History of the Typewriter

— 13 — typewriters, for instance, are not in such urgent demand, but they have been invented, and have attained quite a reasonable degree of perfection. There has been one feature, too, in connection with the typewriter which will at once appeal to the kindly disposed and charitable. Almost, if not quite, from the first, the effort has been to produce a mechanical writer for the use of the blind. But this has opened out two branches of study, for in the first place, the sightless ones are able readily to operate ordinary machines for general purposes, whilst for intercommunication special instruments have been devised, using the Braille or other codes, and at least one of the instruments has been brought to such a degree of perfection, that it can be manipulated, as a shorthand machine, with a speed equal to that attained by the ordinary or average sighted stenographer. By means of this shorthand machine, and the ordinary type- writer, many blind shorthand clerks to-day earn an easy competency, who, but for these aids, might be thrown upon the cold charity of a hard-hearted world. The great principle of the typewriter, that is to say, the depression of a key in order to produce a visible or tangible result, has also made itself manifest in several other ways. Such widely divergent instruments as the national cash register and the linotype composing machine must be considered as developments of the writing machine and this opinion will, it is considered, be regarded as fully justified when the account of these machines comes to be written. Although the typewriter has been, from its first incep- tion to the present day, purely practical, it has not been without its lighter side. It has done more than anything else to create uniformity in business matters and communi- cations. It has rendered correct spelling a thing impossible to avoid. It has forced attention to the problems of punctuation. It has taught display, system, orderliness, and a due regard for little things. It has trained even the most careless operators in a more or less perfect school of mechanics. It has always proved itself a willing in- strument in the hands of the intelligent operator. Little that can be done with the pen cannot be repeated with the typewriter. It is a training school of art, the lightning caricaturist, the pencil of nature, and the portrait painter par excellence. Numerous specimens of artistic work have been published, every line of which has been produced on the typewriter, and the studies appended to this introduc-