced a series of typewriters called Thermotronic with letter-quality output and correcting tape along with printers tagged Quietwriter. Brother extended the life of their typewriter product line with similar products. DEC 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 disruption posed by word processors 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.

The increasing dominance of personal computers, desktop publishing, the introduction of low-cost, truly high-quality, laser and inkjet printer technologies, and the pervasive use of web publishing, e-mail and other electronic communication techniques have largely replaced typewriters in the United States.

As of 2009, typewriters still were 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 paper forms.^[14]

Russian typewriters use the Cyrillic alphabet, which has made the Azerbaijani reconversion from Cyrillic to Roman 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 in common use. In Latin America the typewriters used are most often Brazilian models (Brazil continues to produce mechanical typewriters to the present day), whereas in Africa and India, they are often old or used machines from an Indian company called Godrej.

Legacy

Keyboard layouts: "QWERTY" and others

The "QWERTY" layout of typewriter keys became a de facto standard and continues to be used long after the reasons for its adoption (including reduction of key/lever entanglements) have ceased to apply.

The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "QWERTY" 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.^[15] 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.^[16] The QWERTY layout of keys has become the de facto standard for English-language typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages written in the Latin alphabet sometimes use variants of the QWERTY layouts, such as the French AZERTY, the Italian QZERTY and the German QWERTZ 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. A popular story suggests that it was designed and used for early typewriters exactly because it was so inefficient; it slowed a typist down so as to reduce the frequency of the typewriter's typebars wedging together and jamming the machine. 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. 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.^[16][17] This allowed the user to type faster without jamming. Unfortunately, no definitive explanation for the QWERTY keyboard has been found, and typewriter aficionados continue to debate the issue.

A number of radically different layouts such as Dvorak 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 typewriter with its DHIATENSOR layout may have possibly been the first attempt at optimizing the keyboard layout for efficiency advantages.

Many old typewriters do not contain a separate key for the numeral 1 or the exclamation point, and some even older ones also lack the numeral zero. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the lowercase letter l for the digit 1, and the uppercase O for the zero. 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. On modern keyboards, the exclamation point is the shifted character on the 1 key, a direct result of the heritage that these were the last characters to become "standard" on keyboards. Holding the spacebar pressed down usually suspended the carriage advance mechanism, allowing to type multiple symbols on a single location. The ¢ symbol (meaning cents) was located above the number 6 on old typewriters. Modern keyboards now use ^ above the 6.

A Chinese typewriter produced by Shuangge, with 2,450 keys.

Japanese typewriter SH-280, a small machine with 2,268 keys.

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 languages with thousands of characters, such as Chinese or Japanese. They were not easy to operate, but professional typists used them for a long time until the development of electronic word processors in the 1980s.

Computer jargon

Several words of the typewriter age have survived into the personal computer era. Examples include:

• backspace – 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.
• carbon copy – now in its abbreviated form "CC" designating copies of email messages (with no carbon paper involved).
• carriage return (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.
• cut and paste – taking text, a table, or an image and pasting it into a document. The term originated when such compound documents were created using manual paste up techniques: actual brushes and paste were very early on replaced by hot-wax machines equipped with cylinders that applied melted wax to developed prints of "typeset" copy. This copy was then cut with knives and rulers and slid into position on layout sheets on slanting 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.
• line feed (LF), aka "newline" – standing for moving the cursor to the next on-screen line of text in a word processor document.
• Shift – a modifier key used to type capital letters and other alternate "upper" characters, would previously shift a typewriter's print carriage to allow a different stamp (such as 'D' instead of 'd') to press into the ribbon and print on a page.
• tty, short for teletypewriter, is used in Unix-like operating systems to designate a given "terminal".

Typewriter conventions

Illustrates a number of typographic conventions stemming from the mechanical limitations of the typewriter: two hyphens in place of an em dash, double sentence spacing, prime marks in place of quotation marks, and double carriage returns between paragraphs

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 obstacle, 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.^[18] 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,^[19][20] and the use of prime marks (or "dumb quotes") as quotation marks.^[21] 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.^[22]

Effect on culture

"Get out! Can't you see I'm busy." Early 20th century humorous postcard; boss man puts his arm around female typist.

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-twentieth-century office. The "Tijuana bibles"—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?"^[11]

The famous quote by Marcus Glenn, "Live by the typewriter, die by the typewriter!" also dates from this period.

Correction methods

An old typewriter on display at the Historic Archive and Museum of Mining in Pachuca, Mexico

According to the standards taught in secretarial schools in the mid-1900s, a business letter 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 several methods were used.

The traditional erasing method involved the use of a special typewriter eraser made of hard rubber that contained an abrasive material. Some were thin, flat disks, pink or gray, approximately 2 in (50 mm) in diameter by 1/8 in (3 mm) 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.

