The Remington schools at Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, Petrograd and many other cities throughout Europe were established soon after the machine had invaded these markets. In other continents the business met similar conditions and went through the same process. In Australia the great Remington schools at Melbourne, Sydney and other cities have graduated many thousands of operators; so also in South Africa, and throughout the entire South American continent, where not only the large centers but even many of the smaller cities now have their Remington schools. In the Asiatic countries the problem of securing competent stenographers and typists assumed another phase. Here the stenographers and typists are all natives, Chinese, Japanese, Siamese, Javanese, Hindu, etc., and they are all men, for this is one part of the world where the modern girl typist has not yet arrived. In the countries of the Far East, the Chinese predominate among the practitioners of the “twin arts.” It’s a stiff job, that of acquiring such mastery of a foreign language that the stenographer can take and transcribe accurately the shorthand notes taken from dictation in that language, but the Oriental peoples, with their remarkable linguistic gifts, have proved equal to the task.
The schools of shorthand and typewriting in the Eastern countries are easily the most interesting in all the world, and it is noteworthy that these schools maintain the highest standards of efficiency. The Remington schools in various cities throughout India, which train the Babu or educated native in the “twin arts,” have been for many years the main source of supply of the typists employed in all branches of the Indian Government service.
The founders of the typewriter business had little realization that out of their efforts would come a new plan of practical education; still less did they realize that over a great part of the earth’s surface the task of developing this plan would fall on the manufacturer himself. In their broad effect on human society, the by-products of the typewriter business, in more than one phase, have been quite as important as the main idea.
CHAPTER VI.
HIGH SPOTS IN TYPEWRITER PROGRESS
We have noted the fundamental features contained in the original typewriter of 1873. It had the step-by-step escapement mechanism which caused the letter-spacing travel of the paper carriage. It had type bars on which type were mounted which printed at a common center. It fed the paper around a cylinder on the paper carriage. It was equipped with a line spacing and carriage return mechanism. It printed through a ribbon, which traveled across the printing point with the movement of the carnage. It had the standard number of printing keys, placed in four rows, and the characters on these keys, and the corresponding type bars, followed the arrangement now known as “universal.” To these fundamental features the Model 2 Remington of 1878 added the shift-key mechanism, with two type mounted on a single bar.
Every one of the features above described is standard in all the leading writing machines of the present day. It must not be supposed, however, that the reign of each and all of these basic features has been undisputed throughout the entire fifty years of typewriter history. In time other typewriters appeared on the market, which represented radical departures from one or another of these principles. Some of these machines proved practical in actual service and won a considerable popularity, and some of them are manufactured and sold today. A review of typewriter history would not be complete which failed to take note of these departures from the type of construction generally known as “standard.”
One of the earliest issues in the typewriter field concerned the relative merits of the type-bar principle versus the type wheel. Mention of the type wheel brings us back to John Pratt’s Pterotype and the article concerning it in the Scientific American of July 6, 1867, which is said to have suggested the idea of a typewriter to Sholes and his colleagues. Pratt is said to have actually built and sold some of these machines in England, but they were not a success, and he for a time despaired of being able to construct a machine on which the printing wheel would move quickly and yet stop instantly. He worked over the problem for years, and when, at last he approached the United States Patent Office he found himself in interference with two other inventors, James B. Hammond and Lucien S. Crandall, both of whom appeared with writing machines built on the type-wheel principle. A deadlock ensued which was finally settled by Pratt yielding precedence to Hammond upon a type-wheel machine and receiving a royalty, while Crandall proceeded with his application for a patent on a type-sleeve instrument. The first Hammond patents were taken out in 1880, and the machine was placed on the market shortly thereafter. The early Hammond had what was called the “ideal” keyboard, semi-circular in shape, but later Hammonds have conformed to the “universal” keyboard arrangement.
The Hammond was the first practical type-wheel machine and is today the leading machine of this class. The type-wheel construction has always had strong advocates, but these machines have never been very serious competitors of the type-bar machines in the general commercial field.