# Typewriter > Printing letters one keystroke at a time - Date: c. 1808 - Era: Industrial age - Domain: [Writing & Communication](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/communication/) - Rebuild stage: IV (Science & industry) - Difficulty: 4/5 - URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/typewriter/ A typewriter prints text one character at a time from a keyboard. Each key swings a typebar whose raised letter strikes an inked ribbon against the paper, and a spring pulls the carriage one letter space along after every stroke. The oldest surviving typed letters were written in 1808 by Countess Carolina Fantoni on a machine that Michael Adler attributes to Pellegrino Turri and Italian sources to her brother Agostino Fantoni, and the Sholes and Glidden, sold by Remington from 1874, was the first to be made in large numbers. ![Typewriter · Printing letters one keystroke at a time](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.B33onuUt_2byAqc.webp) ## Legend 1. Keys 2. Typebar striking the platen 3. Ribbon and its two spools 4. Platen on the carriage 5. Escapement rack and wheel 6. Mainspring drum and its strap ## What it is A typewriter is a machine that prints text one character at a time. Pressing a key makes a small metal type, with a letter in relief on its face, strike an inked ribbon lying in front of a sheet of paper, and the letter is printed on the page. After each stroke the paper moves one step to the left, so that the next letter falls beside the last. At the end of a line the typist pushes a lever that brings the paper back and turns it up by one line. An office machine of around 1900 had four rows of keys and a space bar, a semicircle of typebars behind them, two ribbon spools, and a carriage across the top. The carriage holds the platen, a hard roller round which the paper is wound and against which the type strikes. Each typebar carries a type with two characters, usually a capital above a small letter. ## How it works The key is the end of a lever. Pressed down, it pulls a link that swings its typebar up from the segment, the semicircle where all the bars lie, each on its own pivot. The type at the tip of the bar passes through a notched guide that brings every bar to the same point and strikes the ribbon against the paper on the platen. The platen backs the paper at that point and stops the blow, so the whole face of the letter prints. A spring returns the key and the bar, and a ribbon guide lifts the ribbon in front of the type at each stroke and lowers it afterwards so that the letter just typed can be seen. ![A close view of a typewriter escapement: a straight toothed rack under the carriage meshing with a small pinion on the shaft of a ratchet wheel, with two rocking catches, one engaged in a tooth and one raised, and a strap running off to one side](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.BKre0hIi_ZfcHKy.webp) _The escapement: the rocking catches let the wheel turn by one tooth, and the rack carries the carriage one letter space._ The carriage and its escapement move the paper. A mainspring coiled in a drum pulls the carriage to the left through a strap. Under the carriage a toothed rack meshes with a small pinion on the shaft of the escape wheel, and two catches, the dogs, hold that wheel still. Each stroke of a key or of the space bar rocks the dogs: one lets go of its tooth as the other catches the next, so the wheel turns by one tooth and the carriage moves one letter space. The same principle of releasing a wheel one tooth at a time regulates the [mechanical clock](/en/inventions/mechanical-clock/). The return lever pushes the carriage back against the spring, which winds it again, and turns the platen by one line. The shift key raises or lowers either the typebars or the carriage by the height of one character, so the other half of the type strikes. The ribbon winds from one spool onto the other as typing goes on. On the first Sholes and Glidden machines the typebars hung in a circle under the carriage and struck upwards against the underside of the platen, so the typist had to lift the carriage to read the line. Machines whose bars strike the front of the platen show each letter as it is typed. ## How to do it A typewriter has many parts, but a model with one key and a stepping carriage shows how the two main movements work. Make the key and the typebar from one strip of hardwood, pivoted near its middle on a nail through a block screwed to a base board. Pressing the front end lifts the back end, which strikes upwards, as on the first Sholes and Glidden machines. Carve a letter, reversed, on the end of a soft rubber eraser and glue it to the top of the back end, face up. Fit a light spring or rubber band that pulls the front end back up. Build the carriage as a thin board that slides sideways on two rails set just above the type. Tape a sheet of paper under the board, face down, and a piece of carbon paper under the sheet