Typewriter Invention

The typewriter is one of America's greatest inventions. The typewriter was a big successes during the era it was invented, it became a very helpful tool for anyone who had to write long papers and it helped lead lots of other people to evolve it. The typewriter helped sped up the written world. But few people paid much attention, because they were too busy reading what the typewriter had written. The story of the typewriter begins in 1868, when Christopher Latham Sholes came up with a simple writing machine.
The central machinery that made the typewriter work was a circular arrangement of type bars. The type bars swung in a downward position and was connected by wires to the keys. When a key was pressed, a type bar swung upward and its head

The price for these typewriters were $125 each, which was an expensive piece of office equipment at that time. In its five years of manufacture, only 5000 units were sold. Even though not many were sold it still had many supporters. the first known writer to use a typewriter was Victorian actress Fanny Kemble used her Sholes & Glidden to crank out copy for a column in Atlantic Monthly. Also among the first users was Mark Twain, who bought the typewriter the moment he saw it. If there's one thing that links the first typewriter to nearly all its descendants it's the QWERTY keyboard. Sholes developed this arrangement and took a lot of heat over the years from competitors who spread the false rumor that he intentionally created a confusing keyboard to slow down fast typists. In fact, the qwerty keyboard was designed to solve jamming problems and improve typing speed. During the design process, Sholes realized that jams occurred only when two adjacent type bars were activated one after another. To solve the problem, he took the most frequently occurring letter pairs (such as TH and ED) and arranged them

Remington showed him the door, saying the company intended to make its own ribbons. Angry, Underwood bought the rights to a new kind of machine, one that typed from the front and allowed users to see what was typed on the page, this invention was called the Visible-Writing Underwood No. 5. By 1908, every other major typewriter maker had switched to the visible format. Other familiar features had also become standardized by this time, such as the 4-row keyboard and the SHIFT key for caps. Still, these improved typewriters were just a variation of Sholes' basic idea. Even most electric typewriters were simply powered versions of a familiar machine. It wasn't until 1960 that a new standard was set in typewriter design. This was the year the IBM Selectric first appeared. What made the IBM Selectric so successful was its single element mechanism-a type ball that replaced all the individual type bars. Interestingly, single-element mechanisms had originally appeared in the 1880s on several popular machines manufactured by Hammond, Blickensderfer and Crandall, among others. Blickensderfer, in fact, was also a pioneer in adapting typewriters to electricity, and the Blick Electric of 1902 was an electric typewriter that also incorporated a single-element concept, the same setup perfected in the Selectric nearly six decades later. Like the Remington-made Sholes & Glidden and