109-528: Remington Rand, Inc. was an early American business machine manufacturer, originally a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers . Formed in 1927 following a merger, Remington Rand was a diversified conglomerate making other office equipment, electric shavers, etc. The Remington Rand Building at 315 Park Avenue South in New York City
218-631: A , e , i , o and u to produce á , é , í , ó and ú , reducing the number of sorts needed from 5 to 1. The typebars of "normal" characters struck a rod as they moved the metal character desired toward the ribbon and platen, and each rod depression moved the platen forward the width of one character. Dead keys had a typebar shaped so as not to strike the rod. In English-speaking countries, ordinary typewriters printing fixed-width characters were standardized to print six horizontal lines per vertical inch, and had either of two variants of character width, one called pica for ten characters per horizontal inch and
327-456: A US English keyboard layout. Until Windows 8 and later versions, when Microsoft separated the settings, this had the undesirable side effect of also setting the language to US English, rather than the local orthography . The US keyboard layout has a second Alt instead of the AltGr key and does not use any dead keys ; this makes it inefficient for all but a handful of languages (unless
436-419: A backspace, and a period. A semicolon (;) was produced by printing a comma (,) over a colon (:). As the backspace key is slow in simple mechanical typewriters (the carriage was heavy and optimized to move in the opposite direction), a more professional approach was to block the carriage by pressing and holding the space bar while printing all characters that needed to be in a shared position. To make this possible,
545-508: A cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing head. Then, in 1875, the well-known "tall model" was patented, which was the first of the writing balls that worked without electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878 and he received the first-prize for his invention at both exhibitions. The first typewriter to be commercially successful
654-421: A firm contract for the next batch. However, Remington was engaged in merger talks, which would eventually result in the creation of Remington Rand and no executives were willing to commit to a firm order. Northeast instead decided to enter the typewriter business for itself, and in 1929 produced the first Electromatic Typewriter. In 1928, Delco , a division of General Motors , purchased Northeast Electric, and
763-635: A key for the non-ASCII character broken bar ¦ , but lacked one for the far more commonly used ASCII character vertical bar | . It also lacked support for various diacritics used in the Welsh alphabet , and the Scots Gaelic alphabet ; and also is missing the letter yogh , ȝ, used very rarely in the Scots language . Therefore, various manufacturers have modified or extended the BS 4822 standard: Support for
872-549: A lack of continuous, reliable electricity. The QWERTY keyboard layout , developed for typewriters in the 1870s, remains the de facto standard for English-language computer keyboards . The origins of this layout still need to be clarified. Similar typewriter keyboards, with layouts optimised for other languages and orthographies, emerged soon afterward, and their layouts have also become standard for computer keyboards in their respective markets. Although many modern typewriters have one of several similar designs, their invention
981-631: A large number of different keyboard layouts used for different languages written in Latin script. They can be divided into three main families according to where the Q , A , Z , M , and Y keys are placed on the keyboard. These are usually named after the first six letters, for example this QWERTY layout and the AZERTY layout. In this section you will also find keyboard layouts that include some additional symbols of other languages. But they are different from layouts that were designed with
1090-446: A larger ↵ Enter key, includes £ and € signs and some rarely used EBCDIC symbols ( ¬ , ¦ ), and uses different positions for the characters @ , " , # , ~ , \ , and | . The BS 4822:1994 standard did not make any use of the AltGr key and lacked support for any non-ASCII characters other than ¬ and £ . It also assigned
1199-527: A manufacturer of sewing machines ) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer . This was the origin of the term typewriter . Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York . It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which, because of the machine's success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. As with most other early typewriters, because
SECTION 10
#17327911314191308-412: A piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement. The study of bigram (letter-pair) frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backer James Densmore , is believed to have influenced
