The typewriter went from the office to the niche market

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This device first came into the light of public interest on 7 May 1957 when it was presented on a large scale for the first time at the Office Equipment Exhibition in Hanover. People found it superfluous at the time, even though typewriting was hard physical work at the time. Moving the typing lever in particular took so much strength that typing was considered to be a man’s job. With the electric typewriter, a motor drew the paper carriage back and hit the lever. Now, only a seventieth of the force was required and typing became a woman's job. Also, the “electric” one was much quieter. As a result, typewriters became ever more comfortable to use.

In 1961, IBM developed the ball-head typewriter with a removable writing element. These changes allowed for different fonts and writing in many languages. With the IBM 72 ball-head typewriter, the business brought the mother of modern electrical typewriters onto the market, With the electromechanically moved typing ball, the typing lever no longer got caught, it was easy to replace the ball head to change the font type. Although IBM owns the patent, the principle was founded in 1902 by George C. Blickensderfer.

Hanover prepares the field for success

The next highlight was an IBM typewriter in 1973 with a key-controlled correction facility. This meant that, thanks to the 96-character keyboard, you could type special characters such as powers and μ. After 1980, a small display and a universal memory capacity with 16,000 characters came along. This was followed by the ability to connect to an external floppy disk unit, which offered unlimited memory. Things went further with the print wheel and four writing forms.

Zoomed in

A true, global Swabian

As a result, electric typewriters increasingly became communication interfaces. The AEG Olympia ES 72 i also offered a standard integrated universal interface and was therefore completely teletext-capable and ready for future communication concepts including ISDN. No matter how effective the machines had become, the decline came in around 1980. They were powerful, had an exquisite typeface, but cost several thousand deutschmarks.

From key-controlled correction to ISDN

IT equipment was on the upswing, but the typeface of the matrix printer was rather modest. The better and more cost-effective the printers and the text processing of the IT equipment became, the more they took market share away from typewriters, which, by about 2003, had been more or less displaced in the majority of offices and households.

Today, typewriters are a niche item. For 2014, Triumph-Adler (business week of 19 July 2014) had a sale of 10,000 typewriters. They are usually used where PC's are not worthwhile, such as filling in forms. Otherwise, they can benefit from NSA surveillance activity, as sensitive documents are now increasingly written on tap-proof typewriters.

This article was first published on maschinenmarkt.de

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