The advancements of the typewriter and its effects on present day

During the roar of production in the 19th century, many large and monotonous products and machines were invented or at least attempted for creation. These inventions had a large scope of uses, but most were around the size of a piano and were just as heavy. One invention, however, strayed from the mold that all others had been following. This is the creation of the typewriter, brought forth in 1867 by Christopher Sholes. His patented model came out in 1868 and wrote far faster than a pen could, and after a few years of updating the machine, he signed a contract with Remington & Sons in 1873 for manufacturing. In 1874 the new Remington, the first name put out to represent the typewriter, was added to the market. At this time, the machines could produce about 1,000 characters per minute. It wasn't long before people were using Remingtons to produce content, as Mark Twain was the first author to purchase one and submit a fully typewritten book manuscript.

Mark Twain depicted with a typewriter.

At this time, the typewriter still had some major flaws in it, including the lack of a shift key. The machines wrote in all-caps until 1878 when the Remington model 2 came out and included a shift key, which alerted the machine whether to use the lowercase or uppercase letters that had been added to each bar. As time progressed, typewriters became more and more advanced as new models proved to be quicker, quieter, and eventually, electric. 

Thomas Edison created the first electrically powered typewriter in 1872, which was then adapted and made into an office machine by James Smathers in 1920. During this time, typewriters grew in popularity and became a regular machine in the workplace. A quick 40 years later, the International Business Machines Corporation put the first-ever commercial typewriter on the market, allowing anyone to become a writer. Now that these machines were in the average household, it was time to continue making them innovative. 

The 20th century was all about making the typewriters better. By 1909, the first successful portable typewriter appeared on the market. Prior to this, portables were slow, awkward, and lacked convenience. Quickly enough, by the 1950s, pretty much all typewriter manufacturers had a portable option for their customers. 

As typewriters adapted more throughout the 20th century, they became the common day composing machine. From there, the typewriter sparked the idea for the creation of highspeed printers, which could produce up to 100,000 characters per minute, a huge advancement from its ancestor machines back in the 1800s. Today, millions upon millions of pages are printed daily with trillions of words on them, all of which is thanks to the clunky, slow machine produced over 150 years ago.