Computers and smartphones might be where most writing is done these days, but typewriters still have work to do in the US.
BBC article here.
Mike Marr has been repairing typewriters for more than 20 years and still sees dozens being brought into his shop in Rhode Island every week (Credit: Ernesto Roman)
Lisa Floading uses her collection of typewriters every day to write letters, compile lists and do admin (Credit: Lisa Floading)
BBC article here.
Mike Marr has been repairing typewriters for more than 20 years and still sees dozens being brought into his shop in Rhode Island every week (Credit: Ernesto Roman)
Pretty much every day, another customer clutching an old typewriter will walk into Mike Marr's shop in Pawtucket, Rhode Island...
... law firm Tomasso & Tomasso...has three typewriters, John [Tomasso] says and his colleagues still use them to type up cheques and fill in legal forms to ensure the details on those documents are legible.
...in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a real estate agency called Jarvis Realty, owned and run by Woody Jarvis. "I'm real old school," he says. Jarvis, too, regularly uses a typewriter for office work.
...in 1868, the first device actually called a typewriter emerged: the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, which was patented that year by four inventors in Milwaukee. One of the group, Christopher Latham Sholes, also invented the Qwerty keyboard...
... law firm Tomasso & Tomasso...has three typewriters, John [Tomasso] says and his colleagues still use them to type up cheques and fill in legal forms to ensure the details on those documents are legible.
...in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is a real estate agency called Jarvis Realty, owned and run by Woody Jarvis. "I'm real old school," he says. Jarvis, too, regularly uses a typewriter for office work.
...in 1868, the first device actually called a typewriter emerged: the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, which was patented that year by four inventors in Milwaukee. One of the group, Christopher Latham Sholes, also invented the Qwerty keyboard...
Lisa Floading uses her collection of typewriters every day to write letters, compile lists and do admin (Credit: Lisa Floading)
Lisa Floading, who works at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, is a big fan of typewriters. She has 62 of them. "There's something very inviting about a typewriter waiting with paper in it," she explains. "I have them all over my house."
...she'll even bring a typewriter to her local coffee shop sometimes so she can work on it there. People regularly come up to her to ask about it, she says.
In June, Floading took part in an event in Milwaukee called Qwertyfest – intended to celebrate both the typewriter and the Qwerty keyboard layout, in memory of Christopher Latham Sholes...
Todd Althoff is president of Royal, a US company that has been making typewriters since 1904... The factory is in Indonesia, he explains, and is run by a team from Nakajima, a typewriter manufacturing firm from Japan. Every year, Royal still sells around 20,000 new electric typewriters and more than double that amount of mechanical typewriters...
And, re the QWERTY keyboard, from a linked article in the one above, there's a gun link. My mother had a "Remington Noiseless" model made in the 1930's:...she'll even bring a typewriter to her local coffee shop sometimes so she can work on it there. People regularly come up to her to ask about it, she says.
In June, Floading took part in an event in Milwaukee called Qwertyfest – intended to celebrate both the typewriter and the Qwerty keyboard layout, in memory of Christopher Latham Sholes...
Todd Althoff is president of Royal, a US company that has been making typewriters since 1904... The factory is in Indonesia, he explains, and is run by a team from Nakajima, a typewriter manufacturing firm from Japan. Every year, Royal still sells around 20,000 new electric typewriters and more than double that amount of mechanical typewriters...
The qwerty layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code - that's why, for example, the Z is next to the S and the E, because Z and SE are indistinguishable in American Morse code. The telegraph receiver would hover over those letters, waiting for context to make everything clear...
Sholes' design was taken up by the gunsmiths E Remington and Sons. They finalised the layout and put it on the market for $125 - perhaps $3,000 (£2,271) in today's money, many months' income for the secretaries who would have used it.
Sholes' design was taken up by the gunsmiths E Remington and Sons. They finalised the layout and put it on the market for $125 - perhaps $3,000 (£2,271) in today's money, many months' income for the secretaries who would have used it.
