47 Fun Facts About Typewriters

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter could type only what?

Capital letters: a sewing-machine department built it, so the machine looked much like a sewing machine.

What did Soviet bugs inside US embassy typewriters in Moscow capture?

Keystrokes: the bugs sensed the typing mechanism's movements, radioed the text out in short bursts and went unnoticed for about eight years.

In the best-known version of the 'infinite monkey' idea, typing monkeys would eventually produce the works of whom?

Shakespeare: when a computer was left with six zoo macaques, they typed mostly the letter S and battered the machine.

Which Bradbury book was drafted on a rented library typewriter?

Fahrenheit 451: feeding the UCLA library's typewriter a dime per half hour, Bradbury finished a draft in just nine days.

Pellegrino Turri is credited with building an early typewriter for a friend who had what condition?

Blindness: little is known about the machine itself, yet letters his friend, a countess, wrote on it survive.

American inventor William Austin Burt patented an early writing machine under what name?

The Typographer was reportedly slower than writing by hand.

Which gun earned the nickname 'Chicago typewriter'?

Tommy gun: designed for World War I trenches, it was finished only after the war ended and found fame instead with Prohibition gangsters.

In which film does a woman find stacks of pages typed with the same sentence over and over?

The Shining: rather than subtitle those pages, Kubrick had new stacks typed with a local proverb for each foreign-language version.

Which typeface, created for typewriters in the 1950s, is the traditional font for screenplays?

Courier: its maker never took ownership of the name or design, which left both free for anyone to use.

In which city did Christopher Sholes and his partners begin developing the typewriter they patented in 1868?

Milwaukee: struggling to fund development, Sholes eventually sold his rights to the invention for $12,000.

Which company put the Sholes and Glidden typewriter on the market in 1874?

Remington, a gunmaker, had the machinery and skilled machinists needed to finish developing the complex machine.

Which German philosopher, his eyesight failing, began writing on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter in 1882?

Friedrich Nietzsche even claimed the machine shaped his thinking, writing that our writing tools take part in forming our thoughts.

Early typewriters that hid the typed line from the typist are often called what?

Understrike machines printed under the platen, out of sight, until front-strike designs won out in offices in the early 1900s.

An 'index typewriter' selects letters using what instead of a keyboard?

A pointer or stylus: slower than a keyboard but far cheaper, so these machines suited people who only needed to type now and then.

Which author reportedly dismissed Jack Kerouac's work as not writing but typing?

Truman Capote aimed the jab at Kerouac's fast 'spontaneous prose', a style that drew acclaim from some critics and scorn from others.

What did the small bell inside a manual typewriter signal?

The margin was near: a few characters after the bell the keys locked, so typists pressed a margin release key to keep going.

Frank McGurrin, winner of a famous 1888 typing duel in Cincinnati, typed without doing what?

Looking at the keys: he was hailed as the only touch typist, yet rivals' results at other 1880s typing matches suggest they typed by touch too.

Why was 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' used to test typewriters?

It uses every letter, which is why computers still use the sentence today to show off what each font looks like.

On a typewriter, a 'dead key' is one that does what?

It prints without advancing the platen, so one accent key could be struck over whichever vowel came next, saving a key for each accented letter.

On a typewriter, 'pica' and 'elite' named two different what?

Type sizes: elite's smaller letters fit 12 to an inch against pica's 10, squeezing more words onto each line.

Many typewriter ribbon levers had black, red and a third position used for what?

Cutting stencils: the ribbon stayed out of the way, so the bare type cut letters into a stencil for a duplicating machine to print from.

Which famous inventor built an early electrically operated typewriter in the 1870s?

Thomas Edison: his electric print-wheel machine was later developed into telegraph printers, which printed messages sent down the wire.

After each line, a manual typewriter's lever pushed what back to the start?

The carriage: that lever is why keyboards have a Return key, and computer text still includes an invisible 'carriage return' character.

Which feature, missing from ordinary typewriters, did IBM's 1940s Executive electric typewriter offer?

Proportional spacing gave a narrow 'i' less room than a wide 'm', so a typed page could pass for typeset print.

