Many of the earliest typewriters were built so blind people could write
Around 1802 in Italy, Pellegrino Turri built a writing machine for his blind friend, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. It was far from alone. Inventors in Britain and America also designed early typing machines for people who could not see, and historians reckon the typewriter was invented some 52 separate times before anyone got it right.
The ancestors stretch back centuries. An Italian printmaker, Francesco Rampazetto, made a device for pressing letters into paper in 1575, and Henry Mill won a British patent in 1714 for a machine he claimed could write so neatly it looked printed. In 1829 the American William Austin Burt patented his Typographer, often called the first typewriter, although Turri's machine came earlier.
Help for the blind drove much of the work. Charles Thurber's first patent, in 1843, was meant as an aid for them, and William Hughes's Typograph of 1850, with raised keys, became standard equipment in British schools for the blind. The pressure of business mattered too: stenographers and telegraph operators could record 130 words a minute, while the fastest recorded pen managed 30.
The first typewriter actually sold was the Hansen Writing Ball from Denmark, invented by the pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen in 1865 and on sale from 1870, which typed only capital letters and was still found in European offices in 1909. The machine that conquered the market came from Milwaukee, patented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes with Carlos Glidden and two partners. E. Remington and Sons, then best known for sewing machines, started making it on 1 March 1873 in Ilion, New York, as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, which gave the device its name. Its keys struck upward, so typists could not see their words until later, and its QWERTY layout, whose original reasoning is still unclear, spread with its success.
Cheaper index machines, where a pointer picked each letter, sold to travellers from the 1880s; one Simplex model cost a fortieth of a Remington. Chinese and Japanese typewriters also took the index form, and embossing label makers carry on the idea. Offices kept typewriters until personal computers took over in the 1980s, yet roadside and legal offices in many Indian towns still use them where electricity is unreliable.
Source: Typewriter
