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.