The history of the typewriter. The cult of the typewriter

A typewriter or a typewriter - once this thing was the property of those who are commonly called people of intellectual professions: scientists, writers, journalists. A brisk knock on the keys was also heard in the reception rooms of high officials, where a charming typist-secretary sat at a table next to a typewriter ...

Now another time and typewriters are almost a thing of the past, they have been replaced by personal computers, which retained only the keyboard from the typewriter. But maybe if there weren't a typewriter, there wouldn't be a computer? By the way, the typewriter also has its own holiday - Typewriter Day, and it is celebrated on March 1st.

Old typewriter, early 20th century

Legends and historical sources tell us that the first typewriter was developed as early as 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 only the images of this machine have not been preserved.

A real, working machine was first introduced to the world by an Italian named Terry Pellegrino in 1808. His writing apparatus was made for his blind friend, Countess Caroline Fantoni de Fivisono, who was so able to communicate with the world by typewriting with her friends and loved ones.

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: the Americans Christopher Sholes and Samuel Soule - former printers - first came up with a device for numbering pages in account books, and then, therefore, they created a workable typewriter, printing words.

A patent for the invention was obtained in 1868. The first version of their typewriter 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, with a quick successive press on the letters located nearby, the hammers with the letters got stuck, forcing them to stop work and clear the jam with their hands. Scholes then came up with the QWERTY keyboard, a keyboard that made typists work slower.

According to another legend, Sholes' brother analyzed the compatibility of letters in English and proposed a variant in which the most common letters were spaced as far as possible, which made it possible to avoid sticking when printing.

Typewriters with a familiar keyboard layout

Various types of machines over a period, gradually became more practical for daily use. There were also typewriters with a different arrangement of keyboards, but... The classic Underwood Typewriter, which appeared in 1895, was able to dominate 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

What only is not present and there were no typewriters. Printing machines special purpose: stenographic, 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 the so-called index squeakers: one hand works with the pointer, which selects the desired letter in the index, and the other hand presses the lever to print the letter on paper.

Such typewriters were very cheap compared to conventional ones and were in demand among housewives, travelers, graphomaniacs and even children.

Index typewriters

The principle of operation of the index typewriter The Mignon Index Typewriter - 1905

And a little about the Russian keyboard layout - YTSUKEN ... the story of its appearance is as follows: alas, it was invented in America at the end of the 19th century. Then all the companies produced a typewriter 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 now we have on the computer everything that has been invented for centuries before us ... The typewriters themselves have become an antique value and can be quite perceived as works of art.

History of the typewriter

Writing computers are relatively recent, but attempts to invent mechanical writing devices began nearly three centuries ago. In 1714, Britain's Queen Anne authorized a patent to an engineer named Henry Mill certifying that he had invented "an artificial machine or method of drawing letters, one by one, or successively one after another, as in hand writing." Unfortunately, this turned out to be easier in theory than in practice. Mill failed to build a working typewriter; a similar fate befell dozens of other inventors who tried to put the same idea into practice. This could not be done until the 60s of the last XIX century, when a newspaper editor and publisher from pcs. Wisconsin (USA) Christopher L. Sholes finally solved the problem.

There was something in the character of Sholes that brought him closer to a modern hacker. Having received public office As customs officer for the Port of Milwaukee, he retired from the newspaper business, but often reminisced about the long hours he spent writing and rewriting articles, when his only working tool was a quill pen or a steel-tipped pen. There must be a better way, and Sholes was determined to find it. Insofar as new job did not require much effort - Milwaukee was not a major international port - Sholes found enough time for his favorite pastime - technical invention. Working in a local workshop, Sholes and his companion Carlos Glidden came up with an apparatus for sequential numbering of book pages. From this simple device the typewriter originated.

Sholes patented his device in 1867. Six years later, Sholes and Glidden's typewriter began to be manufactured by Remington and Sons (Remington and Sans), a solid arms company, which later turned into Remington Rand (Remington Rand) and in 1951 began to produce and sell Univac UNIVAC, the first commercial computer in the US. After the American Civil War (1861-1865), Remington, expanding its range of products, began to produce sewing machines in addition to weapons. This was reflected in the models of typewriters: they were decorated with cheerful floral patterns and began to be mounted on the bed of a sewing machine in such a way that pressing the pedal caused a carriage return.

