History of Computers - Typewriter
Page created by Kelsey Duncombe-Smith
The Typewriter
Christopher Sholes along with Carlos Glidden and other members of the Kleinstuber Machine Shop gang invented the first typewriter that was commercially successful in 1868, first implementing the well known QWERTY keyboard.
Overview
The first typewriter predates the common QWERTY typewriter created by tinkerers at Kleinstuber Machine Shop and Christopher Sholes. There is controversy over what was the first typewriter, some claim Pellegrino Turri, the inventor of carbon paper, developed a typewriter to allow the blind to write, others say the first was created after that by William Austin Burt with his patent of his "Typographer", others still say the typewriter was first created in Brazil by Father Francisco João de Azevedo, a brazilian priest, John Pratt created a machine called the Pterotype, and Peter Mitterhofer, a carpenter from Austria developed a fully functioning prototype typewriter in 1867.[1] While it is questionable which invention was truly the first typewriter, it can be said for certain that the first typewriter using the QWERTY keyboard set up was created in 1968 by Christopher Sholes and other tinkerers in the Kleinstuber Machine Shop gang.[2]
The first QWERTY typewriter was called the "Sholes & Glidden Type Writer" and it was produced by E. Remington & Sons, gunmakers from New York. It wasn't extremely successful, only 5,000 were produced, but it became a lasting invention.
The first typewriter was a simple contraption; when a key was pushed a rod would come up with a letter on the end of it and hit carbon paper sandwiched with stationary, hitting the carbon paper hard enough to leave an impression on the stationary. Later typewriters used a ribbon for inking that was spread across the letters and when a letter was typed it would come up and hit the ribbon hard enough to put ink on the page in the shape of that letter and then the letter would go back down; the ribbon then shifted over enough so that there was fresh ink for the next letter and the excess ribbon was spooled at the far side of the typewriter. With this new design the printing process was hidden from view so it was called a "blind-writer", the carriage was hinged so that a person could lift it and check their work.[3]
The success of the "Sholes & Glidden Type Writer" came with the Remington No. 2. Sholes had quickly sold all rights to his invention to James Densmore who brought the machine to Remington. Sholes' first typewriter could only type in capital letters and it was slow and inefficient; the Remington No. 2 could type in both capital and lowercase using a shift key and had the typical open black frame of a typewriter that is pictured today. The No. 2 was a huge success and sparked the beginning of the typewriter age; the times when typewriters were relied on by professional writers and business offices for all typed documents.[4]
Significance
The invention of the typewriter led to the modern keyboard and Sholes' typewriter in particular led to the standard QWERTY keyboard used by almost everyone in America. The typewriter led to the keyboard used for all computers today and inspired the invention of word documents, because as the computer became more popular the typewriter was modernized and made obsolete with the creation of word documents that are used thousands of times a day.
References
- ↑ [[1]]. Wikipedia
- ↑ [[2]]. Christopher Sholes' typewriter
- ↑ [[3]]. Christopher Sholes' typewriter
- ↑ [[4]]. Christopher Sholes' typewriter
Links
http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/firsttw.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter
