Why add a motor
A manual typewriter works by muscle. Each key press lifts a typebar to strike the paper through a ribbon, and the typist supplies the force. Heavy keys tired the hands, and each typist’s touch differed, so some letters came out darker than others. When several carbon copies were needed, typists had to strike hard.
Replacing that force with a motor was an obvious idea. The key then merely triggers a mechanism, and the machine delivers every stroke with the same strength. Early electric motors were a natural fit for office machines in the early twentieth century, although the earliest electric typewriters were costly and not widely adopted.
Early electric experiments
Several inventors tried powered writing machines. The telegraph industry, which had built printing telegraphs and used electric power for signaling, supplied technologies that could be adapted. Printing telegraphs of the 1800s, which typed messages at a distance, were part of the wider story of the electric telegraph and gave engineers experience with electrically driven print mechanisms.
Electrically powered typewriters were patented in the early 1900s. Blickensderfer, known for a lightweight machine with a rotating type cylinder, introduced an electric version around 1902. James Fields Smathers of the United States patented an electric typewriter around 1910 and is often credited with a practical one. Companies such as Remington also offered motorized machines in the 1920s. Dates and priorities vary between accounts, and several designs overlapped.
IBM and the Selectric
The electric typewriter became a mainstream product in the 1930s. IBM took over a firm called Electromatic Typewriters in 1933 and launched the IBM Electric Typewriter in 1935. It went on to dominate offices over the following decades.
The most famous model was the IBM Selectric, introduced in 1961. Rather than a row of typebars, it used a small metal ball, called the typeball, that rotated and tilted to the right character and struck the paper while the carriage stayed still. Advantages commonly cited include:
- No typebars to jam. There was no mechanism for adjacent bars to collide.
- Changeable type. Typists could swap one typeball for another to change the typeface in the middle of a document.
- A steadier rhythm. The motor-driven strike gave consistent impression.
A later version added a correction ribbon that could lift off a typed character, and typists no longer had to retype a page for a single error.
The step to memory
From the 1960s, makers began adding storage. IBM’s Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter, introduced in 1964, recorded keystrokes on magnetic tape so that text could be corrected and replayed. This is often seen as an early step toward word processing. Systems of this kind let an operator revise and reprint a letter without retyping all of it.
In the 1970s, daisy wheel machines carried characters on a spoked wheel and printed with a quality close to a fixed typeface. Later electronic typewriters used silicon chips and often added a display, a memory for a line or page, and automatic correction. Many were sold into the 1980s and 1990s, particularly for homes and small offices.
The typing pool
Larger organizations often organized typing in a central pool. A group of typists, usually women, produced letters and documents from dictation or handwritten drafts for managers elsewhere in the building. A pool could be efficient, since work could be shared and equipment standardized, and some firms used dictation machines to feed it.
Memory typewriters and early word processors changed the economics. Because text could be saved and revised, drafts were no longer retyped from the beginning. A document could be corrected by the person who wrote it, and the pool lost much of its purpose.
Replacement by word processors and computers
Dedicated word processing systems appeared in the 1970s and early 1980s, and some firms built their business on them. Personal computers, together with software and affordable printers, soon did the same job and many others. By the 1990s, most offices in industrialized countries had stopped buying typewriters for ordinary correspondence, although they stayed in use for forms and labels for some years.
Typewriters never disappeared completely. Some writers and collectors still use manual machines, and the keyboard layout they established continues on computers. In some settings, such as places with unreliable power, a mechanical machine can still be useful, although exact present-day usage is hard to measure.
The sequence of events is clear even where dates differ: muscle power gave way to motors, motors to memory, and memory to general-purpose computers. For the larger social changes this series of machines brought, the roles of secretaries and clerks are as important as the machinery itself.