Upstrike Keyboard typewriters
If you put type on the end of a typebar, and print by
swinging the bar against the paper, the typebar needs to fall back into
its original position. Otherwise, you would have to pull it back manually,
before striking the next key. The easiest way to achieve this is by using
gravity.
It wasn't even Christopher Latham Sholes who followed this
train of thought for the first time. He was just the first to build such
a machine that was actually mass-produced.
The Austrian carpenter Peter Mitterhofer had built a typewriter
with the same odd upstrike system ten years earlier. The only difference
was that his machine was made completely out of wood, and nobody was interested
in mass production.
Obvious as it may seem today that you can see what
you writer, the 'blind writing' upstrike typewriter was the benchmark
machine for more than 20 years and the Remington Typewriter Company kept
up production of this clumsy system until 1915, despite the fact that
the first truly visible writers had already appeared in 1895.
This section of the museum presents only upstrike typewriters,
with single keyboards and a shift key, and with 'full keyboards' where
each character had its own key.
For the other keyboard typewriters, go back to the
Keyboard Typewriter index in the collection.
|