The history of the typewriter. |
The typewriter with its QWERTY keyboard revolutionized the world of communications.
Our current world would not exist without the vision of men who in 1868 presented an invention of a rudimentary machine in the city of Milwaukee, which went unnoticed unlike the telephone, the car and the plane. People paid little attention to this invention since it was busy reading what the machine had written about the other inventions.
As I said at the beginning the history of the machine starts from the year 1868 when an inker named Christopher Latham Sholes presented his visionary machine, after 5 years I present an improved version to E. Remington & SONS, DE Ilion, NY. In 1874, the first typewriter, Sholes and Glidden, left the Remington factory. (Carlos Glidden helped Sholes in the development of the initial model and this became his partner).
More than its mechanical functionality, its appearance was a true beauty, beautifully decorated with flowers and golden curls. She was leaning on a lectern and using a pedal on her foot to return the car, something strange may seem like the model but it was definitely a typewriter. It took more than 80 years for the basic model developed by Sholes to change significantly.
Nothing escaped from the vision of Sholes; the most characteristic and that which unites and defines the first machine with its subsequent descendants to the computers that we currently occupy. It is the "QWERTY" keyboard, which gets its name from the first 6 letters from left to right in the upper row of the keys.
Sholes; for years he was criticized by his closest competitors arguing that the confusing arrangement of the keys developed by him, intentionally stopping the fastest typists could already jam the machines. However, this "QWERTY" board was designed to solve these problems and improve the writing speed. To solve the problem Sholes took the most frequent pairs of letters and separated them so that none were close. Of course they could still get stuck but it would be less frequent and the typists would write as fast as possible. The "QWERTY" keyboard machine being the first of its kind, Sholes and Remington set a pattern that would be impossible to change. Other keyboards have appeared over the years, such as the "Blickensderfet" keyboard and the "Dvorak" keyboard, but none of them achieved the success or permanence of "QWERTY".
During this golden age of typewriters appeared hundreds of competitors, who faced a common problem: to create a machine that did not violate any of the patents of Remington or anyone else. The result was the production of very strange machines; with "typing" bars, wheels, bands, or shuttles. The keys were distributed in straight rows, graceful curves and even in complete circles.
But in 1895 a ribbon maker named John Thomas Underwood went with Remington to renew his supplier contract. Remington rejected him, furious Underwood bought the rights for a new kind of machine, one that would typify from the front allowing the user to see what he would type in the paper. The Underwood Nº. 5 took the industry as a storm and by 1908 almost all manufacturers had switched to visible format.
1960 another important year for the history of typewriters, a new design appears IBM Seletric that perfected the sphere of typing; a mechanism that had appeared on 1880 typewriters.
1978 few years passed for the next innovation as the machine that sets the standard to our day goes out to market. The Exxon QYX, an electric typewriter that used a microprocessor and a daisy wheel typing mechanism.
The arrival of the era of computers and the bankruptcy of companies like Smith-Corona IN 1995, turned the typewriters into collectibles with prices ranging from $ 50 to $ 5000 for a copy.
What a good return to the past with this.
It reminds me of the vintage decorations of today
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