Erasing a set of carbon copies was particularly difficult, and called for the use of a device called an eraser shield (a stainless steel rectangle about 2" x 3" 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 each copy, the typist 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.

Paper companies produced a special form of typewriter paper called erasable bond (for example, Eaton's Corrasable Bond). 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.

In the 1950s and 1960s, correction fluid made its appearance, under brand names such as Liquid Paper, Wite-Out and Tipp-Ex; it was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham. 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.

In actual practice, more than one correction method was often used. 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.

Dry correction products (such as correction paper) 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 this black or white powder could be partly rubbed off with handling, and so such corrections were generally not acceptable in legal documents.

The pinnacle of this kind of technology was the IBM 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 reversing and overstriking the previous characters with minimal marring of the paper. White cover-up or plastic lift-off correction ribbons are used with fabric ink or carbon film typing ribbons, respectively.

Authors and writers who had unusual relationships with typewriters

William Faulkner's Underwood Universal Portable sits in his office at Rowan Oak, which is now maintained by the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a museum.

Early adopters

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter in an attempt to stem his migraine headaches and his incipient blindness.

Mark Twain claimed in his autobiography that he was the first important writer to present a publisher with a typewritten manuscript, for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (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 Mississippi (1883).^[23]

Henry James dictated to a typist.^[11]

Others

E. E. Cummings 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. Burroughs 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 Hemingway 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 Vigia, Hemingway's Havana house (now a museum) where he lived until 1960—the year before his death.

Jack Kerouac, a fast typist at 100 words per minute, typed On the Road on a roll of paper so he wouldn't 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.^[11] Another fast typist of the Beat period was Richard Brautigan, 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.^[24]

Tom Robbins waxes philosophical about the Remington SL3, a typewriter that he bought to write Still Life with Woodpecker, and eventually does away with it because it is too complicated and inhuman of a machine for the writing of poetry.

After completing the novel Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen is said to have flung his typewriter into the Aegean Sea.

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 Sedaris used a typewriter to write his essay collections through Me Talk Pretty One Day at least. Hunter S. Thompson 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. William Gibson used a Hermes 2000 model manual typewriter to write Neuromancer and half of Count Zero before a mechanical failure and lack of replacement parts forced him to upgrade to an Apple IIc computer.^[25] Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, wrote his manifesto as well as his letters on a manual typewriter.

Author Cormac McCarthy continues to write his novels on an Olivetti Lettera 32 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's for $254,500 USD^[26]; McCarthy obtained an identical replacement for $20 to continue writing on.^[27]

Typewriters in popular culture

In music

• The composer Leroy Anderson 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.
• The Boston Typewriter Orchestra was founded in 2004. Composed of typewriters only, it has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Fox & Friends, NPR, and other media.
• Les Luthiers, an Argentine musical comedic group, created a musical instrument based on a manual typewriter: the Dactilófono o máquina de tocar (“the dactilophone or playwriter”).
• The Dolly Parton song "9 to 5" features typewriter noises as percussion.
• The Pulitzer Prize–winning musical comedy How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (music and lyrics by Frank Loesser) is a satire set in the world of big business and features typewriter sound effects in the song A Secretary is Not a Toy.
• The Guess Who used typewriter keys on the track "One Way Road to Hell" on their 1974 album Road Food.
• The Tom Tom Club used the clacking keys of a typewriter to open its 1981 single "Wordy Rappinghood".
• The Winnipeg band Poor Tree incorporates typewriters into its music. Two to three members would type a poem while reading them at the same time, interlocking the lines, words and sounds.
• On the album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Brian Eno takes a typewriter solo in the song China My China.
• Multi-instrumentalist and composer Yann Tiersen has used the typewriter as a percussion instrument in a number of his compositions, notably "Pas si simple" on his 1996 album Rue des Cascades.
• On the hidden track 'Writer's Block' from 2000's Binaural Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder can be heard mashing his typewriter keys over and over.
• Pearl Jam's 2009 album Backspacer is a reference to the backspace key on typewriters.
• 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.
• Thomas Dolby used typewriter sounds (keys and bell) in the track Dissidents from his second album The Flat Earth.
• In Warren Zevon's ballad Carmelita he mentions pawning his "Smith Corona".
• A typewriter is featured in the Jefferson Airplane song, Lather.
• In the musical Chess the song "Embassy Lament", sung by a chorus of unamused consular clerks, features typewriter key strikes, end of line bells, and carriage returns as percussion.
• R.E.M's song "Exhuming McCarthy" from the album Document begins with clacking keys of a typewriter.

