The first typewriter appeared. The concept of offset printing. How it all began
Over its more than 100-year history, typewriters have seen many talented works; they have been directly involved in the creation of thousands of masterpieces and bestsellers around the world. For many decades typewriter was considered the main working tool of writers, philosophers and journalists.
The history of the creation of a typewriter began in 1714, when a patent was issued for a certain typewriter. It was invented by plumber Henry Mill from England, but, unfortunately, there is no exact information about the mechanism and photos of the unit itself.
It took almost a whole century for the first, and importantly, working typewriter to be created in 1808. The creator and developer was Pellegrino Turi, who came up with it for a friend of Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Caroline was blind, and with the help of such a device she could correspond with her relatives. Caroline Fantoni da Fivisono's letters have survived to this day, but the writing apparatus has not. It is known that paper stained with soot (similar to carbon paper) was used for printing. By the way, the idea of “copying” multiple documents was not developed by Turi. In 1806, the Englishman Ralph Wedgwood patented “coal paper”. For another two centuries, it was actively used in office work to quickly obtain copies.
But let's return to printing presses.
The next attempt to create a unit suitable for “fast printing” was in Russia, when M.I. Alisov developed a typesetting machine. Mikhail Ivanovich wanted to simplify and facilitate the procedure for rewriting manuscripts and originals, and he succeeded. The car performed well. True, the high cost of the product put an end to the history of the development of this product.
September 1867 became a landmark date for all writing units in the world.
They say that a talented person is talented in everything. Christopher Latham Sholes was a writer, journalist and, of course, inventor. In 1867, he applied for a patent for the production of his “brainchild” - a printing machine. It took the “bureaucratic machine” months to make a decision, but nevertheless, in 1868, Christopher received the coveted confirmation. Glidden and Soule were listed as co-authors of the development.
Six years later, the first batch of writing units under the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer brand entered the American market. It should be noted that appearance was very different from what we are used to seeing: the keyboard consisted of two rows of letters, placed according to an alphabetical hierarchy. By the way, there were no numbers 1 and 0, their role was played by “I” and “O”. The first unit had plenty of disadvantages. This is an inconvenient arrangement of letters, and the inability to work quickly, because the hammers on which the stamps with letters are attached did not have time to take their original position and got confused with each other.
By the way, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, published in 1876, was printed on just such a typewriter with “tangling hammers.” One can envy the author's patience.
There were several ways to solve the problem of hammers getting tangled: work slower (this did not suit the writers) or change the design of the machine. But Christopher Sholes used a third method: he changed the order of the letters. The fact is that the hammers were installed on an arc, and most often the letters placed in the “neighborhood” jammed. And then, the developer decided to fix them so that the letters that participate in the formation of stable combinations are further away from each other. By placing the letters in the correct order, the updated keyboard began with letters Q,W, E, R, T, Y.
The QWERTY layout or universal keyboard has become popular all over the world.
Did you know that L.N. Tolstoy’s favorite writing assistant, without which it was impossible to imagine the interior of his office, was the reliable Remington, and his colleague in the writing workshop V.V. Mayakovsky was an ardent fan of Underwood.
In 1877, Sholes sold the rights to manufacture the typewriter to the Remington arms company. And that was the beginning new chapter in the history of the creation of the typewriter. Remington engineers supplemented the “source code” with the ability to print uppercase and lowercase letters (in the original version, only uppercase letters were written). To do this, we added the “Shift” key.
Sholes' success inspired other inventors. In 1895, Franz Wagner received a patent for the manufacture of a machine with horizontally located levers that strike the paper roller from the front. The main difference, and at the same time advantage, from the invention of 1867 was that the printed text was visible during operation. Wagner then sold the rights to manufacture his typewriter to John Underwood. The design was very convenient to use, and very soon new owner made a fortune from it.
In addition to Remingtons and Underwoods, dozens of other companies produced their own versions of other typewriters. From 1890-1920, these devices were constantly modernized and improved. Among the machines of this period, two main types can be distinguished: with a single letter carrier and with a lever device. The convenience of the first ones was that the printed text could be seen immediately, but at the same time they were very slow in operation and had poor penetrating ability. The advantage of the latter was speed.
