Typewriter Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Typewriter - Essay Example In private homes, people used it usually for the business correspondence with their lawyers, proprietors and other official purposes. They ruled over the business world for more than a century. Nineteenth century became the century of typewriters. There were quite many modifications within the existing machine, but they still had no replacements (Williams, 2003). The advent of the word processors in the end of nineteenth century took the place of typewriters in the western world, and many of the uses of the typewriters were replaced. The typewriters started to become obsolete but they were still very prominent in their use in some countries where the economy was not good or the advancement of technology was behind the western worlds. It is still very popularly used in some Countries in Africa and India. WHAT IS A TYPEWRITER? A typewriter is a mechanical or an electromechanical machine, it writes the characters in a very similar way as the characters are written when we use prin ters. The keyboard operated types when the keys are struck. The keys when struck produce an impression with the use of ink transfer or carbon impression on the paper (Wershler-Henry, 2007). Manufacturers who were in business became quite famous for their manufactured typewriters and made quite a lot of profit from it. The famous companies that were involved during the middle of nineteenth century in the making of typewriters were E. Remington and Sons,  IBM,  Imperial Typewriters,  Oliver Typewriter Company,  Olivetti, Royal Typewriter Company,  Smith Corona, and  Underwood Typewriter Company (Marie, 2006). The main concept and design of the typewriter is same, but due to the ever increasing demand of the typewriters there were many inventors who were working together or independently just to make the machine perfect. Many of the inventors were working in contest with each other while some were working for the increased social benefit. The innovations that were carried out on the typewriters were all incremental. Many people provided insights as to the improvement of the machine and the result was a more commercially useful instrument. It has been estimated that the number of times the innovations that have occurred are around fifty two to make it more workable and profitable for the business. Earlier ribbon was used for typing but then introduction of print ball made typing more easier (Kittler, Young and Wutz, 1999). HISTORY OF TYPEWRITERS AND THEIR EVOLUTION The first of its kind was a machine that was built by Henry Mill in 1714 (Marie, 2006). He had obtained a patent for a machine that was very much similar to the typewriter. The reviews that could be found about the machine all relate to a machine that could be used to write letters. The machine was said to be so perfect that it enabled the letters to be transcribed or printed on a sheet of paper in such a perfect and neat manner that it could be used repeatedly and the perfection in th e printed pages remained synchronous. It was a machine that was considered as a perfect solution for all the correspondence either business or commercial. It was considered as a machine that would produce quite a lot of ease in the maintenance of the public records as well. The reason it was considered as a more effective way as compared to the manual writing that was done to keep the records was because the print stayed for a longer time period (Daniell and Mortensen, 2007). The typewriter that continued to be in