with its inked side facing the paper. The oldest known typewriter, the one Carolina Fantoni used, took its ink from a black paper of this kind. A rubber band pulls the board to one side. Cut evenly spaced notches, like the teeth of a comb, along one edge of the board. ![A wooden model: a board with seven teeth along its top edge lies on a rail, pulled to the left by a rubber band, and above it a rocker turns on a post, its left peg down in a notch and its right peg raised over the teeth, with a cord knotted to its right end](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.Bcxdo1-Q_1MNb8a.webp) _Each stroke tips the rocker and lets the board move on by one notch._ Above the notched edge, pivot a small rocker carrying two pegs, one on each side of the pivot, spaced so that when one peg sits fully in a notch the other is half a notch out of step with the next. At rest the first peg holds the board. Tie the rocker to the key with a cord so that each stroke tips it: the first peg rises as the second drops onto the edge, and when the key comes back the second peg rises and the first falls into the next notch. Each letter should print and the board move on by one notch. If the board runs on by several notches while the key is down, the second peg does not reach the notches: lengthen it. Safety: hold the eraser flat on a cutting mat and carve with the blade moving away from your fingers, and clamp the wood before sawing or drilling. A stretched rubber band can snap back at the face, so wear safety glasses while fitting and testing the bands. Keep fingers out of the path of the striking end of the lever. ## History and evolution In 1714 the English engineer Henry Mill was granted a patent for a machine "for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another", but no description of it survives and nothing shows that it was ever built. The oldest typing that does survive was done in Italy by Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, who had lost her sight. Some of the letters she typed are kept in the State Archives of Reggio Emilia. In one, dated 6 November 1808, she worries that she has almost run out of the black paper made for the machine. According to Michael Adler's history of the typewriter, followed by the Science Museum in London, Pellegrino Turri built the machine so that she could write to him in letters he could read. The Italian Ministry of Culture instead credits her brother Agostino Fantoni with a typewriter made at Fivizzano in 1802, and a study of the family papers by Alessandra Celi and Simonetta Simonetti also dates a machine built for her to 1802. The machine and any drawing of it are lost, and the Science Museum describes the evidence as sparse. In the United States, William Austin Burt of Detroit patented his "typographer" on 23 July 1829, a machine that printed with type set on a swinging sector. ![The Malling-Hansen writing ball: a brass hemisphere bristling with round keys on short rods pointing to its centre, above a sheet of paper wrapped round a cylinder, on a wooden base](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.CUNO5Dor_Z2wGsPT.webp) _The writing ball of Rasmus Malling-Hansen: its rods pass straight through the hemisphere to print on the paper below._ The Danish pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen worked on his writing ball from 1865 and patented it in 1870, the year it went into production. Its 52 keys sat on a brass hemisphere, on short pistons that passed straight through the ball, and the first models moved the paper with an electromagnetic escapement, replaced by a mechanical escapement in 1875. About 180 were made. Friedrich Nietzsche received one in Genoa in February 1882 and put it aside after six weeks and nearly sixty typed pages. In Milwaukee, the newspaper publisher Christopher Latham Sholes, working with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, began from a machine for numbering pages and tickets. In 1867 Glidden showed him a magazine article on the "pterotype" that John Pratt had patented in England, and in 1868 they patented their typewriter. The keys first ran in a nearly alphabetical order; after some thirty trial models they took the QWERTY order, settled by 1872. One explanation is that it separates letters often typed together so that neighbouring typebars do not jam; more recent historians link it to the work of [telegraph](/en/inventions/telegraph/) operators taking down Morse code. In 1873 the arms maker E. Remington and Sons agreed to build the machine, and the Sholes and Glidden went on sale in 1874 at 125 dollars. It printed only capitals, struck from below, and stood on a stand like that of a [sewing machine](/en/inventions/sewing-machine/), with a treadle that returned the carriage and advanced the paper. Remington's No. 2 of 1878 added a shift key, so each typebar could print a capital or a small letter. The line being typed was still out of sight. Franz X. Wagner, a German