The last typewriter factory in India was closed in April 2011. This means that the era of this writing tool is officially over.
A printing or typewriter - once upon a time this thing was the property of those who are usually called people of intellectual professions: scientists, writers, journalists. The brisk knocking of the keys could also be heard in the reception rooms of high-ranking bosses, where a charming secretary typist sat at the table next to the typewriter...
Now it’s a different time and typewriters are almost a thing of the past; they have been replaced by personal computers, which have retained only the keyboard from the typewriter. But maybe if there were no typewriter there would not have been a computer? By the way, the typewriter also has its own holiday - Typewriter Day, and it is celebrated on March 1st.
Old typewriter from the early 20th century
Legends and historical sources tell us that the first typewriter was developed three hundred years ago in 1714 by Henry Mill, and he even received a patent for the invention from the Queen of England herself. But the image of this machine has not been preserved.
A real, working machine was first introduced to the world by an Italian named Terry Pellegrino in 1808. His writing machine was made for his blind friend, Countess Caroline Fantoni de Fivisono, who was able to communicate with the world by writing correspondence with her friends and loved ones on a typewriter.
Old typewriters with "unusual" keyboard layouts
The idea of creating an ideal and convenient typewriter captured the minds of inventors, and over time, various modifications of this writing device began to appear in the world.
In 1863, the ancestor of all modern printing machines finally appeared: Americans Christopher Sholes and Samuel Soule - former typographers - first came up with a device for numbering pages in account books, and then, according to the principle, created a workable machine, typing words.
A patent for the invention was received in 1868. The first version of their machine had two rows of keys with numbers and an alphabetical arrangement of letters from A to Z (there were no lowercase letters, only capital ones; there were also no numbers 1 and 0 - the letters I and O were used instead), but this option turned out to be inconvenient . Why?
There is a legend according to which, when quickly sequentially pressing letters located next to each other, the hammers with the letters got stuck, forcing them to stop work and clear out the jam with their hands. Scholes then came up with the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that forced typists to work slower.
According to another legend, Sholes' brother analyzed the compatibility of letters in English and proposed a variant in which the most frequently occurring letters were spaced as far apart as possible, which made it possible to avoid sticking when printing.
Typewriters with a familiar keyboard layout
Various types of machines over a period of time gradually became more practical for daily use. There were also machines with a different keyboard layout, but... The classic Underwood Typewriter, which appeared in 1895, was able to achieve dominance at the beginning of the 20th century, and most manufacturers began to make their typewriters in the same style.
The principle of operation of one of the modifications of typewriters Williams Typewriter demonstration
Old postcard - girl with a typewriter
There are all kinds of typewriters and never have been. Printing machines for special purposes: shorthand, accounting, for writing formulas, for the blind and others.
Typewriters for various fields of activity
There was even an alternative - typewriters without... keyboards. These are so-called index typewriters: one hand operates a pointer that selects the desired letter in the index, and the other hand presses a lever to print the letter onto the paper.
Such machines were very cheap compared to regular ones and were in demand among housewives, travelers, graphomaniacs, and even children.
Index typewriters
How the index typewriter works The Mignon Index Typewriter – 1905
And a little about the Russian keyboard layout - YTSUKEN... the history of its appearance is as follows: alas, it was invented in America at the end of the 19th century. At that time, all companies produced the machine with only one layout option - YIUKEN.
This is not a typo - the familiar YTSUKEN appeared only after the reform of the Russian language, as a result of which “yat” and “I” disappeared from the alphabet. So we now have on our computer everything that was invented for centuries before us... The typewriters themselves have become an antique value and can be completely perceived as works of art.
The machine revolution of the 70s of the 19th century affected many areas of human activity, including writing. WITH invention typewriter a person did not need to spend a lot of time on commercial correspondence and business papers, which required special clarity of writing. Now, instead of writing out each letter, one hit on the desired key was enough. Many inventors tried to invent a typewriter accessible to everyone and capable of quickly producing not one, but several copies of a legible, quickly readable manuscript.