The first typewriter, created in 1873 by Sholes and Glidden, was attractive enough in appearance, but not very comfortable to use. With a typewriter of this design, hammers with letters hit the roller from below, and the typist could not see the typed text.

The first typewriter model had serious flaws. The typewriter was quite expensive at that time, $125, and it was possible to print on it only in capital letters. Also, since the characters driven by the keys were hidden under the carriage, the carriage had to be raised to see the printed text.

Success for the typewriter did not come immediately, but some of the first buyers rated it very highly. Among them is the former typographical compositor Samuel Clemens, who wrote books under the pseudonym of Mark Twain. Striking the keys with one finger (the blind typing system was invented a few years later), Twain typed out a letter to his brother:

"I'm trying to get used to this newfangled typewriter, but so far, it seems without much success. However, this is my first attempt, and I still think that I will soon and easily learn how to use it ... I believe that it will type faster, than I can write. she fits a lot of words on one page. she writes clearly, does not smear or plant ink blots."

Mark Twain

And a few years later, Mark Twain was the first of the writers to submit a typewritten manuscript to the publishing house. (According to Twain's own recollections, it was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but historians have determined that it was Life on the Mississippi.) Twain became so fascinated with mechanical devices for typewriting and typesetting that he later invested $300,000 in a typesetting machine. It turned out to be impractical - and Twain went bankrupt.

Other companies soon came out with their own types of typewriters, including ones that allowed immediate reading of typed text, as well as case-shifting models that could be typed in both lowercase and uppercase letters. The effectiveness of the improved models and the fact that they “do not smear or plant ink blots” eventually dispelled all entrepreneurial doubts, and the typewriter became a common tool.

One of the stubborn opponents new technology was a growing company Sears Roebuck, trading on mail orders. The management of the firm believed that typewritten letters were too impersonal, and even after the typewriter became widespread in the 90s of the 19th century, the secretaries of the firm continued to write all correspondence by hand, so as not to offend the feelings of their traditional farm clientele with newfangled "machine" letters.

The typewriter not only revolutionized office work, but also changed the composition of office workers. By providing women with acceptable social relations an occupation other than housework, the typewriter became a powerful tool for their emancipation, opening doors to where previously only men worked. The typewriter, Christopher Sholes remarked shortly before his death in 1890, “is evidently a blessing to all mankind, and especially to the female half of it. My invention turned out to be much wiser than I could have imagined."

However, women soon began to realize that they had freed themselves from the kitchen stove only to become slaves to the typewriter. This device did not forgive mistakes: it was enough to accidentally press the wrong key and the entire page had to be retyped. The advent of the electric typewriter in the 1920s did not solve the problem. It worked faster and was more comfortable for the fingers, but still one accidental hit on the wrong key inevitably caused errors.

Photos of the first typewriters

When the first computers appeared after World War II, modified typewriters naturally began to be used to print the output of the central processing unit. Approximately ten years later they were already used for data preparation. However, the problem of errors and the tedious retyping associated with them remained, which looked even more annoying against the background of the high speed of the computer's central processor.

Chinese typewriter?

Did the Chinese have something similar to a European typewriter?

After all, there are thousands of characters in Chinese. Before the invention of the computer, all documentation was drawn up manually, with the help of clerks, connoisseurs of hieroglyphs?

Artificial intelligence August 01, 2010 (rev. 1.08.2010 20:30) replied: 90 50

Chinese typewriter MingKwai, 1946:

Hieroglyphs were typed with a combination of keys according to the Lin system. The machine could create 8,000 different characters, and with the help of their combinations, it could print 90,000 words.

Shuangge typewriter:

It allowed typing 30,000 hieroglyphs, but at the same time - only 3,000 - so many hieroglyphs fit in the tray of the machine, the rest were stored separately. The operator placed the "scanner" over the desired hieroglyph, the hammer grabbed the bar with the hieroglyph and hit it on the paper.

And here is the Japanese Nippon SH-280, 1929:

I printed 2400 hieroglyphs. The operator moved the mechanical system over the desired hieroglyph and, by pressing the handle, actuated the "foot", which grabbed the bar with the hieroglyph and printed it on a sheet of paper.

The complexity of classical Chinese writing is illustrated by the structure of the Chinese typewriter.