The IBM Selectric, launched in 1961, replaced typebars with a spherical element popularly nicknamed what?

The golfball spun and tilted into place for each letter, doing away with the jams typebars suffered when keys were struck in quick succession.

What security headache did used typewriter ribbons create in offices handling classified documents?

Text could be read from them, so ribbons used for classified work had to be locked away or destroyed along with the secret papers.

Many electronic typewriters printed with a spoked plastic wheel named after which flower?

Daisy: the letters sat at the tips of its petal-like spokes, and changing the wheel changed the typeface.

In 1991, IBM's typewriter business passed to which company?

Lexmark: an investment firm bought the business in a buyout, and the new company grew into a maker of laser printers.

Swintec makes typewriters out of clear plastic for what specific customer?

US prisons: the see-through cases make it harder for inmates to hide contraband inside the machines.

Godrej and Boyce, likely the last maker of manual typewriters, shut its plant in which city in 2011?

Mumbai: headlines hailed the 'world's last typewriter factory', but other companies were still making electric typewriters.

Who invented the correction fluid that became Liquid Paper?

Bette Nesmith Graham, a secretary and artist, stopped erasing her typing errors and painted over them with white tempera paint.

Which rival keyboard layout, patented in the 1930s to speed up typing, never displaced QWERTY?

Dvorak: wartime Navy tests seemed to show big speed gains, but a 1950s government study found that retraining typists was not worth it.

Which typewriter, printing from a typewheel rather than typebars, was among the first practical portables?

Blickensderfer: when World War I cut off its export markets, the firm turned to making machine-gun belt loaders for the French government.

Which comic-strip character sits at a typewriter writing 'It was a dark and stormy night'?

Snoopy borrowed the line from a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose name was later given to a contest for the worst opening sentence.

The 'cc' in emails is traditionally read as short for what office term?

Carbon copy: the 'cc' line outlived carbon paper itself, surviving the switch to photocopies and then to email.

Hunter S. Thompson retyped pages of which Fitzgerald novel?

The Great Gatsby: Thompson wanted to feel what it was like to write that way, and retyped pages of Hemingway for the same reason.

Early typewriter salesmen struggled because customers compared their $125 machine to what?

A pen cost about a cent, and some who received typed letters even took offence, as if the sender doubted they could read handwriting.

Which author claimed to be the first important writer to hand a publisher a typewritten manuscript?

Mark Twain named Tom Sawyer as that book, but he misremembered: the typed manuscript was Life on the Mississippi.

Jack Kerouac typed the first draft of which novel on a 120-foot roll of taped-together paper?

On the Road: publishers rejected it at first, and it came out only in 1957, after years of revising.

Which task was beyond Archy, the cockroach poet who typed Don Marquis's column at night?

Press the shift key: archy typed by hurling himself headfirst onto one key at a time, so his poems came out all in lower case.

Which actor is a well-known collector of manual typewriters?

Tom Hanks turned the hobby into Uncommon Type, a book of short stories in which a typewriter plays a part in every one.

William Gibson typed which novel, his first, on a manual typewriter?

Neuromancer: Gibson had never even owned a personal computer when he wrote it, yet the book imagined hackers roaming worldwide computer networks.

Which composer of the Christmas favourite 'Sleigh Ride' also wrote an orchestral piece featuring a real typewriter?

Leroy Anderson: radio programmes went on to use The Typewriter as a theme tune.

Satie's 1917 ballet Parade, whose score called for a typewriter and a pistol, had costumes designed by which artist?

Pablo Picasso: his costumes, some of them Cubist, shocked the audience at the Paris premiere.

The 2012 French comedy Populaire centres on a 1950s secretary competing in what?

Typewriting speed contests: the heroine starts out typing with just two fingers, so her boss moves her into his home to train her.

In which Sherlock Holmes story do typed letters share one typewriter's flaws?

A Case of Identity: Holmes chooses not to tell his client the truth, sure that she would not believe him.

In which country did a 1983 decree make typewriter owners give police a sample of every character?

Romania: the police kept the samples so that anything typed in secret could be traced back to the machine that typed it.