1417-574: A regular basis. French-speaking Canadians respectively have favoured the Canadian French keyboard layout (see French (Canada) , below). The CSA keyboard is the official multilingual keyboard layout of Canada. The United Kingdom and Ireland use a keyboard layout based on the 48-key version defined in the (now withdrawn) British Standard BS 4822. It is very similar to that of the United States, but has an AltGr key and
1526-409: A shortened left ⇧ Shift with ` and ~ in the newly created position, and in the upper left of the keyboard are § and ± instead of the traditional EBCDIC codes. The middle-row key that fits inside the return key has \ and Pipe symbol . The arrangement of the character input keys and the ⇧ Shift keys contained in this layout is specified in
1635-589: A single-stroke key for the Dutch character IJ/ij , which is usually typed by the combination of I and J . In the 1990s, there was a version with the now-obsolete florin sign (Dutch: guldenteken) for IBM PCs. In Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium ), "AZERTY" keyboards are used instead, due to influence from the French-speaking part of Belgium. See also #US-International in
1744-450: A standard US QWERTY keyboard with the sole loss the guillemet / degree sign key. Its significant difference from the US standard is that the right Alt key is reconfigured as an AltGr key that gives easy access to a further range of characters (marked in blue and red on the keyboard image. Blue indicates an alternative character that will display as typed. Red indicates a dead key :
1853-650: A workable design. Some early typing instruments include: By the mid-19th century, the increasing pace of business communication had created a need to mechanize the writing process. Stenographers and telegraphers could take down information at rates up to 130 words per minute, whereas a writer with a pen was limited to a maximum of 30 words per minute (the 1853 speed record). From 1829 to 1870, many printing or typing machines were patented by inventors in Europe and America, but none went into commercial production. In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented
1962-588: Is a 20-floor skyscraper completed in 1911. After 1955, Remington Rand had a long series of mergers and acquisitions that eventually resulted in the formation of Unisys . During World War II , Remington Rand produced M1911 pistols used by the United States Armed Forces. Remington Rand was formed in 1927 by the merger of the Remington Typewriter Company and Rand Kardex Corporation . One of its earliest factories,
2071-623: Is attached to a lever, and hence the offset prevents the levers from running into each other – and has been retained in most electronic keyboards. Some keyboards, such as the Kinesis or TypeMatrix , retain the QWERTY layout but arrange the keys in vertical columns, to reduce unnecessary lateral finger motion. The first computer terminals such as the Teletype were typewriters that could produce and be controlled by various computer codes. These used
2180-658: Is considered the first practical power-operated typewriter in 1914. In 1920, after returning from Army service, he produced a successful model and in 1923 turned it over to the Northeast Electric Company of Rochester for development. Northeast was interested in finding new markets for their electric motors and developed Smathers's design so that it could be marketed to typewriter manufacturers, and from 1925 Remington Electric typewriters were produced powered by Northeast's motors. After some 2,500 electric typewriters had been produced, Northeast asked Remington for
2289-450: Is reached by ⇧ Shift + 3 and the # sign by ⌥ Option + 3 , the opposite to the US layout. The € is also present and is typed with ⌥ Option + 2 . Umlauts are reached by typing ⌥ Option + U and then the vowel, and ß is reached by typing ⌥ Option + S . Newer Apple "British" keyboards use a layout that is relatively unlike either the US or traditional UK keyboard. It uses an elongated return key,
SECTION 20
#17327911314192398-480: Is slightly different from the modern layout, most notably in the absence of the numerals 0 and 1, with each of the remaining numerals shifted one position to the left of their modern counterparts. The letter M is located at the end of the third row to the right of the letter L rather than on the fourth row to the right of the N, the letters X and C are reversed, and most punctuation marks are in different positions or are missing entirely. 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify
2507-536: The 1952 U.S. presidential election . With a sample of 1% of the voting population it predicted Eisenhower's win. In 1949, Remington Rand designed the Remington Rand 409 , a control panel programmed punched card calculator (but not introduced as a product until 1952 as the UNIVAC ;60 then in 1953 as the UNIVAC 120 with double the memory). They also sold punched card systems, beginning with
