Typewriters Trivia
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47 free Typewriters trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This typewriters trivia quiz covers the whole life of the writing machine, from a 1714 English patent and a Danish clergyman's writing ball to the IBM Selectric and the clear-plastic models still sold to prisons today. The easy questions cover QWERTY, carbon copies, the margin bell and the famous authors who typed. The middle of the quiz gets into the mechanics: understrike versus frontstrike, the shift key, dead keys, pica and elite, and why ribbons had a red stripe. The harder questions are for collectors and history nerds: the Blickensderfer's DHIATENSOR layout, Remington's factory town, Olivetti's first daisywheel machine, Soviet and Romanian typewriter registration laws, and the price Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti fetched at Christie's. Pop-culture rounds cover Satie, Leroy Anderson, Jerry Lewis, Sherlock Holmes and Tom Hanks. If you liked our inventions or office quizzes, this is the deep dive on one machine. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the typewriter before publishing, and figures such as dates and prices are the ones recorded there.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Sholes and Glidden typewriter could type only what?
Capital letters
Capital letters: a sewing-machine department built it, so the machine looked much like a sewing machine.
Q 02What did Soviet bugs inside US embassy typewriters in Moscow capture?
Keystrokes
Keystrokes: the bugs sensed the typing mechanism's movements, radioed the text out in short bursts and went unnoticed for about eight years.
Q 03In the best-known version of the 'infinite monkey' idea, typing monkeys would eventually produce the works of whom?
Shakespeare
Shakespeare: when a computer was left with six zoo macaques, they typed mostly the letter S and battered the machine.
Q 04Which Bradbury book was drafted on a rented library typewriter?
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451: feeding the UCLA library's typewriter a dime per half hour, Bradbury finished a draft in just nine days.
Q 05Pellegrino Turri is credited with building an early typewriter for a friend who had what condition?
Blindness
Blindness: little is known about the machine itself, yet letters his friend, a countess, wrote on it survive.
Q 06American inventor William Austin Burt patented an early writing machine under what name?
The Typographer
The Typographer was reportedly slower than writing by hand.
Q 07Which gun earned the nickname 'Chicago typewriter'?
Tommy gun
Tommy gun: designed for World War I trenches, it was finished only after the war ended and found fame instead with Prohibition gangsters.
Q 08In which film does a woman find stacks of pages typed with the same sentence over and over?
The Shining
The Shining: rather than subtitle those pages, Kubrick had new stacks typed with a local proverb for each foreign-language version.
Q 09Which typeface, created for typewriters in the 1950s, is the traditional font for screenplays?
Courier
Courier: its maker never took ownership of the name or design, which left both free for anyone to use.
Q 10In which city did Christopher Sholes and his partners begin developing the typewriter they patented in 1868?
Milwaukee
Milwaukee: struggling to fund development, Sholes eventually sold his rights to the invention for $12,000.
Q 11Which company put the Sholes and Glidden typewriter on the market in 1874?
Remington
Remington, a gunmaker, had the machinery and skilled machinists needed to finish developing the complex machine.
Q 12Which German philosopher, his eyesight failing, began writing on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter in 1882?
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche even claimed the machine shaped his thinking, writing that our writing tools take part in forming our thoughts.
Q 13Early typewriters that hid the typed line from the typist are often called what?
Understrike
Understrike machines printed under the platen, out of sight, until front-strike designs won out in offices in the early 1900s.
Q 21Many typewriter ribbon levers had black, red and a third position used for what?
Cutting stencils
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.
Q 22Which famous inventor built an early electrically operated typewriter in the 1870s?
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison: his electric print-wheel machine was later developed into telegraph printers, which printed messages sent down the wire.
Q 23After each line, a manual typewriter's lever pushed what back to the start?
The carriage
The carriage: that lever is why keyboards have a Return key, and computer text still includes an invisible 'carriage return' character.
Q 14An 'index typewriter' selects letters using what instead of a keyboard?
A pointer or stylus
A pointer or stylus: slower than a keyboard but far cheaper, so these machines suited people who only needed to type now and then.
Q 15Which author reportedly dismissed Jack Kerouac's work as not writing but typing?
Truman Capote
Truman Capote aimed the jab at Kerouac's fast 'spontaneous prose', a style that drew acclaim from some critics and scorn from others.
Q 16What did the small bell inside a manual typewriter signal?
The margin was near
The margin was near: a few characters after the bell the keys locked, so typists pressed a margin release key to keep going.
Q 17Frank McGurrin, winner of a famous 1888 typing duel in Cincinnati, typed without doing what?
Looking at the keys
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.
Q 18Why was 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' used to test typewriters?
It uses every letter
It uses every letter, which is why computers still use the sentence today to show off what each font looks like.
Q 19On a typewriter, a 'dead key' is one that does what?
Prints without advancing the platen
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.
Q 20On a typewriter, 'pica' and 'elite' named two different what?
Type sizes
Type sizes: elite's smaller letters fit 12 to an inch against pica's 10, squeezing more words onto each line.
Q 24Which feature, missing from ordinary typewriters, did IBM's 1940s Executive electric typewriter offer?
Proportional spacing
Proportional spacing gave a narrow 'i' less room than a wide 'm', so a typed page could pass for typeset print.
Q 25The IBM Selectric, launched in 1961, replaced typebars with a spherical element popularly nicknamed what?
The golfball
The golfball spun and tilted into place for each letter, doing away with the jams typebars suffered when keys were struck in quick succession.
Q 26What security headache did used typewriter ribbons create in offices handling classified documents?
Text could be read from them
Text could be read from them, so ribbons used for classified work had to be locked away or destroyed along with the secret papers.
Q 27Many electronic typewriters printed with a spoked plastic wheel named after which flower?
Daisy
Daisy: the letters sat at the tips of its petal-like spokes, and changing the wheel changed the typeface.
Q 28In 1991, IBM's typewriter business passed to which company?
Lexmark
Lexmark: an investment firm bought the business in a buyout, and the new company grew into a maker of laser printers.
Q 29Swintec makes typewriters out of clear plastic for what specific customer?
US prisons
US prisons: the see-through cases make it harder for inmates to hide contraband inside the machines.
Q 30Godrej and Boyce, likely the last maker of manual typewriters, shut its plant in which city in 2011?
Mumbai
Mumbai: headlines hailed the 'world's last typewriter factory', but other companies were still making electric typewriters.