The drum (tray) contains more than 2000 symbols, with several thousand more available in other drums (there is information that there are about 5700 symbols in total). The typist first aligns the drum, then presses the key, which collects the required character and makes an impression on the paper opposite. The machine can print vertically and horizontally.

SOURCE: David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, (Cambridge: Cmabridge University Press, 1987), p. 31

In the next picture - "improved", "cool" Chinese typewriter, the latest model of '47. :) In it, each hieroglyph is printed component by component - the upper, middle and lower parts. There are much fewer buttons, but it has a very complex mechanism and difficult controls.

The width of the keyboard is about one meter, on which prints with hieroglyphs (letters) that were previously in the box are placed. Naturally, the most popular words used in print are located on the canvas. Such as "Mao", "Peace", "Labor", "May" are located closer to the center. Accordingly, the closer to the edge of the canvas, the less popular the hieroglyph. Disused waiting in the box. Before printing a hieroglyph, the operator needs to find it with a magnifying glass. And only then, fixing it on the holder, transfer the image to paper. The fastest and most professional typists achieve typing speeds of only 11 words per minute.

Nippon Typewriter Co. began producing typewriters with Chinese and Japanese characters in 1917. "Nippon has a flat bed of 3,000 Japanese characters. This is considered sufficient for shorthand, as the Japanese language contains over 30,000 characters." (Thomas A. Russo, Office Collectibles: 100 Years of Business Technology, Schiffer, 2000, p. 161.) The successor company, Nippon Remington Rand Kaisha, made similar machines in the 1970s.

To use a typewriter, the paper must be wrapped around a cylindrical rubber roller that moves on rollers over a bed of type. The operator uses a level to control the an arm, which picks up the pieces of the metal symbol from the stock, makes an impression on paper, and returns them to their niches.

So - if you:

- you can't force yourself to work;

- if everything around you annoys;

- if you think only about how to get home early;

- even if you're just in a bad mood -

JUST THINK OF THE CHINESE TYPIST!!!

In their more than 100-year history, typewriters have "seen" a lot of talented works, they have been direct participants in the creation of thousands of masterpieces and bestsellers around the world. For many decades, the typewriter was considered the main working tool of writers, philosophers and journalists.

And 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 (Henry Mill) from England, but, unfortunately, there is no exact data on the mechanism and photos of the unit itself.

It took almost a century to create the first, and most importantly, working typewriter in 1808. The creator and developer was Pellegrino Turi, who invented it for the familiar Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Carolina was blind, and with the help of such an apparatus she could correspond with her relatives. The letters of Carolina Fantoni da Fivisono have survived to this day, but the typewriter has not. It is known that paper stained with soot was used for printing (it looks like carbon paper). By the way, the idea of "copying" several documents was not developed by Turi. In 1806, the Englishman Ralph Wedgwood patented "charcoal paper". For another two centuries, it was actively used in office work to quickly obtain copies.

But back to printing presses.

The next attempt to create a unit suitable for "quick printing" was in Russia, when M.I. Alisov developed a typesetting machine. Mikhail Ivanovich wanted to simplify and facilitate the procedure for copying manuscripts and originals, and he succeeded. The machine performed great. True, the high cost of the product put a fat cross on the history of the development of this product.

September 1867 was a milestone date for all writing machines in the world.

They say that a talented person is talented in everything. Christopher Latham Scholes was a writer, journalist and, of course, an inventor. In 1867, he applied for a patent for the production of his "brainchild" - a printing apparatus. The "bureaucratic machine" took 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 arranged according to the alphabetical hierarchy. By the way, there were no numbers 1 and 0, their role was played by "I" and "O". The downsides of the first unit were plenty. This is an inconvenient arrangement of letters, and the inability to work quickly, because the hammers on which the stamps with the letters are fixed 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, which was published in 1876, was printed on just such a typewriter with "tangled hammers". You can envy the patience of the author.

There were several ways to solve the problem of hammer entanglement: work more slowly (this did not suit the writers) or change the design of the typewriter. 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 are involved in the formation of stable combinations are farther from each other. By placing the letters in the correct order, the updated keyboard began with letters Q,W, E, R, T, Y.

QWERTY layout or universal keyboard has become popular all over the world.

Did you know that Leo Tolstoy's favorite writing assistant, without whom 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 a bright admirer of Underwood.

