The history of typing

Originally, of course, all the writing was done by hand.

The first person to patent a typewriter was Henry Mill. His idea was entered into the records of the British Patent Office in 1714. Unfortunately, Henry Mill never made his typewriter due to impatience with manufacturing.

After this, more types of typewriters were invented, but they were huge and heavy, some seemed the size of a piano, and actually took longer to use than handwriting, which obviously defeated the object!

The first person to make the first practical typewriter was Christopher Scholes, who patented his second model in 1868 (this machine eventually surpassed the speed of handwriting), along with the help of SW Soule and G. Glidden.

Scholes sold the rights to the typewriter to Densmore, and Densmore improved the typewriter and its ease of use by using Philo Remington to market the typewriter. However, it was not an instant success. The first Scholes and Glidden typewriter went on sale in 1873. It wasn’t until a few years later that Remington engineers worked on and improved the device that it became a success and sales skyrocketed. The first typewriter sold for $ 125. About 5,000 were sold in the next four years and about 6 different models evolved in that time due to improvements. On some machines, the return (carriage return) can be used with a foot pedal.

Then the keyboard was designed so that the most commonly used letters were next to each other and therefore the keys were found to get stuck easily. James Densmore, a business partner, suggested separating the most commonly used keys from each other to slow down typing, and that’s how we got today’s keyboard layout, the QWERTY (the first six letters on the keyboard).

Typewriters became common in offices in the late 1880s. Initially, the typewriter could only produce uppercase letters, but later it was modified with uppercase and lowercase letters. A typewriter has (and still has on modern typewriters) a carriage that contains a large roller that is used to return (hence the name carriage return) and a small roller to hold the paper in place.

If you made a mistake, it was necessary to erase a lot (including carbon copies) or start over.

Tippex wasn’t invented until the 1950s and even then it was a kind of powdered paper substance (not like the fluid we have now). But before using it, I still had to remove the error on all carbon copies first. And then it still made a bit of a mess, so accuracy was paramount.

A Remington was still in use in the 1970s and most students had to complete an RSA Certificate of Typing Proficiency. This took a lot of time and care and if a mistake was made, Tippex was used to correct the mistakes. In the 1980s, computers became more and more advanced and of course we have the modern computer today (thank goodness for that)!

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