50 free Typewriters trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The first commercial typewriters were introduced in which year?
1874
They did not become common in American offices until after the mid-1880s.
Q 02Typewriters remained a standard fixture in most offices until roughly which decade?
1980s
After that they were supplanted by personal computers running word-processing software.
Q 03Historians estimate that some form of the typewriter was independently invented roughly how many times?
52
Like the telephone and the automobile, it was the product of many tinkerers over decades rather than a single inventor.
Q 04Henry Mill obtained a British patent for a typewriter-like machine in which year?
1714
The patent promised writing 'so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print'.
Q 05Between 1801 and 1808, Pellegrino Turri invented a typewriter for a friend who had what condition?
Blindness
Several of the earliest typing machines were built as accessibility tools, and their use by blind people accelerated development.
Q 06In 1829, American William Austin Burt patented a machine with what name?
The Typographer
The London Science Museum cautiously calls it only 'the first writing mechanism whose invention was documented'.
Q 07By the mid-19th century, a writer with a pen was limited to about how many words per minute?
30
Stenographers and telegraphers could manage up to 130 words per minute, which created the demand to mechanise writing.
Q 08Which priest do many Brazilians credit with inventing the typewriter, from wood and knives, in 1861?
Francisco João de Azevedo
Emperor Pedro II presented him with a gold medal for the invention that same year.
Q 09What was the first commercially sold typewriter, invented by a Danish clergyman and produced from 1870?
The Hansen Writing Ball
Rasmus Malling-Hansen's device produced only upper-case characters and was still in office use in Europe as late as 1909.
Q 10Sholes and partners patented the first successful typewriter in 1868 in which US city?
Milwaukee
Its working prototype was built by a clock-maker and machinist named Matthias Schwalbach.
Q 11Which company, then famous for sewing machines, commercialised the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer?
Remington
The machine's brand name is the origin of the word 'typewriter' itself.
Q 12The Sholes and Glidden machine entered production on 1 March 1873 in which New York town?
Ilion
The town remains home to the Remington Arms factory today.
Q 13Early typewriters whose typebars struck upward, hiding the text, are known by what retronym?
Understrike
Frontstrike 'visible' typewriters, which struck the front of the platen, eventually became standard.
Q 21Typewriter 'pica' type is ten characters per inch; 'elite' is how many?
12
Both printed six lines per vertical inch in English-speaking countries.
Q 22Why did many typewriter ribbons carry a red stripe alongside the black?
To mark negative bookkeeping entries
A third lever position stopped the ribbon altogether so keys could cut stencils for mimeograph machines.
Q 23Which inventor's 1870 Universal Stock Ticker laid the groundwork for the electric typewriter?
Thomas Edison
It printed letters and numbers on paper tape from a typewriter at the far end of a telegraph line.
Q 14An 'index typewriter' selects letters using what instead of a keyboard?
A pointer or stylus
They were slower but cheaper and lighter; the Simplex sold for 1/40 the price of a Remington.
Q 15What is the most common kind of index typewriter still manufactured in the 2020s?
Embossing tape label makers
Japanese and Chinese typewriters were also index machines, with a vastly larger array of type elements.
Q 16The 1896 Underwood 1 was the first typewriter to offer what feature, later copied by every competitor?
A fully visible typing area
Its mechanism was developed by Franz X. Wagner and taken up by office-supply producer John T. Underwood.
Q 17What was the purpose of the small bell inside a typewriter?
To warn the typist the right margin was near
It rang a few characters before the margin so the typist could finish the word and use the carriage-return lever.
Q 18The shift key was introduced with which machine in 1878?
Remington No. 2
Before it, typewriters needed a separate key and typebar for every capital letter, effectively two full keyboards.
Q 19Compact three-row typewriters with 'CAP' and 'FIG' shift keys were popular with what group in WWI?
Journalists
They were lighter than four-bank machines yet could type just as fast with just as many symbols.
Q 20On a typewriter, a 'dead key' is one that does what?
Prints without advancing the platen
It let one accent key combine with a, e, i, o and u, cutting five sorts down to one.
Q 24Which company acquired Electromatic Typewriters in 1933 and spent $1 million redesigning its machine?
IBM
The result was the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01, the company's entry into a market it would come to dominate.
Q 25IBM's Electromatic Model 04 of 1941 introduced which typesetting-style feature?
Proportional spacing
Combined with carbon-film ribbons, it made typed pages look almost like print.
Q 26The IBM Selectric, launched in 1961, replaced typebars with a spherical element popularly nicknamed what?
The golfball
The ball rotated into position and struck the ribbon, which eliminated key jams and allowed typeface swaps mid-document.
Q 27Carbon-film ribbons on later Selectrics created what security headache in classified offices?
Typed text could be read from the used ribbon
Ribbons had to be accounted for so typists could not carry them out of the facility.
Q 28The first electronic daisywheel typewriter marketed in the world, in 1976, came from which manufacturer?
Olivetti
The Tes 501 was followed in 1978 by the ET101 with a function display and the TES 401 with a floppy disk.
Q 29IBM sold its typewriter division in 1991 to which newly formed company?
Lexmark
It marked IBM's complete exit from a market it had dominated for decades.
Q 30Swintec makes typewriters out of clear plastic for what specific customer?
US prisons
Prisoners may own typewriters but not computers, and transparent cases make it harder to hide contraband inside.