![]() The paper was set in a frame above all of this and would slide from right to left and then return, all driven by the mechanical action of hitting the piano key. The disk served to guide the type to a central point where it would hit the ribbon. A type bar (also termed a hammer in the patent application), to which a piece of lettered type was attached, pushed up through a notched circular brass disk. To operate the Sholes, Glidden, and Soule machine, the "type writer," as typists were called in the 19th century, hit down on a key. Writing balls were custom-built by scientific instrument makers starting in 1870, but only about 180 were built before Hansen died suddenly in 1890. Hansen built a beautiful " Writing Ball" in Denmark in 1865 and won prizes at several international exhibitions. But work on typewriters accelerated in the 1860s, especially after Hans R. ![]() Historians of technology have identified their machine as the 52nd in an uneven lineage stretching back to the mid-1700s. In October 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule submitted a patent application for an "Improvement in Type-Writing Machines." Sholes, a former journalist who had become a customs collector at the port of Milwaukee, was working on a page numbering device in a machine shop where he met Glidden and Soule, both inventors of mechanical devices. A working manual typewriter was one of the most complicated pieces of mechanical machinery ever to enter mass production and widespread use. Also, the type hit the paper from underneath, making it impossible for operators to see what they were typing.ĭesigning a typewriter that could be manufactured and sold on a larger scale involved innovating materials so that the narrow type bars were stable for repeated use, designing the mechanism so that specific pieces of type marked the paper in the desired location without jamming, building a machine that moved an inked ribbon so that the type hit a fresh spot each time, and shifting the paper, both left-to-right and upward in even rows. They had no lettered keyboards, but instead used piano keys. Equally remarkable, the first typewriter patents are baffling to modern eyes. A working typewriter was not invented until the 1870s, some 420 years after Gutenberg. So how about the typewriter? In some ways, it seems but a small step removed from the printing press just attach each piece of type to a bar and trigger it by hitting a key.īut the answer to my leading question may surprise you. ![]() Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg built a printing press in Europe that used moveable type and featured innovations in the metal alloys and the process for casting type. The first printing press that used movable type (made of porcelain) was invented in the 1040s in China by Bi Sheng. When was the typewriter invented? Let me offer a hint.
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