The world of qwerty

Who would have that thought old tech was so fascinating especially when this technology was  simply pressing a key to get a letter on a piece of paper. The eighty typewriters in this lovely book are a celebration of the inventor's art, least the early models sold before 1900. The first model shown is the 1874 Sholes & Glidden Type Writer and the first to have a QWERTY keyboard that's still with us today though unlike contemporary typewriters it wasn't possible to see what was being typed in capital letters only.

I find it odd that not being able to see the typing was a common feature of so many machines (they're known as blind writers, the typist had to lift the carriage to see their work) and still being sold even after 1893 when the Daugherty Visible solved the problem by showing what was being typed. The 1892 Duplex was an inspired idea, it had two alphabet keyboards (with twice as many typebars) one for each hand and it was supposed to speed up typing by having the left hand start a word and right hand type the next letter with the third letter typed by left hand and so on, the Duplex folk soon gave up on that model. There were several machines on sale that only printed one letter at a time but were much cheaper than those with a full keyboard though they look more like children's toys.

It was around 1900 that typewriters settled down to the now familiar shape, the four bank qwerty keyboard, typists could see their work, caps and lower case, tab stops, adjustable margins, backspaces et cetera were all available. The 1901 Underwood 1 for a $100 had it all and it was the machine that inspired manufacturers for the next fifty years. You might think that electric typewriters were a post WW2 development but page 152 shows the 1924 Woodstock Electric (Model E) apparently rather noisy, other companies soon took up the electric idea. The author has included a couple of musical note typewriters, a 1936 Corona Sterling and the 1953 Keaton which typed notes with a vertical carriage on an upright piece of pre-printed notation paper. IBM introduced their famous Selectric 721 in 1961 with 2,800 parts and 300 adjustment options. The big idea was to use an incredibly fast moving ball to type the letters on stationary paper and up to fifteen letters a second, much faster than any typist.

This landscape shaped book has a spread on each typewriter (all from the author's collection) with details of each machine on the left and a large photo on the right-hand page, a few visually interesting models have an extra spread of photos like the intriguing looking 1896 Oliver which has the typebars in a U shape either side of the printing point, ignore the keyboard and it doesn't even look like a typewriter. The back pages have a glossary, bibliography and index. Nicely the whole book is set in a very readable typewriter font.