Typewriters have a fascinating history. The concept of the typewriter appeared quite late when they began to be marketed and then standardized, but the first known attempts to build a machine that printed letters on paper were as early as 1500. Since then, various inventors have tried over time, to develop a model for such a machine.
In 1575 an Italian printer named Francesco Rampazetto invented the scrittura tattile (pictured left) a machine that prints letters on paper. Then in 1714, Henry Mill obtained a patent in Great Britain for a machine, which seemed, from that patent, to have resembled a typewriter. In 1802, the Italian Agostino Fantoni developed a kind of machine that would allow his blind sister to write. Between 1801 and 1808, the Italian Pellegrino Turri invented a machine with which he could write his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. Approaching more and more the concept of typewriter, in 1823, the Italian Pietro Conti da Cilavegna invented a new model of typewriter called tachograph, also known as tachitipo.
Later, in 1829, the American William Austin Burt patented a machine called "Typographer" (pictured right) which, together with other earlier machine models, was named one of the first typewriters. Unfortunately, even the one used by its inventor was much slower than handwriting. It used an indicator to select each character and not keys, so it was considered an index typewriter, rather than a keyboard typewriter.
Finally, the Italian Giuseppe Ravizza, a famous inventor, born in 1811, obsessively spent 40 years of his life struggling with all the complications to invent a useful typewriter. He named his invention from 1855 Cembalo scrivano or "macchina da scrivere a tasti" (pictured left) because it resambled a piano keyboard.
Starting with the middle of the 19th century, the rhythm of business communication was increasing more and more, thus creating the need to mechanize the writing process.
In 1865, Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented the Hansen Writing Ball (pictured right), which went into commercial production in 1870, becoming the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a great success in Europe and is known to have been used in London offices until 1909.
According to the book Hvem er skrivekuglens opfinder? (English: Who is the Inventor of the "Writing Ball"?), written by Hansen's daughter Johanne Agerskov in 1865, Malling-Hansen made a porcelain pattern of the keyboard of his "writing ball" and experimented with different letter placements to be able to reach the fastest speed for writing. These experiments led to the improvement of the "writing ball" to the point where they made it the first typewriter to produce text faster than a person could write by hand. The "writing ball" was a template for inventor Frank Haven Hall who developed a prototype that produced letters much faster and cheaper.
The first commercially successful typewriter was patented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. However, due to misunderstandings caused by Sholes' refusal to use and recommend a typewriter that "looked like a combination of a piano and a kitchen table," a prototype built by machinist Matthias Schwalbach, the patent was sold to Densmore and Yost. They made a deal with E. Remington and Sons (who was a famous sewing machine maker at the time) to market the typewriter as Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer.
This was the origin of the word "Typewriter". Remington began production of the first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York. It had a keyboard with a QWERTY layout, which, due to the success of the machine, was adopted by other typewriter manufacturers.
By 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had achieved somehow a standardized design. There were small variations from one manufacturer to another, but they followed the same concept: each key was connected to an arm that had a mold with the corresponding letter or character attached to its end. When a key was struck quickly and firmly, the arm struck the ribbon (usually silk with ink) making a mark printed on the paper wrapped around a rubber cylinder.
On most early typewriters, the arms struck from the bottom up on the paper (e.g. the image on the right), being pressed on the bottom of the rubber cylinder, so the typist could not see the text that was typed. Later, more ingenious mechanical designs emerged, the so-called "visible typewriters", which used front striking, in which the arms hit the front of the rubber cylinder, thus becoming a standard.
A significant innovation was the shift key, introduced by Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key practically changes either the segment of the arms going down, in which case it is described as "shift segment"(in later models), or the carriage with the rubber cylinder going up, the case in which it is described as "carriage shift". The result was that the arm mold could print two different characters, thus reducing the number of keys and arms in half (considerably simplifying the typewriter's internal mechanisms). Before the shift key, typewriters needed separate arms and keys for each character, it basically had two keyboards next to each other (Smith Premier in the image on the left). With the shift key, manufacturing costs and purchase prices were greatly reduced and the operation of a typewriter became easier.
With the invention of the shift key came the need for a function that locks the shift in the uppercase position so that the little fingers do not get tired when writing only with uppercase.
Tab keys were added in the late 19th century to facilitate the use of typewriters in business management. The first models had a tab key and a stop. Later models allowed as many stops as needed, so they often had multiple buttons or tab keys, each moving a certain number of spaces forward from the decimal point. In the image on the right, we have an example of tab buttons on the Remington 10 typewriter.
In the early 20th century, a typewriter was sold as Noiseless and described as "silent." In conventional typewriters, the arms reach the rubber cylinder simply by whipping the ink ribbon and paper. A "noiseless" typewriter has a complex mechanism of levers that mechanically reduce speed before the arm with the mold reaches the ribbon and the paper, in an attempt to cancel the noise.
The designs of the electric typewriters removed the direct connection between the keys and the arms. Not to be confused with later electronic typewriters, as electric typewriters contained a single electrical component, namely the motor. Where before a keystroke moved the arm directly, now it involved mechanical connections that directed the mechanical power from the engine to the arm.
Some electric typewriters were patented in the 19th century, but the first machine known to be mass-produced is the Cahill (pictured right) in 1900.
James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what was considered the first practical typewriter to operate on electricity in 1914.
Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors, so they developed designs that could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and since 1925 Remington Electric typewriters (pictured left) have been produced by Northeast's motors.
After about 2,500 electric typewriters were manufactured, Northeast asked Remington to sign a contract for the next typewriter industry. The Remington directors were not willing to come up with anything concrete, so Northeast decided to go into the typewriter business on its own, and in 1929 it produced the first Electromatic typewriter.
In 1928, Delco, a division of General Motors, bought Northeast Electric, and the typewriter business split becoming Electromatic Typewriters Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired by IBM, which spent $1 million on a redesign of the Electromatic Typewriter design, launching the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01 in 1935.
IBM and Remington Rand electric typewriters were market leaders until the advent of the IBM Selectric typewriter introduced by IBM in 1961, which replaced the typewriter arms with a spherical element (type ball) slightly smaller than a golf ball, with character molds on its surface.
The last major development in the field of typewriters was the electronic typewriter. Most electronic typewriters replaced the spherical element (type ball) with a metal wheel mechanism (a "daisy-shaped" disc with character molds at the ends of the "petals"). For a time, these typewriters were successful since this "daisy" mechanism (pictured right) was much simpler and cheaper than Selectric arms or mechanisms, and their electronic memory and screen allowed the operator to easily see the mistakes and correct them before the text is actually printed.
Unlike Selectric or older models, they were truly "electronic" because they operated on the basis of integrated circuits and electromechanical components.
In 1970 the typewriter market began to decline due to personal computers. In the following years, many typewriter companies began to go bankrupt or close, as was the case with IBM, which in 1991 sold its typewriter manufacturing division and withdrew completely from the typewriter industry.