His machine was very clumsy and practically useless, however. It was not until more than a century later (1829) that anything more was attempted. Then the first American typewriter, called a "typographer," was patented by W.A. Burt.
In 1833 a machine was produced in France having a separate key lever for each letter, and between the years 1840 and 1860 Sir Charles Wheatstone invented several machines which are now preserved in the South Kensington Museum, London.
In 1873, C.L. Sholes, an American, after five or six years' work, succeeded in producing a machine sufficiently perfect to warrant extensive manufacture. He interested E. Remington & Son, the gun-manufacturers, in it, and in 1874 the first model of the modern typewriter was put upon the market.
THE FIRST PRINTED BOOK.
The first book printed with type, according to Pettigrew, was the Latin Bible printed by John Gutenberg, at Mayence, about 1455; but Haydn is inclined to assign a somewhat later date to this, making the Book of Psalms, by Faust and Scheffer, printed on August 14, 1457, the first book.
The Gutenberg book is called the Mazarin Bible, having first been found in the library of Cardinal Mazarin.
There are only twenty copies of this first edition known to exist, and the workmanship in type, ink, and paper far exceed any of the subsequent editions for two hundred years.
Christopher Sower (or Saur) made the first punches and matrices and cast the first type in America at Germantown, Pennsylvania, about 1735. The anvil on which he hammered them out is still preserved. They were for a German Bible which Sower published.
"The price of our newly finished Bible, in plain binding, with a clasp, will be eighteen shillings," he said, "but to the poor and needy we have no price."