typewriter

Keyboard machine that produces characters on paper. The earliest known typewriter design was patented by Henry Mill in England in 1714. However, the first practical typewriter was built in 1867 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, by Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soulé. By 1873 Remington and Sons, US gunmakers, had produced under contract the first typing machines for sale and in 1878 they patented the first with lower-case as well as upper-case (capital) letters. Modern typewriters comprise electronic storage and editing of text, and a variety of printing methods. Even these have been almost wholly superseded by word-processing software run on laptops or personal computers.

The first typewriter patented by Sholes included an alphabetical layout of keys, but Remington's first commercial typewriter had the QWERTY keyboard, designed by Sholes to stop the mechanical keys getting jammed together as they had in earlier alphabetical arrangements.

Other layouts include the Dvorak keyboard developed by John Dvorak in 1932, in which the most commonly used letters are evenly distributed between left and right, and are positioned under the strongest fingers. Later developments included tabulators from about 1898, portable machines about 1907, the gradual introduction of electrical operation (allowing increased speed, since the keys are touched, not depressed), proportional spacing in 1940, and the rotating typehead with stationary plates in 1962. Word processing has largely replaced the typewriter for typing letters and text.