immigrant, designed a mechanism from about 1892 whose bars struck the front of the platen and left the text in view. John T. Underwood, a maker of ribbons and carbon paper, took it up in 1895, and the Science Museum in London holds an Underwood No. 1 made in 1897. By 1908 all the major typewriter makers had changed to machines with visible writing. ## Key facts - Oldest surviving typed letters: Carolina Fantoni, 1808, on a machine attributed to Pellegrino Turri - Malling-Hansen writing ball: Invented in 1865, patented and made for sale from 1870 - Sholes and Glidden: Sold by Remington from 1874 at 125 dollars, capital letters only - Shift key: Remington No. 2, 1878 - Typing in view of the typist: Front-strike design of Franz X. Wagner, taken up by Underwood in 1895 ## Requires - [Writing](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/writing/): Knowledge that outlives memory (c. 3,300 BCE) - [Paper](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/paper/): A cheap surface for memory (c. 150 BCE) - [Writing ink](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/writing-ink/): Colour carried onto a surface (c. 3,300 BCE) - [Steel](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/steel/): Iron with just enough carbon (c. 1,000 BCE) - [Gears](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/gear/): Teeth that trade speed for force (c. 350 BCE) - [Weaving](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/weaving/): Threads crossed into cloth (c. 6,700 BCE) ## Leads to - [Rotor cipher machine](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/rotor-cipher-machine/): Wired discs that change the alphabet at every letter (1915) ## Sources - [Typewriters and assistive technology for blind and partially sighted people](https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/everyday-wonders/typewriters-blind-partially-sighted-people), Science Museum, London - [La escritura mecánica y los ciegos: la máquina de Pellegrino Turri (Integración 34, 2000)](https://portal.once.es/bibliotecas/fondo-bibliografico-discapacidad-visual/1716/la-escritura-meca-nica-y-los-ciegos-doc-2285/at_download/file), E. Montes López, ONCE - [Museo della Stampa Jacopo da Fivizzano](https://cultura.gov.it/luogo/museo-della-stampa-jacopo-da-fivizzano), Ministero della Cultura, Italy - [Memorie nascoste: carte di donne nel territorio apuano (secc. XVI–XX), p. 79](https://archiviodistatofirenze.cultura.gov.it/memoriadonne/cartedidonne/cdd_06_celi_simonetti.pdf), Alessandra F. Celi and Simonetta Simonetti, Archivio di Stato di Firenze - [Typewriter (Dictionary of American History; How Products Are Made)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science-and-technology/technology/technology-terms-and-concepts/typewriter), Edwin A. Battison and Gillian S. Holmes, Gale / Encyclopedia.com - [The Development of the Automatic Writing Machine: The Typewriter (Science and Its Times)](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/development-automatic-writing-machine-typewriter), Stacey R. Murray, Gale / Encyclopedia.com - [Sholes & Glidden Type Writer, ME.276068](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_850542), National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution - [Remington Standard No. 2 Typewriter](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_687313), National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution - [Remington Standard No. 6 Typewriter](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_850053), National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution - [Underwood Model 5](https://www.si.edu/object/underwood-model-5:nmah_998196), National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution - [Franz Xavier Wagner](https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp112835/wagner-franz-xavier), Science Museum Group Collection - [Typewriter - Underwood Typewriter Company, Model No. 5, 1924](https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/388645), Museums Victoria - [Where Did the QWERTY Keyboard Come From?](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/origins-qwerty-keyboard-typewriter-180982726/), Nick Yetto, Smithsonian Magazine (2023) - [US Patent X5,581: Printing Machine Styled the Typographer (W. A. Burt, 23 July 1829)](https://www.datamp.org/patents/displayPatent.php?pn=X5581&id=33563), Directory of American Tool and Machinery Patents - [The writing ball: the history](http://www.malling-hansen.org/the-writing-ball/the-history.html), International Rasmus Malling-Hansen Society - [Friedrich Nietzsche's writing ball](https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/en/home/digital/collection-highlights/friedrich-nietzsches-writing-ball/), Klassik Stiftung Weimar Fact-checked on 2026-10-18. --- The Last Codex · https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/typewriter/ · © The Last Codex. Texts, plates and figures: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.