As many of you know, I am fully into Chillicothe History and since my retirement have spent many hours poring over old books, magazines, and databases at the Historical Society Museum. I am at ease with those who come to view our displays. I try to provide accurate information on what we have on things we have. A particularly fun experience I have is when young visitors come to the museum and I see their eyes and expressions on their faces when they encounter something they have never seen. As you can imagine, when they are in the five- to twelve-year-old range there are many “new” things for them to see. Two of those things that seem to surprise and intrigue them are the typewriter and the pedestal dial telephone. Nearly all of them want to try to operate each item and it is a pleasure to let them try to figure out what they are. With supervision, we let them touch and ask them if they know what they are touching. Some of the older ones have the right answer but others have never seen a typewriter of pedestal telephone. 

A group of young people from the Pearce Community Summer Camp came through and were very interested in the typewriter we have on display. As they asked questions and I answered them and gave them bits of its history, I realized that I really didn’t know as much about the origin of the typewriter as I had thought. Afterward, I decided to educate myself on that story. Even though I had worked for Kellstedt’s Office Equipment in Peoria when I attended Bradley, I had not learned that information from the people at Peoria Typewriter, who owned Kellstedt’s.

I was surprised to learn that the first writing machine was patented by Henry Mills in 1714. That machine is nothing like what we know today. It was a very cumbersome printing device that was never developed into a commercial unit. Some fifty years later, the first typewriter was patented by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1868. It too was not a simple, easy machine to operate, but did start the real development of a mechanical writing machine. Believe it or not, the first electric typewriter was patented in 1871. It only provided a motorized power bar to move the carriage across the page. Between 1868 and 1873, Sholes made fifty machines but did not sell any of them. Sholes sold his patent to gun manufacturer E. Remmington and Sons who built machines that printed only capital letters. In 1877, the Remington 2 Typewriter featured the ability to print both upper- and lower-case letters.

If you learned to use a typewriter, or a modern computer keyboard, did you ever wonder why the keys were in the places they are?  You can thank Mr. Sholes for that layout. He was the one who decided to create the upper row of keys Q W E R T Y as they are. He found that early keyboard layouts caused typists to go very slow because of keys jamming together. He moved the E, T, and A keys over to the left side to reduce the number of key jams, thereby allowing typists to maintain higher typing speeds. The layout is based upon which letters are used most often. 

Remmington had the early edge on typewriter production until Thomas Underwood bought the typewriter design invented by Franz Xavier Wagner in 1890. Underwood worked on its design and produced the Underwood model in 1896. It was his design that eventually established the way typewriters were built and looked. The underwood model got a real boost when the U.S. Navy bought 250 units in 1897. The company grew to employ 7500 workers and produced 500 machines a year by 1915. 

Electric typewriters were used in both WWI and WWII which led to the development of the teletypewriter. The electromagnetic typewriter was being produced in the 1930s but did not make much headway into the industry until it was bought out by IBM in 1933. In 1935, IBM introduced its first electric typewriter—the IBM Model 01. In 1961, IBM presented the first Selectric Model Typewriter that offered different fonts, italics, and foreign languages. IBM Selectric models were presented in 1964 with magnetic printing tape and correction ribbons.

The Model II came out in 1971 and the final Selectric model produced was in 1980, but it had little success because the computer technology had captured the market. 

One last bit of typewriter history is that Mark Twain was the first author to submit a book manuscript typed on a typewriter.