The History of Typewriters: From Invention to the Digital Keyboard

The first commercially successful typewriter was the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, introduced in 1868 and manufactured by E. Remington and Sons from 1873. Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer, led the team that developed the machine after years of experiments with mechanical writing devices.

The early Remington model could only type in uppercase letters — no lowercase. It was a curiosity rather than a practical tool, and sales were slow at first. Mark Twain is often credited as one of the first authors to submit a typewritten manuscript to his publisher, writing Life on the Mississippi on a Remington in 1883.

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter introduced the QWERTY keyboard layout — the same layout you are probably using right now. Contrary to popular myth, QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down. It was designed to reduce mechanical jamming by separating commonly paired letters.

By the 1880s and 1890s, typewriters had become indispensable in business offices across America and Europe. A skilled typist could produce documents three to four times faster than a copyist writing by hand, with far greater legibility. The term "typewriter" originally referred to the person who operated the machine, not the machine itself.

The typewriter also had a profound social effect: it opened professional office work to women on a large scale for the first time. By 1900, women made up the majority of "typewriters" in American offices. The typing profession gave a generation of women economic independence and entry into the formal workforce.

By 1910, there were dozens of competing typewriter manufacturers including Underwood, Royal, Olivetti, and Remington. Speed-typing competitions became popular public spectacles, with champion typists achieving 100–150 words per minute — speeds that most modern computer typists still cannot match.

Electric typewriters arrived in the 1920s but became dominant only after IBM's Model 01 "Executive" in 1944 and, more famously, the IBM Selectric in 1961. The Selectric replaced the moving carriage with a rotating typeball — a golf-ball-sized sphere containing all the characters — that moved across the page instead. This allowed faster, cleaner typing and easier font changes.

The IBM Selectric became the standard office typewriter of the 1960s and 1970s. Its distinctive typing feel influenced the keyboard feedback that computer keyboard manufacturers would later try to replicate. Many typists who learned on the Selectric became the first generation of computer keyboard users in the 1980s.

Personal computers arrived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and within a decade the typewriter was effectively obsolete. But its influence was everywhere. The QWERTY layout survived unchanged into the digital era. The concept of a "typing speed" measured in words per minute came directly from typewriter competitions. Even the sound design of modern mechanical keyboards is explicitly engineered to evoke the satisfying clatter of a vintage typewriter.

The typewriter era also established the idea that typing was a professional skill worth training and measuring — a tradition that typing practice tools like this one continue today. The fastest typists of the typewriter age would recognize in modern touch-typing technique everything they valued: proper posture, correct finger placement, and the pursuit of effortless, error-free speed.