It is reminiscent in the soulless tapping of keys on modern keyboards and recalled in the sounds of the elite of the keyboard world, the mechanical keyboard.
However, none of them quite reach the splendor and grandeur of a typewriter in action.
National Typewriter Day celebrates this humble device and the amazing pieces of literature it’s brought to us over the decades.
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." ~Ernest Hemingway
• Organize a typewriting contest – whoever types the fastest and with the least number of errors wins.
• Show your typewriter pride by wearing typewriter-shaped jewelry.
• Avoid using your computer and email, type letters and send them in the post or mail.
See if someone you know has a typewriter, or dig your old one out of your closet or attic. Spend some time learning to appreciate the sound of the typewriter and the style of writing it provides.
Sooner or later, you’ll soon find that the steady clacking of the keys encourages creativity, inspires greatness, and lends a form of satisfaction not found when writing on a modern keyboard.
Who knows? This holiday may lead to you writing the next great classic!
DID YOU KNOW?
…that most typewriters and computers today share the same keyboard layout?
REVOLUTIONARY DEVICE
Typewriters revolutionized the world of communications. Letters and correspondences looked more professional, followed a consistent format, and were more legible when typed out on a typewriter compared to handwritten communications that dominated the workplace in the past.
In addition to creating an efficient and more organized workspace, the use of typewriters in businesses and governments worldwide meant that typing became a required skill for many jobs.
A large percentage of these jobs were administrative in nature and were usually done by women, who were specifically hired for their typing skills - the typewriter played a very important role in opening up workspaces for women.
HISTORY
in 1575, typewriters were originally conceived by an Italian printmaker, though it never saw production (and to be fair it wasn’t QUITE a typewriter, but the vestiges were there).
In 1714, we had patents in Britain from English inventor Henry Mill that seems to be a typewriter from the design and was explicitly described as being intended for that purpose.
It appears that at some point the device was actually made, though it never went into production and no examples of it exist today.
In 1802, Another example was designed by Italian inventor Agostino Fantoni to help his blind sister writer, while Italian engineer Pietro Conti di Vilavegna invented yet another.
While many people had been working on different prototypes of typewriters before 1868, American inventor, newspaper publisher and Wisconsin politician Christopher Latham Sholes' typewriter was the first one to be commercially marketed.
Sholes co-invented the QWERTY keyboard, and has been contended to be one of the inventors of the first typewriter in the United States.
Known as the Sholes and Glidden typewriter or the Remington 1 typewriter, the device could only type uppercase letters.
But it wasn’t until 1895 that a model went into actual production with the Ford Typewriter. From there the world has never looked back, and typewriters started finding their way into private homes and places of business alike.
Some of the most important classics of the last one hundred years have been produced on a typewriter, including the earliest examples of Stephen King’s work,
Ernest Hemingway, name a professional writer who wrote a piece of any significance, and odds are high that they were written on a typewriter.
National Typewriter Day reminds any and all of us that while keyboards may be the key to modern literature, the world we live in was conceived on a typewriter.
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