The typewriter has made itself such an essential factor in modern life, it has become so necessary to all human activities, that the present-day world could hardly be conceived without it. It is hard to name any other article of commerce which has played a more commanding role in the shaping of human destiny. It has freed the world from pen slavery and, in doing so, it has saved a volume of time and labor which is simply incalculable. Its time-saving service has facilitated and rendered possible the enormous growth of modern business. The idea which it embodied has directly inspired many subsequent inventions in the same field, all of which have helped to lighten the burden of the world’s numberless tasks. In its broad influence on human society, the typewriter has been equally revolutionary, for it was the writing machine which first opened to women the doors of business life. It has radically changed our modern system of education in many of its most important phases. It has helped to knit the whole world closer together. Its influence has been felt in the shaping of language and even of human thought.
The most amazing fact of all is that these stupendous changes are so recent that they belong to our own times. One need not be very old to recollect when the typewriter first began to be a factor in business life. The man in his fifties distinctly remembers it all. There are even some now living who were identified with the first typewriter when its manufacture began fifty years ago in the little Mohawk Valley town of Ilion, New York.
Such results, all within so short a period, indicate the speed with which our old world has traveled during the past generation—a striking contrast to the leisurely pace of former ages.
The story of the typewriter is really the latest phase of another and greater story—that of writing itself. Anyone, however, who attempted to write this greater story would soon discover that he had undertaken to write the whole history of civilization. The advance of man from primitive savagery to his present stage of efficiency and enlightenment has been a slow process, but each stage of this process through the ages has been marked, as if by milestones, by some improvement in his means and capacity for recording his thoughts in visible and understandable form.
The earliest attempts at word picturing by savages, the Cuneiform inscriptions of Babylonia, the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, the clay tablets and stone monuments of antiquity, the papyrus of Egypt, the wax tablets and stylus of the Romans, the parchment manuscripts of the Middle Ages, the development of the art of paper manufacture, the invention of the art of printing, and even the comparatively modern invention of steel pens, are all successive steps in this evolution. Looking back from our vantage ground of today over this record it is easy for us to see the writing machine as the outcome. The art of recording thought was always destined to remain imperfect until some means had been found to do it, which, in the very speed of the process, would be adequate for all human requirements. Even the ancients felt this need; of this fact the history of shorthand is sufficient proof. But never, until the nineteenth century, did men’s thoughts turn seriously to machinery as a possible solution.
The invention of printing has been described as the most important single advance in the history of civilization, and it seems to us of today exactly the kind of invention which should have suggested the idea of a writing machine. But fate decreed otherwise, and more than four centuries were destined to elapse after Gutenberg had begun to use movable types before the advent of the typewriter. It is interesting to note, however, that when the typewriter finally did appear, its influence on the printing art was almost immediate, many improvements in typesetting devices having been directly suggested and inspired by the writing machine.
We have spoken of shorthand, an art so intimately allied with typewriting that they are known today as the “twin arts.” The story of the typewriter cannot be adequately told if this other art is left out of the picture.
Unlike the writing machine, the beginnings of shorthand date back to antiquity. Some have believed that Xenophon wrote stenographic notes of the lectures of Socrates, but it is at least established that the learned slave Marcus Tullius Tiro, freed by Cicero and made his secretary, developed a system which soon came into widespread use. Few high school boys and girls today, who struggle with the orations of Cicero, know that it was the art of Tiro which preserved these classics for us.
The “Notae Tironianae” (notes of Tiro) consisted of some 5,000 signs for words, and it is doubtful if stenography would today be so popular a profession had one to burden his memory with an equal list. But the ancients were more patient than we, and, once mastered, these notes proved swift and practical. Busy Rome found much use for its stenographers. Atticus, a famous Roman book lover, trained a great force of slaves in the art for the sole purpose of transcribing, and thus become a real publisher ages before the days of printing. Five manuscript readers were allotted to each one hundred stenographers, and these took down the spoken words. And the cost to the thrifty Atticus was one pound of grain and a small allowance of wine per slave.
