Sholes and Glidden
1874 · Type Bar Typewriter · Work 157 of 1,871
A Sholes and Glidden typewriter on its sewing machine stand in a Remington workshop, a decorated iron shell over the upstrike typebars, the carriage return treadle below and a paper roller above.
- What it was used for
- The machine was built by E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York — a gunmaker that also built sewing machines, and it showed: a table, a treadle for the carriage return, black lacquer with floral decoration. The contract of 1 March 1873 committed Remington to have its own lead mechanics William Jenne and Jefferson Clough rework the machine and to build at least a thousand of them. From 1874 it sold at 125 dollars. According to the Smithsonian it could type capital letters only; upper and lower case arrived with the successor model of 1878.
- What was new
- It was not the first typewriter: of Malling-Hansen's writing ball of 1870 the Science Museum Group writes that it is considered the world's first commercially produced typewriter — yet only 180 were ever made and it was not a commercial success. What was new about the Sholes & Glidden was that it could be built in series: about 5,000 between 1874 and 1878, where the Milwaukee predecessors had, according to the ASME, been turned out in small numbers in an improvised workshop. Sholes arranged the keys, as the ASME relays the received account, so that the typebars would jam less often — a fix for a mechanical problem of this one design, and as QWERTY it has outlived the design. The price was blindness: the types struck the underside of the platen, and the text became visible only when the platen was turned up.