History of the Typewriter

— 22 — We must now go back again to America. During the years 1847 to 1856, Alfred E. Beach, the editor of the Scientific American, invented a number of machines, and a sectional view of one of them is shown in the drawing. The most noticeable feature which will strike the typist of to-day, is the key-stem passing through the bridge, the bell-crank lever pulling the connecting wire, and the pivotting of the type-levers. With this illustration before him, the operator might very well wonder wherein the inventions of the past thirty years have advanced the essential theory of the typewriter. But Beach’s machine was not intended as a writer, pure and simple. It was used to emboss a narrow paper tape. This tape fed through the centre of the machine, and the type-bars themselves worked in pairs like a pair of tongs. When a key was depressed, the lower bar rose, and the upper bar descended, and gripped the paper between them. On one bar the letter was in relief, and in the other it was sunk, so that the paper was forced into the sunken letter by the pressure of the one in relief. The typebars all converged to a common centre, and the paper was fed forward by an in- dependent clockwork mechanism, the escapement of which was controlled by a cord, which, passing beneath the type- bars, received a pull whenever any of them was depressed, and allowed the train of clockwork to advance the paper the space required to emboss the next letter. Thus we have a third stage in the evolution of the machine, namely, the equivalent of what we now call the universal bar. Fairbank’s machine, invented in 1848, was another step in the development of the general idea. This gentle- man was not a typewriter inventor, however. He was a calico printer, and with the idea of printing designs in various colours upon the fabric mentioned, he elaborated a machine in which the patterns desired were affixed at the ends of rods, all of which worked up to the same point.