The glory of the typewriter has already rolled up, and more recently, it was truly grandiose. At the end of the last century, the typewriter had to pass the baton on to a personal computer. But what was the first typewriter? Photo, history of the invention and design features - hereinafter.
First experiences
When did the first typewriter appear? The history of portable printing devices begins long before the twentieth century. Many people, together or independently from each other in different years, invariably came up with the idea of quickly typing a wide variety of texts. For the first time this happened at the beginning of the eighteenth century, namely in 1714.
Then Queen Anne of England issued an official patent to Henry Mill, a waterworks employee in London, for a car in which the artificial method of printing letters allows each to be arranged separately and in the required order. In this case, the text is printed on paper clearly and clearly. Unfortunately, apart from the text of the patent, nothing has been preserved.
Secondly, a typewriter was designed in Germany in the fifties of the same century by Friedrich von Knauss. This device was not destined to become popular, they forgot about the typewriter again. Next came the turn of Spain. Around 1808, the talented mechanic Terry Pellegrino created his own typewriter. This device has generated love.
Touching love story
Terry Pellegrino fell in love with the lovely Countess Carolina Fantoni. The young girl suddenly became blind, but her chosen one turned out to be a loyal and rather adventurous person. For his blind beloved Terry created the first typewriter. On it, blind Carolina Fantoni wrote letters to her lover and composed poems.
The device worked as follows. The countess with her fingers found the key with the necessary letter engraved on it, pressed lightly, and the letter fell, tracing the letter on paper through the carbon paper. After the death of Carolina, the machine itself was lost, but several letters printed on it remained.
First carbon paper
In the fall of 1808, Carolina informed Terry that she was running out of paper, without which she would no longer be able to write letters to her beloved. Thus, an enterprising Italian can be considered the creator of not only the world's first typewriter, but also a prototype of modern carbon paper.
Terri Pellegrino saturate ordinary sheets with printing ink and dried in the sun. After this touching story, various experiments on creating new versions of cars for the blind became widely known in many countries of the world. Until the end, the typewriter was invented in the USA.
American inventions
In 1829, an American citizen, William Austin Burt, patented a typewriter for the blind under the name Typograph ("printer"). Using a special embossing method, letter blanks left a clear mark on a thick paper tape. In 1843, Charles Tober received a patent for a printing device.
The inventor was worried about the fate of the blind. Like his predecessors, the American wanted to provide work for blind people who had not previously participated in social life. The Tober typewriter did not find a response from the manufacturers, but his invention uses the fruitful idea of lever transmission of the movement of letters.
The next "first" typewriter is the invention of Samuel Francis. In his typewriter of 1856, there was a movable carriage, and levers with blanks of letters, and a ribbon saturated with special printing ink, and even a bell that warned of the end of the line.
Other inventors
So who invented the first typewriter? In the middle of the nineteenth century, another prototype of a typewriter was created by a certain Italian. He called his invention “harpsichord writing”, or “keyboard typing machine”. It was already a more modern device that allowed you to see the written text in the printing process.
In 1861, a Brazilian priest created his own version of the device. Inspired by this invention, the Emperor of Brazil Pedro I awarded the priest a gold medal. Father became a real pride of the Latin American country. In Brazil, he is still considered the sole inventor.
Russian typewriter
Who created the first typewriter in Russia? In 1870, Mikhail Ivanovich Alisov constructed the “typographer”, or “scribbler”. His goal was to replace the calligraphic rewriting of manuscripts and various documents. The printer was quite suitable for this, for which he received high reviews and medals at three exhibitions: in Vienna in 1873, in Philadelphia in 1876 and in Paris in 1878.
The inventor who invented such a device, the Russian Technical Society awarded a medal. That typewriter was very different in appearance from most devices familiar to the modern layman. Wax paper was used, which was then multiplied on a rotator.
QWERTY Keyboard
Various types of printing presses gradually became more practical for daily use. The familiar QWERTY keyboard was invented by a certain Scholes. The inventors analyzed the compatibility of letters in the English language, and QWERTY is an option in which often combined letters are located as far as possible. This prevented sticky keys when typing.
Ageless Classics
The classic Underwood appeared back in 1895 and gained dominance at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is the first typewriter in the world to truly have a stunning commercial success. Soon another classic model appeared. American Christopher Latham Scholes patented a device that, after several improvements, was given the commercial name Remington No. 1. These cars were mass-produced.
The Remington trade was difficult until the Ministry of Finance ordered the cars. By 1910, more than two million such typewriters were already in use in America. One writer from this series was even acquired for himself by writer Mark Twain.
Series production in Russia
In Russia, before the revolution, typewriters were not produced, but were actively used. Due to the pre-revolutionary spelling, the letters on them were located quite unusual. On portable devices, there were no numbers that when printing were replaced with the corresponding letters (“O”, “Z”, and so on).
The first typewriter in Russia, which was mass-produced, was called "Yanalif". The device has been produced since 1928 in Kazan. In later times, the most common domestic brands of typewriters were portable “Moscow” and “Lyubava”, stationery “Ukraine” and “Yatran”. Of the foreign devices, Optima and Robotron, Erica from the GDR, Consul from Czechoslovakia, Olympia from Germany were popular.