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I suspect that a lot of other folks in the blogosphere will be writing about Bastille Day today but I’m going with the typewriter. On July 14, 1868 the United States Patent Office issued a patent on what was the first practical typewriter to be invented here, the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer. It was issued to Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee publisher, politician, philosopher, and ne’er-do-well. |
It did have a QWERTY keyboard but it only typed in capital letters. It was loud, heavy, clunky, crotchety, and difficult to use. Remington, the gun makers, manufactured the thing, improved on it pretty substantially, and the rest, as they say, is history.
All of the other keyboard devices that followed including the computer keyboard I’m typing on now can reasonably be considered descendants of the typewriter. But the typewriter itself was a descendant of the telegraph— Sholes’s demonstration model of the device used a telegraph key.
So we bloggers are really following in the footsteps of the telegraphers of the past who included such famous names as Tom Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and David Sarnoff.
My Bastille Day post from last year is here.
Several bloggers have written worthy Bastille Day observations: Babalu, Random Fate.
There is a plaque, downtown on the side of the local newspaper’s headquarters, noting the location where Sholes did his thing, but I am not aware that there has been any celebration marking the anniversary in the time I lived in Milwaukee.
‘It did have a QWERTY keyboard but it only typed in capital letters.’
It seems some folks on the Internet are using it to this day. How did they get it hooked up to a monitor?
All caps, yep that’s bad and hard on the eyes. But, the opposite can wear you out as well. One recent one was a gentleman was chronicaling (sp?) his cross-country trip by bicycle via email and it was very interesting to read his adventures. But, he always posted in lower case, everything in lower case. It gave me a headache to read it.
“On July 14, 1868 the United States Patent Office issued a patent on what was the first practical typewriter” – do you know the number of patent, issued this day?