1/1/2023 0 Comments Remington typing bookEveryone was looking for the next big thing, and the typewriter happily filled that void. Sholes' backer, James Densmore, sold manufacturing rights to The Remington Arms Company who, after some more tinkering with the keyboard, launched their new product in 1873 to an American public in the midst of Reconstruction after the Civil War, when rifles were in less demand. He went through a number of designs before settling on a four-row arrangement in 1870 that had numbers in the top row, followed by vowels and punctuation and then the rest of the alphabet randomized on the next two rows. To troubleshoot this, he researched which letters were most commonly used and (possibly with input from telegraph operators) spread the most commonly used pairs out on the keyboard. Sholes saw a common problem in the early models: the type bars, which were set alphabetically, would often jam because they were so slow to reset. Originally attempting to create an automatic paginator, Sholes switched to improving the typewriter after seeing it advertised in Scientific American. Perhaps no one person had as much influence over the practical marketing of the typewriter than Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer, newspaper publisher, and politician from Milwaukee. In the beginning, they didn't even contain keyboards or ribbons. An early model stood nearly eight feet tall. They were fashioned in every size and shape one could think of. Like most inventions, the creation of the typewriter wasn't a singular event historians estimate that the typewriter was invented as many as fifty-two times. They didn't foresee typewriters being needed by those who could see after all, what were pens for? The earliest progenitors of the typewriter believed they were creating a writing device only for the blind. But at one time, typewriters were as revolutionary and cutting edge as the latest laptop technology. For those who grew up in the digital age, typewriters may seem all but extinct, a relic of a past era.
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