History of the Typewriter

“298—“ Now it will be clear that if, on the one hand, means could be provided whereby the proper perforations in the tape could be made in the tape by the simple act of depres- sing a single key, instead of tapping it out a mark at a time, much time and labour could be saved. And, more- over, if when the message was sent over the wire, it could be typed in ordinary characters instead of dots and dashes, then also the risk of mistranslation would be avoided, and the time occupied in that operation would be saved. And it is also clear, that time may be saved by the adoption of a simple code of spelling or telegraphic shorthand, in the same way that press work is generally executed. Many means have been adopted to secure these ends, and nearly every one differs widely from the others. Those which we now describe are probably the most important and interesting, and bear most closely upon the subject of the typewriter, and are therefore chosen for our present purpose. Very shortly after the electric telegraph had been brought into operation, Mr. R. E. House, of Vermont, U.S.A., brought out a printing telegraph, which, under favourable conditions, could transmit forty words per minute, whilst the best operator under the old style could not “ do ” more than half that speed. Notwithstanding this remarkable increase in facility, the House instrument was abandoned between forty and fifty years ago, whilst the method it was intended to supersede has remained “ in full force and virtue.” The chief reason for this extraordinary state of things has been stated to have been the inability of House’s machine to work over long distances, a fact which also accounts for the early demise of many another promising invention in the same direction. In the House machine, there was a small wheel with the letters of the alphabet cut on the rim, and this wheel moved round step by step by means of electric impulses until the right letter was brought opposite the printing point, when the impression would be made. For A there would be one impulse or step, for B two, and so on, until Z, which required twenty-six impulses, in order to move the wheel round that number of steps, the average number of impulses being twelve per letter. In 1855, David E. Hughes, of Kentucky, brought out a machine, in which he made use of the principle of syn- chronism, that is to say, he kept a wheel revolving in New York at the rate of about two turns per second, and another at Boston at precisely the same speed, and he so arranged