TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Fri Dec 13 00:45:50 EST 2024
FONT RECOGNITION VIA FONT MOOSE
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The first typewriter?
In 1851 a brochure was published for the Second British Exposition of Technology, signed by Albert, Prince of Wales. In it, we find this text: The first patent for a 'writing machine' was given to Henry Mill in 1714. Sadly there are no surviving details to prove its existence as a working machine. The first known typewriter was invented in the United States of America by William Burt in 1830. This was called a Typographer and printed one single letter after another. From this point on there was a flood of designs both in the United States and Europe, causing some dispute over who invented what components. These machines were usually one-offs and it is only in the past year that the inventors of the 'Type-writer', Christopher Sholes and Carlos Glidden, have made an agreement with the Remington company to have their model manufactured in quantity. The machine writes in capitals and was heavily influenced by the workings of the Remington sewing machines. The original design laid the letters in an ABC format, but Sholes found that this continually jammed his typewriters. To solve the problem, he asked his brother-in-law, a mathematician, to work out an arrangement that would - for the most time - prevent the bars from clashing. The result is a rather unusual arrangement of letters on the keyboard 'QWERTYUIOP' on the top row of keys, 'ASDFGHJKL' in the middle and 'ZXCVBNM' on the bottom row. While this might not seem sensible to the laymen among us, Mr Sholes assures us that it is a highly logical and scientific design for the machine. |
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Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org ⦿ https://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html |