The Golden Age of Typewriter Evolution: 1870 to 1970
Typewriters from John Wherry's Collection
Typewriters That Illustrate History
As a child I liked to watch my dad type reports and letters on a heavy old Royal No. 10 typewriter. The sturdy machine had glass sides that displayed its parts in action. I was fascinated by all the keys, levers, knobs, and rollers.
My interest in typewriters continued as an adult and I decided to study typewriter history and collect vintage models, now numbering more than 50. The remarkable design and operational differences from one early machine to another were intriguing.
The moveable type printing press was earthshaking in 1440
One of the great breakthroughs in human history was German printer Johannes Gutenberg’s development of the movable type printing press in 1440. That invention triggered a publishing explosion that suddenly made books available to the masses.
But personal machine writing was delayed 400 years!
Despite printing press advances, personal mechanical technology was delayed for more than 400 years. Human ingenuity finally produced the first practical writing machines during the 100 year period between about 1870 and 1970. For the first time ordinary people had access to mechanical means of writing and expressing themselves beyond hand writing.
Finally a market for typewriters developed
The typewriters featured in this website illustrate how entrepreneurs and inventors rushed to satisfy that new market. Each new machine was an attempt to improve upon earlier ones. Patents protected proprietary new features, forcing competitors to find new and creative ways of getting the job done.
Improvements came in fits and starts
Keyboard layouts and shapes were not standardized for many years.
Some machines produced only capital letters.
Early “upstrike” machines typed on the bottom of the platen, requiring typists to lift the carriage to see what they had written.
Other imprint methods included frontstrike, downstrike, sidestrike, even backstrike.
Platen widths varied widely.
Some machines were made largely of wood.
Most used inked ribbons to transfer the type image to paper, but some used inked pads or rollers.
Automatic ribbon reversal was not universal.
Some machines required that each sheet of paper be rolled into a cylinder and placed into a cage before being fed onto the platen.
Shift and backspace keys were sometimes absent.
Setting margins was not an early development.
Double or triple line spacing was not universal.
Characters soldered or molded onto type bars were widespread, but sometimes the characters were on wheels, drums, sleeves or shuttles.
One machine avoided keys entirely, using a stylus to point at letters to be typed.
Great progress was made from the first commercially successful “type-writers” in the 1870’s to the last of the manual machines, when electric typewriters, then personal computers and ”word processing” began to take over in the late 1970s.
Learn about the recent evolution of machine writing
Read how the various mechanical marvels in my collection helped usher us into the modern world. The typewriters are presented in chronological order of their manufacture. Click here to begin reading about the typewriters in my collection and use the navigation tabs at the top of each page to read more. Click here to see a general typewriter parts diagram.
Click the following internet link to view an excellent list of vintage typewriter manuals:
