Typewriters and Typists

"A typewriter is a mechanical, electromechanical, or electronic device with a set of 'keys' that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a document, usually paper."  Wikipedia.org

'Typewriter' was also the name by which early users of typewriters were known until confusion led to the alternative term, typist.

A typewriter has a keyboard with keys that form character impressions on paper, but actual methods by which typewriter keyboards create these impressions has varied dramatically since the typewriter was invented in the early 1800s.  Some typewriters had circular keyboards; other had two keyboards, one for lower case characters, the other for capital characters or upper case.

Most early typewriters operated with ink ribbons forcing characters on paper behind the ribbon, sometimes carbon paper was placed between multiple sheets of paper, creating multiple copies behind the first blank page on which colour-free impressions were formed. 

*  Typists using early typewriters often had to retype documents from scratch to correct mistakes and poor copies caused from damaged or dry typewriter ribbons.

*  It wasn't until the middle 1900s that substances like Tippex and Snowpake arrived to ease the burden on early typists and meant that mistakes could be obliterated by white paint and the original document returned to the typewriter for corrections to be made over the paint.

*  No matter how skilled the typist, however, typewritten documents were often flawed, due to typist error, or problems from typewriter or typewriter ribbon.

*  Most early typewriters had a bell which would sound to warn typists that they were nearing the edge of the paper and would have to begin a new line or manually hyphenate any part-typed words.  Long levers at the side of the typewriter were used to perform a carriage return which moved the paper into position for a new line of typing to commence.

*  Early typewriter ribbons came in different colours, all black, all blue, for example, or red and black horizontally across the ribbon so typists could change between black and red type to highlight various parts of their work.

*  The QWERTY system was designed in 1874 for Sholes and Glidden typewriters.  The layout was the result of copious testing and provided the best possible layout for busy fingers moving quickly across a keyboard.  This universal feature of the typewriter keyboard was also the basis on which all typists and students of the art of typewriting were trained.

*  Some older typewriters do not possess separate keys for the numerals 1 and zero so typists became adept at using uppercase O for zero and the lowercase letter l for the number one.

*  Older typewriters lacked choice of fonts types and sizes such as computer users know today and Courier was the prevailing option.

*  In the Eastern Bloc typewriters were controlled by the secret police and their owners' names kept on files.  In Russia the KGB was particularly guarded against anyone using a typewriter, those who did were often investigated as dissidents and political authors.

*  Like fingerprints, every typewriter had its own individual pattern of type and required a specialist forensic branch of police charged with locating actual typewriters used in blackmail and other criminal acts.

*  As of 2005 Barbara Blackburn was the world's fastest typist (Guinness Book of Records) and using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard she can type 150 words a minute for 50 minutes and 170 words a minute over shorter periods.  She has a recorded speed of  212 words per minute, despite the fact she actually failed her typewriting exams at school.