The Milwaukee group
By the 1860s, inventors had been building writing machines for decades without producing one that offices widely adopted. The machine that did became a business success started in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer, worked there with his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, in the machine shop of Matthias Schwalbach and Charles Kleinsteuber, on the idea of a device for numbering pages. According to a story often told, the group saw a magazine article about a British writing machine and decided to build a machine that could print letters.
The first patent, issued in 1868, was followed by further versions. James Densmore, a businessman from Pennsylvania who had known Sholes, funded the experiments and pressed for a practical design. He had a strong commercial interest, and without him the project might not have continued. Over several years the group built dozens of models and tested them with users, including telegraphers and court reporters, who suggested improvements.
How the machine worked
The Sholes and Glidden design had features that remained familiar for decades.
- Keys and typebars. Pressing a key pulled a lever that swung a metal bar with a raised letter on its end up to strike the paper. All the bars converged on a single point.
- Ribbon. An inked ribbon sat between the type and the paper, so the letter was printed through it.
- Moving carriage. The paper was held on a roller, or platen, and moved sideways by a spring after each stroke, with a bell to warn the typist near the end of a line. A lever returned the carriage to start a new line.
- Typing from below. The type hit the underside of the paper roller, so the typist could not see what had just been written. The result was “blind” writing, which meant mistakes might be noticed only when the page was lifted.
Early machines were capital-letters only. A version with a shift mechanism for lower case came later, in Remington’s second model of 1878.
The keyboard arrangement
The group changed the keyboard layout in stages, ending with the arrangement known as QWERTY, named for the first six letters of its top row. The reasons are debated: avoiding jams between typebars is the traditional explanation, with several other theories offered. The details are covered elsewhere, and what matters here is that the layout was fixed in the machine that went to market, and then became a standard because typists learned it.
Remington takes over
Sholes and Densmore needed a manufacturer. In 1873, they struck an agreement with E. Remington and Sons, a firm in Ilion, New York, famous for firearms. Remington was also making sewing machines at the time, which meant the company knew how to build precise mechanisms in quantity. Its engineers refined the design, and the first Remington typewriter went on sale in 1874. Commonly cited prices for early machines were around 125 dollars, a substantial sum at the time.
Sales were slow at first. Early buyers included writers, clergy, court reporters and business people. A common story says Mark Twain was among the first authors to own a typewriter, though that claim, and the claim that he was the first to submit a typed manuscript, is murky. The machine was an expensive novelty, and handwriting remained cheaper.
Competitors and improvements
As the patents and the market matured, other makers produced alternatives. Some added a second set of keys for lower case, as in the Caligraph, introduced in 1880, while others used a swinging type shuttle or a rotating type wheel instead of typebars. These approaches tried to solve problems like jams, the cost of mechanisms or the weight of the machine.
A bigger step came in the 1890s. Front-strike designs, such as the Underwood introduced in 1895, struck the paper from the front so the typed line was visible at once. That feature fixed the biggest flaw of the earlier models and became the standard layout for manual machines.
The first users
Typewriter demand rose along with the growth of large business organizations. Railroads, insurance companies, banks, law firms, government offices and newspapers needed clear documents and duplicate copies. A typed page was readable and consistent, unlike hand writing. Alongside new equipment such as the fountain pen and mechanical calculators, the typewriter became part of the standard set of office tools.
Operators were at first mostly men, such as clerks and court reporters, but by the 1890s typists increasingly were women, trained in business schools. The jobs they took were clerical and often poorly paid, though they offered paid work outside the home. The social effects of this change, including the role of shorthand, are a separate subject.
What the typewriter did
Typing made it practical to produce legible text at speed and to create several copies at once with carbon paper. It encouraged standard document forms, and it helped create the modern office and the occupation of typist. The telegraph and the switchboard were creating similar demands in communications, and operators at the switchboard formed another new category of mostly female clerical worker.
Credit for the typewriter is shared. Sholes and his partners built the machine, Densmore financed it, and Remington made it a product. Earlier inventors had shown that mechanical writing was possible, and later designers made it practical for everyday use.