Typewriters

=__The Typewriter!__= The typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, causes characters to print onto a medium, usually paper. (Wikipedia) The need for the typwriter is part of the ongoing history of the human need to communicate, and to make things faster. The typewriter is one of the great inventions of 19th Century communications technology. Between the 1860s and 1920s engineers, inventors and even carpenters invested all their creativity in the development of the ultimate writing machine. This virtual museum, that is based on private collections of antique typewriters from around the world, is a tribute to their ingenuity.

__Who Invented the Typewriter?__
The first modern typewriter was invented by Christopher Sholes with the financial and technical support of his buissness partners, Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden. First attempts. The first patent for a writing machine was granted in London in 1714 to an engineer called Henry Mill. But there had been earlier attempts to create writing machines, particularly as a means for blind people to communicate in writing. There were several more or less succesful attempts at building typewriters, in Europe where an Austrian carpenter and a Danish clergyman literally wrote history. Sholes is the only typewriter inventor whose biography was written by more than one author and extensive details about his life are available. Sholes was a printer and newspaper man who liked to tinker in a local workshop in Milwaukee, Wis., with his friend Soule. They were working on a machine that would automatically number pages. One day in 1867, Carlos Glidden, another of the local amateur inventors in the workshop, read an article about the Pratt typewriter in Scientific American, and suggested to Sholes that he might transform his number stamping machine into a letter stamping machine.

__What problems were there before the typewriter was invented?__

 * Looking at how many letters some people write, doing them by hand could take a very long time.
 * Medical notes and prescritions were written by hand, everything had to be, if you had to ask permission for something, writing it out could slow down the whole prodject.
 * Individuals handwriting could be hard to read, you could very easily mistake words for somthing else, or maybe not be able to read it at all.Finding a person with a readable handwriting was very problematic.
 * Invoices in particular were mangled and buissness people found themselves struck with the wrong item, or too much of this, or too much of anoither item.

__Invention (Details)__
The keys of Sholes' first typewriter were set in alphabetical order until the mechanical bars which struck the paper consistently jammed. So he rearranged his keyboard by putting the letters that consistently jammed farther apart, these letters were normally the ones that you used most often. This is now the same arrangenment for modern computers nower days. 'QWERTY' is the most common modern day layout.Sholes' was not the only person to invent a mechanical writing device, there were a few others before him, but his has been considered the best, and best working typewriter.

__What was the Impact of the Typewriter?__

 * After the invention, contact with people who lived further away was much easier and faster.
 * Typed letters were much easier to read and write.
 * Everything was far more organised than it had ever been.
 * It has evolved into our modern computers and devices.
 * The typewriter gave respectable young women employment outside the home for the first time.
 * It also helped the proffessional world. It made a business appear more proffesional and aided in writing formal messages.
 * Typewriters became an aid to writers, although many disdained it and still write in long hand.



By Jamielee Clarke and Indigo Matthews 9G :D