The Typewriter and the Keyboard

Abstract

Every computer keyboard descends from a machine that went on sale on 1 July 1874: the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, built by the arms maker E. Remington & Sons. Its inventors had dozens of predecessors, from Henry Mill’s 1714 patent to writing pianos in Turin and New York, and dozens of competitors followed with type wheels, type cylinders and golf balls. The machine created the modern office, carried its QWERTY layout into the computer age, and found its way into literature, film and even cryptography. Chinese, with its thousands of characters, needed an entirely different machine. Word processing, the typewriter’s successor, is covered in The History of Word Processing.

Writing Pianos

The Englishman Henry Mill received the first patent for a writing machine in 1714. In 1821 Karl von Drais, the inventor of the draisine, built a “writing piano” in Baden with 25 letter keys in a square, and in 1829 the American William Burt built a “typographer.” Many early inventors borrowed the piano keyboard, which telegraphs also used: Royal House’s printing telegraph of 1844 and David Edward Hughes’s telegraph, in service from 1855, had black and white keys.

The Italian lawyer Giuseppe Ravizza of Novara, impressed by a “tachygraph” his acquaintance Pietro Conti had built in the 1820s, worked from 1837 on a cembalo scrivano, a writing harpsichord; he had a prototype by 1846 and received a patent in Turin on 30 September 1855. It had two rows of sixteen keys and a ring of typebars that struck upward against a roller. One from 1857 in Novara may be the oldest surviving typewriter. Ravizza built seventeen by 1884 and sold few; in his diary he called Remington “my imitator or forger,” swimming in millions while he grew old and ill. Samuel Francis in New York patented a similar “literary piano” in 1857, the Tyrolean carpenter Peter Mitterhofer built five wooden machines between 1864 and 1869, and the Danish pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen invented the “writing ball” in 1865.

The American lawyer John Pratt of Centre, Alabama, finished a working machine in the spring of 1863, but with Alabama at war with the Union he could not patent it in Washington. He went to Britain, received an English patent on 14 May 1867 for his “Pterotype,” and on 1 May 1867 showed it in London; Engineering and then, on 6 July, Scientific American reported on it.

Sholes and Glidden

In Milwaukee, Christopher Latham Sholes, born on 14 February 1819 in a log cabin in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, was a printer turned newspaper publisher and politician, who had campaigned successfully against the death penalty in Wisconsin and served the city as postmaster, commissioner of public works and customs collector. In 1864, with the printer Samuel Soulé, he had patented a page-numbering machine. In July 1867 the lawyer Carlos Glidden showed him the Scientific American article about Pratt’s machine. With Soulé and the clockmaker Matthias Schwalbach they built a typewriter, which had piano-like keys; Sholes, Glidden and Soulé applied for a patent on 1 May 1868 and received it on 23 June.

The oil-rich James Densmore became their backer, had copies built and gave them to a telegraphers’ school in Chicago; Sholes improved the machine endlessly and accepted the harshest criticism from stenographers. In practical use the original alphabetical keyboard turned into the QWERTY arrangement, and the machine took the familiar shape, keys in front and roller on top. Sholes sold his patent rights to Densmore for $12,000. On 1 March 1873 Densmore signed a contract with E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, makers of rifles, revolvers, farm equipment and sewing machines, for a thousand machines at $10,000. The Remington No. 1, also called the Sholes and Glidden, came out on 1 July 1874, its casing decorated with flowers like a sewing machine. It wrote only capitals, and the typist could not see the line being typed. Only about 400 sold that year, but Mark Twain bought one and dictated Life on the Mississippi to a typist using a Remington No. 2 in 1882.

Myth: QWERTY was designed to slow typists down

The layout came out of years of revision, with telegraph operators among the first users, and separating some common letter pairs reduced clashes between typebars; it was not meant to hobble typists. See Myths and Misconceptions.

Sholes said he had tried all his life not to become a millionaire and believed he had succeeded admirably. He died in Milwaukee on 17 February 1890. Remington’s typewriter business was sold in 1886 and became the Remington Typewriter Company, which in 1927 merged into Remington Rand, later the maker of the UNIVAC (see UNIVAC and the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation).

