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 had 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).
It was a tough sell at first. The Sholes and Glidden printed only capital letters, and typists couldn’t see their words until the paper advanced several lines. The $125 price (roughly $3,500 today) was also a lot to ask when clerks typically earned $7 to $15 a week, and only about 5,000 machines sold in the first four years.
Mark Twain bought one right away, though he later asked Remington not to use his name because every letter he typed brought requests for more samples. Things picked up in 1878, when the Remington No. 2 added a shift key for lowercase letters. The QWERTY keyboard, arranged to keep the metal type bars from clashing, was there from the start and never left.
The machine also created a whole new line of work. The 1870 census counted just seven “stenographers and typewriters” (the word meant the operator as well as the machine), and by 1920 the census listed about half a million typists. Women made up about 40% of stenographers and typists in 1880 and more than three-quarters by 1900, many of them trained through YWCA classes and business schools.
Handwriting was having its own moment during those same years. Austin Norman Palmer of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, published Palmer’s Guide to Business Writing in 1894, teaching a faster, plainer cursive powered by the arm muscles instead of the fingers. New York City schools adopted it after seeing Palmer demonstrate at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, and by 1912 the method had sold a million copies.
The typewriter kept changing for decades after that. IBM bought its way into the business in 1933 and released the Selectric in 1961, replacing the old type bars with a spinning, golf ball-sized type element. By 1978, IBM held roughly 94% of the electric typewriter market.
Then personal computers and word processors took over the office. IBM retired the Selectric in 1986 and spun off its typewriter business as Lexmark in 1991, and Smith-Corona filed for bankruptcy in 1995, citing competition from personal computers.
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 two 1922 newspaper pieces on the decline of handwriting, along with a page from Popular Mechanics, a 1922 handbook for business letter writers and a few old postcards written back when penmanship was still a required school subject.
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.