One of the first machines known to us was introduced in 1833 by the French inventor Progrin. 88 machine arms located around the circumference were connected to digital and letter stamps. The levers moved across and along a sheet of paper on special slides. In 1843, C. Thurber patented a typewriter for the blind. The idea of lever transmission of letters he proposed was subsequently used in all typewriters.
In 1867, in America, typographers Samuel Sulle and Lettam Sholes invented a machine for numbering pages, for printing series and numbers of bank notes. An acquaintance of Scholes suggested that, based on the created typewriter, they could construct 
to create a typewriter in which letters and words were printed instead of numbers and symbols. First, a single-letter typewriter appeared, consisting of a glass plate, a telegraph key in the form of a key and other parts. Having placed a sheet of white paper and a carbon tape on a glass plate, Sholes moved the paper with his hand, with the other hand he pressed a telegraph key with the letter “B” carved into it from brass. Thus, he received an imprint on paper. In the same year, a sample multi-letter typewriter was constructed that wrote clearly and quickly. The disadvantages of the typewriter were the flat keyboard and typing only in capital letters. In 1868 the machine was patented.
After this, Sulla ceased to be interested in the further fate of their joint brainchild, and Sholes continued to work on creating a more advanced machine. Over the next five years, he created 30 models, each of which was better than the previous one. Finally, in 1873, Sholes created a fairly convenient, reliable model and offered it to the Remington factory, which was producing sewing and agricultural machines, as well as weapons. In 1874, the first hundred of these machines went on sale, and in 1876 their mass production began. But for another 8 years the public became accustomed to this technical innovation, until, finally, firms, banks and business offices were able to appreciate this miracle of technology. In the first Remingtons, the text was printed under a roller. To see it, you had to lift the cart, which was located on hinges, which was not very convenient.
In 1890, F. Wagner invented a typewriter with type visible during printing and with letter arms lying horizontally. He sold the rights to manufacture the machine to John Underwood, who became fabulously rich from it. Since 1908, Remington typewriters also began to be produced with visible type. By After this, many more designs were created, but the basis laid down in the invention of 1873 remained unchanged. Steel levers are placed in a metal case like a fan. At the tip of the levers there are letters (numbers, signs, letters). The levers are connected to the keys. Impacts on the keys are transmitted to levers that strike the letters on the paper through a colored cloth tape. The letters leave their imprint on the paper coming out from under the roller. After Remington, several hundred typewriter designs were patented, although no more than 30 of them are of practical use. The principle of operation is the same for all - hitting the keys pushes out a lever with the desired letter at the end.
A printing or typewriter - once upon a time this thing was the property of those who are usually called people of intellectual professions: scientists, writers, journalists. The brisk knocking of the keys could also be heard in the reception rooms of high-ranking bosses, where a charming secretary typist sat at the table next to the typewriter...
Now it’s a different time and typewriters are almost a thing of the past; they have been replaced by personal computers, which have retained only the keyboard from the typewriter. But maybe if there were no typewriter there would not have been a computer? By the way, the typewriter also has its own holiday - Typewriter Day, and it is celebrated on March 1st.
Old typewriter from the early 20th century
Legends and historical sources tell us that the first typewriter was developed three hundred years ago in 1714 by Henry Mill, and he even received a patent for the invention from the Queen of England herself. But the image of this machine has not been preserved.
A real, working machine was first introduced to the world by an Italian named Terry Pellegrino in 1808. His writing machine was made for his blind friend, Countess Caroline Fantoni de Fivisono, who was able to communicate with the world by writing correspondence with her friends and loved ones on a typewriter.
Old typewriters with "unusual" keyboard layouts
The idea of creating an ideal and convenient typewriter captured the minds of inventors, and over time, various modifications of this writing device began to appear in the world.
In 1863, the ancestor of all modern printing machines finally appeared: Americans Christopher Sholes and Samuel Soule - former typographers - first came up with a device for numbering pages in account books, and then, according to the principle, created a workable machine, typing words.