In 1877, Scholes sold the rights to make a typewriter to Remington, a gun manufacturer. And this was the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the creation of the typewriter. Remington engineers added the ability to print uppercase and lowercase letters to the "source" (in the original version, only uppercase letters were written). To do this, added the key "shift" (Shift).

Scholes' success inspired other inventors as well. In 1895, Franz Wagner took out a patent for a typewriter with horizontal arms 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 in the process of work. Wagner then sold the rights to manufacture his typewriter to John Underwood. The design was very easy to use, and very soon the new owner made a fortune on 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 former was that the printed text could be seen immediately, but at the same time they were very slow in operation and had poor penetrating power. The advantage of the second was speed.

The last typewriter factory in India closed in April 2011. This means that the era of this writing tool is officially over.

The first typewriter could have appeared in 1714, when in England a mechanic at the London Waterworks was ordered to build a machine for printing texts. Unfortunately, historians in the chronicles are not told about the fulfillment of this prescription. Another 150 years passed before the first mass-produced typewriters saw the light of day. The first typewriters were very different from modern ones and used different methods for printing text.

Of all the developments, only about twenty subsequently retained their significance. The most successful was the design of the American Scholes. His "Remington" became the ancestor of the modern typewriter.

Sholes lived in the American town of Milwaukee and was a printer by education, but then he earned money by collecting taxes. He invented a mechanism for putting page numbers in books and devoted all his free time to trying to make it. The farmer-inventor Glidden also worked on his original plow there. Once Glidden came with a magazine article about Pratt's typewriter and persuaded him to make a similar typewriter based on the Scholes mechanism. In 1867 the typewriter was made..

Satisfied friends sent letters printed on this typewriter to all their acquaintances. Glidden was among those who received the letters. He suggested to inventors financial support at the expense of future profits, but indicated a need for improvement. Despite leaving the Glidden enterprise, Sholes single-handedly made the necessary improvements. He made about thirty cars, and in 1873 a prototype went into series at the Remington factory.

The inventor of the first computer mouse is considered to be Douglas Engelbar, who worked at the Research Center of the Stanford Research Institute. Its development dates back to 1964 and is a by-product operating system oN-Line System (NLS). →

The roulette wheel first appeared in France in 1655. Blaise Pascal tried to create a perpetual motion machine by experimenting with a ball and a roulette wheel. Pascal's idea was used by some enterprising businessman to create →

The principle of operation of most typewriters is to apply characters to paper using special levers ending in platforms with metal or plastic letters. When the corresponding key is pressed, the lever strikes the ink-soaked tape, thus leaving an imprint of the letter on the supplied sheet of paper. Before printing the next character, the paper sheet is automatically shifted (and, as a rule, the tape is also scrolled). To print multiple copies of the same document, sheets of carbon paper are used, laid between ordinary paper sheets.

Application

For a significant part of the 20th century, almost all official documents emanating from state authorities (and their internal document flow) were typewritten. At the same time, in the USSR, statements, receipts and autobiographies of citizens were written by hand; protocols were often drawn up by hand. Also, publishing houses required to bring manuscripts in typewritten form, which greatly facilitated the work of typesetters, who now did not need to parse the author's scribbles.

Reprinting handwritten texts on a typewriter was the work of special workers (since this profession was mostly female, only the “female” term is commonly used - typist, previously remington player, from the typewriter brand "Remington") and organizations/departments ("typing bureaus").

Typescript

Typewritten text has characteristic features:

all letters are the same width
the character set is limited; some characters are combined - for example, left and right quotes are not distinguished, a hyphen and a dash are combined.

All this made it possible to simplify the design of the typewriter. When creating teletypes and computer printers, these features were repeated - also in order to simplify the hardware and software. Many early word processors (such as The Lexicon) were designed to imitate typewritten text, in part because the formatting of many documents was regulated state standards created in the era of typewriters.

Currently, texts in programming languages are traditionally printed in typewritten style.

Mechanical typewriters made it possible to receive text with different line spacing: single, one and a half, double, etc. The concept of line spacing is currently used in word processors. IN normative documents and standards governing the design text documents, to this day, the concept of "typewriter interval" ("typewriter interval") is used, which is numerically equal to the distance between the baselines divided by the height of the character.

Notes

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