The first commercially successful typewriter went on sale on July 1, 1874. Milwaukee printer Christopher Latham Sholes designed it with help from Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, and it was built by E. Remington and Sons, a gun maker in Ilion, New York, that started making sewing machines after the Civil War. The family resemblance was hard to miss (early models sat on a sewing machine stand, with a foot treadle to return the carriage).
Offices grew quickly in the decades that followed, and the typewriter grew with them. The 1870 census counted just seven “stenographers and typewriters,” while the 1920 census listed about half a million typists, most of them women.
Handwriting instruction was changing at the same time. Platt Rogers Spencer’s looping script was the standard in the mid-1800s, and Austin Norman Palmer’s simpler business cursive, introduced in 1894, became the most popular handwriting method in American schools. The critics of 1922 and 1950 grew up on those systems, and they weren’t happy with what typed letters and hurried signatures had replaced them with.
The machines kept improving. IBM’s Selectric, introduced in 1961, swapped the old type bars for a spinning type element and dominated offices for about two decades, until personal computers and word processors took over in the 1980s. Smith-Corona filed for bankruptcy in 1995, citing competition from PCs.
Cursive hung on a little longer. The Palmer Method faded after the 1950s as schools started teaching print first, and the Common Core standards adopted by most states beginning in 2010 didn’t require cursive at all. Several states have since passed laws bringing it back to classrooms, so the argument those 1922 writers started is still going.
Below, you can read the 1922 and 1950 newspaper pieces on the decline of handwriting, along with vintage typewriter images from the early 1900s through the 1960s.
On typewriters & the decline and fall of handwriting
Who remembers the old days when men of commerce and industry wrote a “good business hand” — when handwriting was one of the accomplishments and letters written in ink could be read with small effort? asks The Nation’s Business.
Handwriting has gone out of style because it gave way to something infinitely better. It was the old story. Hand work could not compete with machine work — the pen could not compete with the typewriter.
But we view with sorrow the fact that the decline and fall of handwriting has also meant the decline and fall of the business signature. You pick up the ordinary business letter these days, and while the body of the communication stands forth in clean-cut, perfect typography, you are lucky if you can make out the signature.
Unless you know who wrote it, the name may be anything from “Blatz” to “Jones.” Some of them appear to be perfect; they are made up of regular, sharp saw teeth, but when you try to decode them you can’t tell the “u’s” from the “m’s” or the “i’s” from the “t’s.” Other confuse and dazzle you with the scrolls and flourishes. And still another type is just plain awful.
How penmanship vanished
A prominent publication in a recent article spoke of the decadence of handwriting since the coming of the typewriter, and referred to the time when a “good business hand” was something to be proud of, and when letters and most written documents could be read without undue eye or nerve strain.
All are familiar with the facts here spoken of. For a generation or more, the great preponderance of writing has been done with typewriters, and in the meantime, the art of writing by hand had gone practically to the wall. It is still necessary for bookkeepers and perhaps a few others to be able to write legibly, by the age and the glory of “a good hand” are gone forever.
People somewhat along in years can well remember the time when good penmanship was considered one of the finest and most valuable accomplishments. Many schoolboys of the old days who were more or less dull in many of their studies would take the utmost pains with their writing.
It was a study in which they took pride, and many of their writing books were carefully preserved as mementos of their school days and testimonials of their success in what they considered the most important of all studies, next to “figgers.”
ALSO SEE: Vintage stationery, school & office supplies (1918)
But the typewriter came, and with its coming, the days of penmanship were numbered. It is still taught, and many boys and girls learn to write well; but for lack of practice, their capacity in that line wanes rapidly after leaving school, and the average handwriting of today is a miserable scrawl.
As a rule, the best specimens come from elderly people who learned how to handle a pen in the days when penmanship meant something, and who have never switched over to the modern way of putting thoughts on paper.
And the same is true with regard to many other things. Labor that used to be done by hand is now done by machinery. There was a time when the handling of the scythe and grain cradle ranked almost as skilled labor, but today there is not one man in a hundred that could handle either properly, where there are few boys, who, if asked, could tell what a grain cradle is.
To be a shoemaker once meant the ability to make a shoe or a boot from start to finish, but the trade is no more. All the making is now done in factories. There is nothing left for the bench man but cobbling, and even in pretentious cobbling chops, machinery has been introduced.
But these changes are not to be deplored. They have been of benefit to all. They have made life easier and have provided leisure which, properly improved, means much for the individual and the country.
So far as writing is concerned, those who have much of it to do or read are devoutly thankful for the machine that has supplanted the pen, which was a hard thing to drive for any length of time, and which in many cases produced results that meant equally hard work for the reader.
This is the machine age, and the typewriter is one of its highly meritorious and valuable achievements. It is a tremendous labor saver, its only lack being, as a wag once observed, the capacity to spell correctly.