A patent for the invention was received in 1868. The first version of their machine had two rows of keys with numbers and an alphabetical arrangement of letters from A to Z (there were no lowercase letters, only capital ones; there were also no numbers 1 and 0 - the letters I and O were used instead), but this option turned out to be inconvenient . Why?
There is a legend according to which, when quickly sequentially pressing letters located next to each other, the hammers with the letters got stuck, forcing them to stop work and clear out the jam with their hands. Scholes then came up with the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that forced typists to work slower.
According to another legend, Sholes' brother analyzed the compatibility of letters in English and proposed a variant in which the most frequently occurring letters were spaced as far apart as possible, which made it possible to avoid sticking when printing.
Typewriters with a familiar keyboard layout
Various types of machines over a period of time gradually became more practical for daily use. There were also machines with a different keyboard layout, but... The classic Underwood Typewriter, which appeared in 1895, was able to achieve dominance at the beginning of the 20th century, and most manufacturers began to make their typewriters in the same style.
The principle of operation of one of the modifications of typewriters Williams Typewriter demonstration
Old postcard - girl with a typewriter
There are all kinds of typewriters and never have been. Printing machines for special purposes: shorthand, accounting, for writing formulas, for the blind and others.
Typewriters for various fields of activity
There was even an alternative - typewriters without... keyboards. These are so-called index typewriters: one hand operates a pointer that selects the desired letter in the index, and the other hand presses a lever to print the letter onto the paper.
Such machines were very cheap compared to regular ones and were in demand among housewives, travelers, graphomaniacs, and even children.
Index typewriters
How the index typewriter works The Mignon Index Typewriter – 1905
And a little about the Russian keyboard layout - YTSUKEN... the history of its appearance is as follows: alas, it was invented in America at the end of the 19th century. At that time, all companies produced the machine with only one layout option - YIUKEN.
This is not a typo - the familiar YTSUKEN appeared only after the reform of the Russian language, as a result of which “yat” and “I” disappeared from the alphabet. So we now have on our computer everything that was invented for centuries before us... The typewriters themselves have become an antique value and can be completely perceived as works of art.
It must be admitted that Wedgwood’s invention was then actively used in office work for a good two centuries to obtain several copies of one document. And on dot matrix printers, the carbon copy was a great help in the absence of a cartridge.
Let us return, however, to the history of the appearance of typewriters in general and keyboards in particular. So, in September 1867, poet, journalist and part-time inventor Christopher Latham Sholes from Milwaukee filed an application for a new invention - a typewriter. After the appropriate bureaucratic procedures, which, as usual, lasted for several months, Sholes received a patent at the beginning of 1868. In addition to Christopher Scholes, the co-authors of the invention were Carlos Glidden and a certain S. W. Soule, who also worked on the creation of the first typewriter. However, the Americans would not be Americans if they did not try to make a profit from their brainchild.
Production of the first typewriters began at the very end of 1873, and in 1874 they entered the American market under the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer brand.
It must be said that the keyboard of the first typewriters was strikingly different from the current one. The keys were placed in two rows, and the letters on them were in alphabetical order.
In addition to this, printing could only be done in capital letters, and there were no numbers 1 and 0 at all. They were successfully replaced by the letters "I" and "O". The text was printed under the roller and was not visible. To look at the work, it was necessary to lift the carriage, which was located on hinges for this purpose. In general, like any new invention, the first typewriters had many shortcomings. And among others, as it soon became clear, the placement of the keys was unsuccessful. The fact is that as the printing speed increased, the hammers of the typewriter with the letter stamps attached to them, which struck the paper, did not have time to return to their place and clung to each other, threatening to lead to a breakdown of the printing unit. Obviously, the problem could be solved in two ways - either to somehow artificially slow down the printing speed, or to develop new design a typewriter that would prevent the keys from jamming.
Christopher Scholes proposed an elegant solution that made it possible to do without changing the mechanics of the rather complex design of the printing unit. It turned out that in order for things to go better, it is enough to change the order of the letters printed on the keys.
Here's the thing. Since the hammers were located in an arc forming a half circle, the letters located close to each other most often jammed during printing. Sholes decided to arrange the letters on the keys so that the letters forming stable English language pairs were located as far away from each other as possible.