Other Ways to Type

The 1880s and 1890s brought a profusion of designs: typebars, type sleeves, type wheels and cylinders, full keyboards with separate keys for capitals, and index machines with a pointer instead of keys. In 1879 Pratt sold his patent to the businessman James Hammond, whose Hammond typewriter of 1885, with its curved keyboard, was bought by Lewis Carroll in 1888. George Blickensderfer of Stamford, Connecticut, showed a small portable with a type wheel at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair; its “scientific” keyboard put the commonest letters in the front row. In 1901 he presented the Blick Electric, an early electric typewriter, which failed because American homes and offices were not yet reliably wired; the first electric typewriter to sell in numbers was the Mercedes Elektra of 1921. His company built about 200,000 machines. In Germany the AEG’s Mignon of 1903, invented by the Berlin patent attorney Louis Sell, selected characters with a pointer and printed them from a type cylinder; 363,000 were made by 1934, and its maker became the Olympia works. Visible writing, the line appearing as it was typed, became standard with Underwood’s machines of the 1890s, based on patents of the German immigrant Franz Xaver Wagner.

The type wheel had a long afterlife: IBM’s Selectric of 1961 used a “golf ball” that travelled along the roller, Olivetti’s TES 401 of 1978 a moving type wheel, and the daisy-wheel printers of early word processors brought Blickensderfer’s idea into the computer age (see IBM: The Company).

Writers and Typists

Friedrich Nietzsche, whose failing eyesight made handwriting hard, bought a Malling-Hansen writing ball for 400 marks and began using it in Genoa on 12 February 1882; it arrived damaged, needed four repairs, and by 24 March he gave up and returned to handwriting, having typed 58 pages of letters and poems. Hermann Hesse, L. Frank Baum and Leo Tolstoy, whose daughter typed for him, also owned machines. Franz Kafka used an Oliver at his insurance office in Prague; the typed letter to his father of 1919 runs to 45 pages, and the HNF links the needle-studded harrow of In the Penal Colony, written in 1914, to the Oliver’s downward-striking typebars, which he compared in his diary to knitting needles. His fiancée Felice Bauer sold dictating machines for Carl Lindström in Berlin.

Typing became a sport. On 25 July 1888 in Cincinnati Frank McGurrin, typing with all ten fingers on a Remington, beat Louis Traub, 8,709 words to 6,938, and won $500; the first world championship followed in 1905, and in the 1920s and 1930s Underwood kept a stable of champion typists. From 1955 the international federation Intersteno held championships every two years; Lore Alt of Stuttgart won the first with 544 strokes a minute, and Sigrid Lude set a record of 683 on an IBM Selectric in 1965. The office typist became a cinema figure, from the 1931 German hit Die Privatsekretärin to All the President’s Men.

Typing Secrets

From 1899 the typewriter also met cryptography. Richard Beger of Deuben near Dresden patented a cheap index typewriter, sold for 32 marks as the “Volks-Schreibmaschine,” and then a version with an adjustable inner dial, sold as the “Discret” or “Diskret” for 75 marks: the user typed the plaintext letter on the inner scale and the machine printed its shifted counterpart, a mechanical cipher disk. Its security was low, since letter frequencies betrayed the shift, but it pointed towards the cipher machines of the twentieth century (see Cryptography: The Secret Science).

Typewriters for Chinese

Chinese needed a different machine altogether. The American missionary Devello Sheffield designed one with 4,662 characters in the 1890s; in 1915 Qi Xuan in New York patented a machine that assembled characters from strokes, and Zhou Houkun at MIT built one with four exchangeable cylinders of 1,500 types each. The first produced in series, from 1922 by a Shanghai publisher, was Shu Zhendong’s: the typist moved a tray of 2,500 metal types under the platen and struck the chosen one with a lever. It was displaced by Japanese machines based on Kyota Sugimoto’s design of 1915, which Japan’s occupation brought in as the “Wanneng.” In 1952 the East German VEB Optima in Erfurt produced an improved version that a Shanghai factory copied, leading in 1964 to the Double Pigeon, the standard typewriter of the People’s Republic, with 2,450 characters, built until 1992. The writer Lin Yutang patented his MingKwai keyboard machine in 1952, and its lost prototype turned up in a New York basement in January 2025. Olympia developed an electronic Chinese typewriter from 1973 and sold 600 of its model 1011 from 1984 before personal computers took over (see Wang Yongmin and the Chinese Input Wars).