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About Typewriter Appreciation Month

February is Typewriter Appreciation Month, a time to celebrate the typewriter, without which most of our modern means of communicating would be unknown. Even on a smart phone, there is a keyboard patterned after the typewriter.

Xavier University has done a beautiful job of documenting the history of the Typewriter. They begin:

The concept of a typewriter dates back at least to 1714, when Englishman Henry Mill filed a vaguely-worded patent for "an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another." But the first typewriter proven to have worked was built by the Italian Pellegrino Turri in 1808 for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano; unfortunately, we do not know what the machine looked like, but we do have specimens of letters written by the Countess on it. (For details, see Michael Adler's excellent 1973 book The Writing Machine. Carey Wallace's 2010 novel The Blind Contessa's New Machine is based on the relationship between the Countess and Turri.)

Numerous inventors in Europe and the U.S. worked on typewriters in the 19th century, but successful commercial production began only with the "writing ball" of Danish pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1870). This well-engineered device looked rather like a pincushion. Nietzsche's mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it.

Much more influential, in the long run, was the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer, which began production in late 1873 and appeared on the American market in 1874….

Read the rest of this fascinating history (includes pictures of the earliest typewriters) at: http://site.xavier.edu/plot/typewriters/tw-history.html