Timeline of the History of the Typewriter
1864: Peter Mitterhofer, typewriter prototype 1864 Technisches Museum Wien
1865: 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.
1867: Between 1864 and 1867 Peter Mitterhofer, a carpenter from South Tyrol developed several models and a fully functioning prototype typewriter in 1867.
1870: From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production.
1870: Hansen Writing Ball, 1870, the first typewriter manufactured commercially.
1870: 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.
1873: Prototype of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, 1873, the first commercially successful typewriter, and the first with a QWERTY keyboard.
1873: The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1867 by Christopher 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. 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.
1874: The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the “QWERTY” layout for the letter keys.
1878: 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.
1883: 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.
1910: Semi-circular keyboard variety, as used by a newspaper office in Saskatoon around 1910.
1910: By about 1910, the “manual” or “mechanical” typewriter had reached a somewhat standardized design.
1910: 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 teletypewriter.
1915: 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 Oliver, were introduced in 1895. The older style continued in production to as late as 1915.
1925: 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.
1929: 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.
1929: 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.
1930: 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?”
1931: 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 font.
1933: The lone exception is the poem “CAPITALS AT LAST” from archys life of mehitabel, written in 1933.
1940: The opening title sequence of Murder She Wrote prominently features Jessica Fletcher touch typing a manuscript with a 1940′s style Royal Typewriter.
1941: In 1941, IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing.
1945: The composer Pablo Sorozabal includes in a scene of his zarzuela La eterna cancion (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.
1950: 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.
1958: By 1958 IBM was deriving 8% of its revenue from the sale of electric typewriters.
1960: 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.
1960: 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 where he lived until 1960, the year before his death.
1961: 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.
1963: 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; McCarthy obtained an identical replacement for $20 to continue writing on.
1970: 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.
1970: 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.
1970: By 1970, as offset printing began to replace letterpress printing, the Composer would be adapted as the output unit for a typesetting system.
1970: 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 need be typed, and photocopies made from it.
1970: Towards the end of the commercial popularity of typewriters in the 1970s, a number of hybrid designs combining features of printers were introduced.
1980: Widely used by professional writers and in offices for decades, by the end of the 1980s, word processors and personal computers largely displaced typewriters in the settings where they previously had been ubiquitous in the western world.
1980: The 1970s and early 1980s were a time of transition for typewriters and word processors.
1980: 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 and laser printers in the 1980s.
1989: Electronic typewriter – the final stage in typewriter development. A 1989 Canon Typestar 110 was produced.
1990: Due to falling sales, IBM sold its typewriter division in 1990 to Lexmark.
1997: 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.
2005: 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.
2009: As of 2009, typewriters were still used by some U.S. government agencies.
2011: In April 2011, Godrej and Boyce, a Mumbai-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.
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