of all the inventions created, one of the most influential in the entire history of the world has been the typewriter. Patented today by firearm maker Charles Thurber in 1843 the typewriter has been the basis that computers and the creation of modern media and much of modern culture has been derived from.while the first typewriter was slow crude and never manufactured (as said in the marvels of modern mechanism) this patent would lead to the creation of the Hansen Writing Ball which would be produced in 1870 and instead of the keyboard which would be present on every typewriter thereafter used a ball shape made up of the keys.
typewriters would continue to become more and more practical. they had become standard in offices by the late 1880's and would be the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and would become where the standard QWERTY keyboard design we use came from (QWERTY referring to the first 6 letters of the keyboard), by the 1910 the typewriter had become a standard design with front stroking (the ability to see what was being typed), the shift key had also become standard) and actually shifted the typebar itself changing what type of letter would be printed from a keypress. Following this was also the tab key which functioned differently than today where the key would go to a predesignated location instead of going forward. noiseless typewriters would become standard by 1917 and in the 1930s and 40s' sold incredibly well.
By 1961 the typewriter had evolved to be electric and instead of a typebar had switched to a type ball which was slightly smaller than a golf ball where it got its nickname of golfball from. electric typewriters like this would become standard until 1991 where the increasing sale of home computers would almost end the typewriter industry except for in the correctional system where prisoners are prohibited from having computers.
The typewriter is an incredible piece of technology that evolved from a simple patent that barely worked into the tool used to create hundreds of thousands of books, documents, scripts and lists that would change our world as it is now and influenced the creation of the computer and even development of some languages.
References
Crabtree, J. (1901). The Marvels of Modern Mechanism and Their Relation to Social Betterment.
Seaver, Alan (2011). "Daugherty Visible". Machines of Loving Grace website.
Mosher, Charles Philo (10 April 1917). "Type-Writing Machine". Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office: 537.
"The Typing Life: How writers used to write", The New Yorker, April 9, 2007,
"A different type of dance move". Industrious. 20 January 2020. Retrieved 27 April 2022.