In film

• In the 1963 film Who's Minding the Store?, Jerry Lewis mimes typing to the orchestral piece "The Typewriter".
• The 1970s movie All the President's Men begins with a close-up of a blank page filling the screen, then the explosive sound of manual typewriter keys spelling out "June 1, 1972". Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman are repeatedly shown using manual typewriters, and close-ups of words as they are typed is used to dramatic effect. In the final scene, as Redford and Hoffman pound away at their machines, gradually joined by other reporters, a 21-gun salute celebrating the re-election of Richard M. Nixon is heard, reflecting the firing of the keys at the beginning. The guns are drowned out by the sound of a teletype printing out the headlines of the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Nixon.
• In the 1982 movie Tron, when the Master Control Program's defenses are destroyed, he reverts to his core form of an old man. The sound of typewriters is heard, associating him with obsolete technology.
• In the 1985 movie Jagged Edge, a Corona typewriter with a raised "t" plays a major role in discovering who the murderer is.
• Typewriters in songs and ambient typewriter sounds are present throughout the 1985 movie Brazil.
• A Royal Typewriter was used in the 1990 film Misery.
• Typewriters transform into monsters in David Cronenberg's 1991 film based on the novel by William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch.
• Typewriters are foundational in the soundtrack and the plot for the 2007 film Atonement.

Television

• In the closing logo for his production company, Stephen J. Cannell is seen typing at his desk. The moment he finishes, Cannell pulls the paper from his typewriter and tosses it. The paper toss segues into a black-and-white animation of a sheet of paper becoming his company's logo.
• In the very popular television show Murder, She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher, played by Angela Lansbury is seen in the opening credits and in a few scenes throughout several episodes in different seasons using a typewriter to type her murder mystery novels.
• On the show NCIS, McGee Types his books on a typewriter. Two people are killed because one of "Thom's" fans digs through McGee's trash and finds his typewriter ribbons that has all of his "free writing" ideas, and almost gets Abby killed.
• In Phineas and Ferb's Musical Cliptastic Countdown, one of Major's agents, Agent M (a monkey) is typing cue cards using a typewriter. Doofenshmirtz criticizes the use of such a machine, commenting that most of the kids watching right now have not even seen a typewriter.

Videogames

• In many of the Resident Evil games, finding an ink ribbon and using it with a typewriter is necessary in order to save the game. The typewriters featured in the games are typically of an anachronistic, antiquated design.
• In the game Heavy Rain, an important detail regarding the identity of the Origami Killer was his use of a Royal 5 typewriter for the letters he sends to the families of his victims.
• In the game Alan Wake, the protagonist uses a typewriter to create the manuscript for his novel. Finding all the manuscript pages is key to the plot.

Other

• The word "typewriter" is the longest English word that can be typed using only one row of keys of a QWERTY keyboard.
• 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.

Forensic identification

Identifying the make and model of typewriters was part of questioned document examination. Because of the tolerances of the mechanical parts, slight variation in the alignment of the letters and their uneven wear, each typewriter had its individual "signature" or "fingerprint", allowing a typewritten document to be traced back to the typewriter it was produced on. The ribbon ink could also be analyzed, particularly if a carbon ribbon was used.

Typewriter analysis was used in the Leopold and Loeb and Alger Hiss cases. In the Eastern Bloc, typewriters (together with printing presses, copy machines, and later computer printers) were a controlled technology, with secret police in charge of maintaining files of the typewriters and their owners. (In the Soviet Union, the First Department of each organization sent data on organization's typewriters to the KGB.) This posed a significant risk for dissidents and samizdat authors.

After personal computers became widespread, these methods became obsolete.

Gallery

Fr. Francisco Azevedo's 1861 typewriter	The Pterotype, John Pratt's 1865 typewriter.	The Hansen Writing Ball, invented in 1865. This model is from 1870	1868 patent drawing for the Sholes, Glidden, and Soule typewriter.
Hammond 1B typewriter, invented 1870s, manufactured 1881.	Types in a 1920s typewriter

See also

References

Patents

• US79265 – Type Writer Machine
• US349026 – typewriter ribbon, by George K. Anderson of Memphis, Tennessee.

External links

• Antique Typewriters, a look at the Martin Howard Collection
• Antique Typewriter Collecting, History & Resources for the Collector
• Early Typewriter Collectors' Association
• The Classic Typewriter Page
• Robert, Paul (2001). "The Virtual Typewriter Museum". http://www.typewritermuseum.org/index.html. 
• Mr. Martin's Typewriter Museum
• The Portable Typewriter Reference Site
• Nick Beland's Typewriter Pages
• Typewriter: Free Minimal Text Editing Software the Behaves like a Typewriter
• In Praise of the Typewriter - slideshow by Life magazine