In order to select the “correct” arrangement of keys, Sholes used special tables that reflected the frequency of occurrence of certain stable combinations of letters in writing. The relevant materials were prepared by teacher Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who, in fact, financed the work of Christopher Sholes to create a typewriter.
After Sholes arranged the hammers with the letters in the required order inside the carriage of the printing press, the letters on the keyboard formed a very whimsical sequence, starting with the QWERTY letters. It is under this name that the Sholes keyboard is known in the world: QWERTY keyboard or Universal keyboard. In 1878, after the modernization was tested on typewriters being produced, Sholes received a patent for his invention.
Since 1877, the Remington company began producing typewriters based on the Scholes patent. The first model machine could print only capital letters, but the second model (Remington No. 2), which began serial production in 1878, added a case switch, which made it possible to print both capital and lowercase letters. To switch between registers, the print carriage was moved up or down using a special Shift key. In this and subsequent (until 1908) Remington typewriters, the printed text remained invisible to the worker, who had the opportunity to look at the text only by lifting the carriage.
Meanwhile, Scholes' example inspired other inventors. In 1895, Franz Wagner received a patent for a typewriter with horizontal letter levers striking the paper roller from the front. The main advantage of this design was that the newly printed text was visible during operation. He sold the rights to its production to manufacturer John Underwood. This machine turned out to be so convenient that it soon became very popular and Underwood made a huge fortune from it.
Christopher Scholes's first typewriter was designed for typing... with two fingers. The emergence of the ten-finger printing method is attributed by historians to a certain Mrs. Longley (L. V. Longley), who demonstrated new approach in 1878. And a little later, Frank E. McGurrin, a clerk at the federal court in Salt Lake City, proposed the concept of the “touch typing” method, in which the typist worked without looking at the keyboard at all. At the same time, typewriter manufacturers, trying to prove to the public the promise of new technology, held numerous competitions for typing speed on the first Remingtons and Underwoods, which, of course, encouraged typists to type faster and faster. Very soon, the pace of work of “typewriter workers” exceeded the average 20 words per minute typical for handwritten text, and typewriters themselves became an integral working tool for secretaries and a completely familiar element of offices.
Until 1907, Remington and Sons consistently produced nine models of printing machines, the design of which was gradually improved. The production of typewriters grew like an avalanche. In the first ten years, more than one hundred thousand copies of Remington were manufactured.
In addition to large firms (such as Remington and Underwood), typewriters were produced by hundreds of small factories and dozens of large companies specializing in precision engineering. Dozens of new designs and hundreds of models have appeared. Of these developments, only about twenty retained their significance by the middle of the century.
In the period 1890-1920, there was an intensified search for design solutions in order to obtain clear, visible text when printing and expand the capabilities of the printing machine. Among the machines of this time, two main groups can be distinguished: with a single writing medium and with a lever printing mechanism. For machines of the first group, the letters are printed on a single lettering medium various shapes, either an indicator device or a keyboard was used to select a printed character. By changing the typeface it was possible to print in several languages. These machines produced text that was visible when printed, but their low printing speed and poor punching ability limited their use.
In machines with a lever printing mechanism, the characters are located at the ends of individual levers; printing is done by striking the type lever on the paper support shaft when pressing a key. The variety of lever printing machines of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reflects the struggle of ideas aimed at making text visible when printing, increasing typing speed and reliability of the machine, and ensuring a “light” strike on the keys.
In 1911, Russia held comparative analysis energy consumption when writing different models of typewriters. It turned out that writing 8,000 characters is equivalent to moving 85 pounds with your fingers on Remington No. 9, 100 pounds on Smith's Premier, and 188 pounds on Postal!
The typewriter was widely used by writers. It is noteworthy that Mark Twain's work "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", published in 1876, became the first book the text of which was prepared using a typewriter.
Office L.N. Tolstoy, for example, the great writer’s acquaintances could not imagine without the old Remington, just as the office of V.V. It is impossible to imagine Mayakovsky without his beloved "Underwood".
