Early typewriters

[mmcirvin]

The Virtual Typewriter Museum. As with most technologies, there was an astonishing variety of designs in the early years. I recently joked about using a spherical keyboard but had no idea that one was produced in 1870, and was arguably the first production typewriter.

Many of these 19th- and early 20th-century machines are gorgeous and some are amazingly small. Many seem not obviously less advanced than the Remington-Rand my mom was using well into the 1980s, and I was surprised to learn that such things as interchangeable typewheels go back to the 19th century. Here's an electric typewriter from 1902.

At the other extreme, there was also a whole category of cheap "index typewriters" that worked on the principle of the Dymo labelmaker. In between, there was a bizarre typewriter with a keyboard consisting of a sort of massive D-pad.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I keep finding wonderful and strange things on this site. Here's a 1950s Toshiba (http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=toshiba&cat=il#), a cylindrical index typewriter for Japanese.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...wow, look at the mysterious Fontana Baby (http://www.typewritermuseum.org/collection/index.php3?machine=fontanababy&cat=kd#).

We need computor keyboards based on some of those designs

[infrogmation.livejournal.com]

Very cool.

[mezdeathhead.livejournal.com]

I look at pictures of older cars, and I look at pictures of these typewriters, and of older architecture, and I wonder why people prefer ugly today. There was so much art involved in every little creation. Thanks for posting these.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Some of the cheap index machines intended for home use were pretty ugly even back then. I think part of it is that simpler designs involving less handcrafting are easier to mass-produce. Most of these beautiful old typewriters were probably hand-built by highly skilled artisans, and the skills hardly even exist any more. Today, production of most consumer items involves a combination of machines and low-paid, relatively unskilled sweatshop labor.

I suppose that the ornate hand-built typewriter was doomed to be a transitional product, since in a sense the typewriter itself represents a step away from a world run on skilled artisanship toward one of semi-automated production with lower-paid workers.