Fine penmanship seen as victim of typewriter age (1950)
From the Buffalo Courier Express (New York) January 8, 1950
Is fine penmanship a lost art? In exhibits of documents, those of our forefathers are signed with elaborate Spencerian, legible and beautiful. The illegible, hen-scratched signatures of contemporaries are often deciphered for the general public by an accompanying typewritten card.
Daily, in thousands of offices, receiving the morning mail is followed by a tilt with the city directory or telephone book. Many a letter goes into the waste basket because no one can figure out whom it came from or, if written in long hand, what it said. Looking for a fine penman is like searching for a needle in a haystack.
Back in the old days, students or faculty members with the “finest hand” were elected to fill out college diplomas. Now most of these documents are turned over to artists for printing. This also goes for the Buffalo Public School System which each year distributes about 15,000 diplomas.
“Years ago,” said James Storer, retired secretary to the Board of Education, “the diplomas were filled out in longhand. We had a man with a wonderful Spencerian hand. When he died, we couldn’t find another and began having the diplomas printed. There’s little fine penmanship anymore. It is a reflection on our age that so much of it is actually illegible.”
The confusing modern-day hieroglyphics can’t be blamed on the School Department. Dr. Lillian A. Wilcox, director of elementary education, has samples of first grade writing which is more legible than signatures on many principals’ supply orders.
“I don’t know why modern, adult penmanship is so inferior to that of past generations,” said Dr. Wilcox. “Nearly all the school children write legibly and some beautifully. It seems handwriting retrogresses with age. It could be due to a lot of things — lack of practice, indifference or wanting to be different. The school system certainly thinks good handwriting is important.
“Handwriting is taught as a regular subject right through the grades. Instruction is much the same as was used during the days of fine penmanship. We not only teach them how to write, but that they should write. That is, we stress the importance of letters as a social grace. After Christmas, emphasis and study were on thank-you notes.
“The children are all instructed that it is not good taste to use a typewriter for personal letters. Each child’s handwriting is not only checked in penmanship classes, but in every course where there is written work.”
Miss Emens was leader
Mention fine handwriting to anyone in the school system, and immediately the name of Miss Clara Emens pops up. Probably thousands of old trunks in Buffalo contain Miss Emens’ special penmanship awards. Under her supervision there was a special department of penmanship. Each pupil’s work was sent to her office where it was carefully examined and criticized by a staff. There was an extensive system of awards and certificates. When Miss Emens died, the department was dissolved.
“Miss Joyce Moore is the only member of the staff still with the School Department,” Dr. Wilcox pointed out. “She is now teaching a sixth grade class. Miss Emens was a beautiful penman herself and did much for this study in Buffalo.”
Devotees of fine documents are not lacking. Scores of local printers take great pride in parchment scrolls, illuminated manuscripts and decorated documents. Francis X. Nalbach, supply clerk for the Board of Education, is a crank on masterly-looking diplomas. While he admits that his own handwriting is the usual contemporary “hen-scratching,” he takes great pride in his fine printing.
Just as a hobby, he prints names, dates and courses on about 1,000 diplomas a year. Right now one of his most prized possessions is an old book on writing and printing, published in 1850. It is entitled, Graphics, the art of accurate delineation, a system of school exercises for the education of the eye. On the cover page is written:
“Probably the greatest event in human history in the entire 10,000 years or more prior to the birth of Jesus was the invention of writing.”
“I was hunting in the Catskills,” Nalbach related, “when I was introduced to an elderly lady named Miss Esther Karst. Her father had been the engraver for the McGuffy readers. Her home was a regular museum, just filled with old books, first editions and manuscripts. I so admired this old book that she gave it to me.
“Buffalo had one penman of whom it could be proud, Grover Cleveland. Some of his documents at the Historical Museum are beautiful. Fine penmanship is an art which I doubt very much will ever be revived. It takes constant practice, the right position, study and even talent. The day of fine penmanship was a more leisurely age. Today we are hurried and with the typewriter we feel legibility isn’t as necessary as it used to be.”
The search for a fine penman was not in vain. But instead of a white-haired gentleman of the old school, he turned out to be a young man. Probably inspired by Nalbach’s interest in documents, Angelo Colucci, who works in the same office, has taken up Spencerian handwriting as a hobby. While it is of no especial value to him in his work, he does testimonials for the Board of Education and fills out special cards and notes for his friends.
One Response
According to The Typewriter Collectors’ Association, all typewriters are considered “early” from the manual ones to the electric. I regret getting rid of the manual one I had but we still have a Smith-Corona electric portable although we don’t carry it anywhere. It’s handy for filling out forms. The Typewriter Collectors’ Association has a journal called ETCetera. The staff of the magazine is primarily outside the USA, mainly in Europe. There is also a Society for the Appreciation of Typewriters. When I had to use one for my job, the one provided for me was an Underwood manual. I had a love-hate relationship with it. I never used an IBM Selectric although my mother did. Andy Rooney used to do all his work on a typewriter; he wouldn’t use a computer. Some people cling to the typewriter because it moves at the speed at which one thinks.