It is not practicable to give a full illustration of the state of the art in typewriters, as it has grown to an industry of large proportions. Nearly 1,700 patents have been granted for such machines, and more than 100 useful and meritorious machines have been devised and put upon the market. Among these may be mentioned the Hall, Underwood, Manhattan, Williams, Jewett, and many others.
FIG. 143.—ELLIOTT & HATCH BOOK TYPEWRITER.
Besides the regular typewriters, various modifications have been made to suit special kinds of work. The “Comptometer” used in banks is a species of typewriter, as is also the Dudley adding and subtracting machine, known as the “Numerograph,” and covered by patents Nos. 554,993, 555,038, 555,039, 579,047 and 579,048. Typewriters for short hand characters, and for foreign languages, and for printing on record and blank books, are also among the modern developments of this art. In the latter the whole carriage and system of type levers move over the book. The Elliott & Hatch book typewriter, [Fig. 143], is a well-known example. In attachments, holders for the copy have received considerable attention, and simple and practical billing and tabulating attachments have been devised which expedite and facilitate the statements of accounts and other work requiring numeration in columns. The Gorin Tabulator is one of those in practical use.
In point of speed the typewriter depends entirely upon the aptness of the operator. For ordinary copying work, where much time is occupied in deciphering the illegible scrawl, probably forty words a minute is the average work. When taken from dictation, seventy-five words a minute may be written, and in special cases, when copying from memory, a speed of 150 words a minute has been maintained for a limited time. It was estimated that there were in use in the United States in 1896 150,000 typewriters, and that up to that time 450,000 had been made altogether. In the last four years this number has been greatly increased, and a fair estimate of the present output in the United States is between 75,000 and 100,000 yearly. In 1898 there were exported from the United States typewriting machines to the value of $1,902,153.
The typewriter has not only revolutionized modern business methods, by furnishing a quick and legible copy that may be rapidly taken from dictation, and also at the same time a duplicate carbon copy for the use of the writer, but it has established a distinct avocation especially adapted to the deftness and skill of women, who as bread winners at the end of the Nineteenth Century are working out a destiny and place in the business activities of life unthought of a hundred years ago. The typewriter saves time, labor, postage and paper; it reduces the liability to mistakes, brings system into official correspondence, and delights the heart of the printer. It furnishes profitable amusement to the young, and satisfactory aid to the nervous and paralytic. All over the world it has already traveled—from the counting house of the merchant to the Imperial Courts of Europe, from the home of the new woman in the Western Hemisphere to the harem of the East—everywhere its familiar click is to be heard, faithfully translating thought into all languages, and for all peoples.