2616-615: The Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation , founded by the makers of the ENIAC , and in 1952, they acquired Engineering Research Associates (ERA), both of which were pioneers in electronic computing. At that time, Remington Rand was one of the biggest computer companies in the United States. On June 14, 1951, the company's first computer was introduced, the UNIVAC ;I (Universal Automatic Computer). Many branches of
2725-569: The Hansen Writing Ball , which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported as being used in offices on the European continent as late as 1909. Malling-Hansen used a solenoid escapement to return the carriage on some of his models, which makes him a candidate for the title of inventor of the first "electric" typewriter. The Hansen Writing Ball
2834-475: The Ithaca Gun Company . After the war all contracts for the 1911A1 were cancelled. The UNIVAC I (UNIVersal Automatic Computer I) was the second commercial computer made in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly , the inventors of the ENIAC . Design work was begun by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation , and was completed after
2943-526: The US national standard ANSI - INCITS 154-1988 (R1999) (formerly ANSI X3.154-1988 (R1999)), where this layout is called " ASCII keyboard". The complete US keyboard layout, as it is usually found, also contains the usual function keys in accordance with the international standard ISO/IEC 9995 -2, although this is not explicitly required by the US American national standard. US keyboards are used not only in
3052-531: The font . In 1941, IBM announced the Electromatic Model 04 electric typewriter, featuring the revolutionary concept of proportional spacing. By assigning varied rather than uniform spacing to different sized characters, the Type 4 recreated the appearance of a typeset page, an effect that was further enhanced by including the 1937 innovation of carbon-film ribbons that produced clearer, sharper words on
3161-419: The 'US-International' keyboard mapping is used, see below ). On the other hand, the US keyboard layout (or the similar UK layout) is occasionally used by programmers in countries where the keys for [ { are located in less convenient positions on the locally customary layout. On some keyboards the ↵ Enter is bigger than traditionally and takes up also a part of the line above, more or less
3270-659: The 1927 merger, the Remington Rand Corp. continued to manufacture and sell typewriters. During World War II, Remington Rand produced 958,764 licensed copies of the M1911 pistol for the war effort between 1943 and 1945. These were shipped to the Springfield Armory as each contract was fulfilled. Colt Manufacturing Company was unable to fulfill the demand and was assisted by Remington Rand, Singer Corporation , Union Switch & Signal , Remington Arms and
3379-513: The 1928 acquisition of the Powers Accounting Machine Company and ending in the 1950s. Remington Rand also made electric razors . The Remington brand of razor was originally produced by a division of Remington Rand, starting in 1937. Sperry Corporation sold the division in 1979 to Victor Kiam , who became the company spokesman of the new Remington Products Company. His line, "I liked the shaver so much, I bought
Remington Rand - Misplaced Pages Continue
3488-590: The Bar-Let and the Corona No. 3 Typewriter have two separate shift keys, a "CAP" shift (for uppercase) and a "FIG" shift (for numbers and symbols). The Murray code was developed for a teletypewriter with a similar three-row typewriter keyboard. To facilitate typewriter use in business settings, a tab (tabulator) key was added in the late nineteenth century. Before using the key, the operator had to set mechanical "tab stops", pre-designated locations to which
3597-515: The Czech keyboard are accessible with AltGr on the same keys where they are located on an American keyboard . In Czech QWERTZ keyboards the positions of these characters accessed through AltGr differs. Both the Danish and Norwegian keyboards include dedicated keys for the letters Å/å , Æ/æ and Ø/ø , but the placement is a little different, as the Æ and Ø keys are swapped on
3706-788: The Danish layout with added Đ ( Eth ), since the Faroe Islands are a self-governed part of the Kingdom of Denmark . This keyboard layout is commonly used in Canada by French-speaking Canadians . It is the most common layout for laptops and stand-alone keyboards aimed at the Francophone market. Unlike the AZERTY layout used in France and Belgium, it is a QWERTY layout and as such is also relatively commonly used by English speakers in
3815-469: The English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letter A is on the home row, which requires the typist's fingers to leave the home row for most words. A feature much less commented on than the order of the keys is that the keys do not form a rectangular grid, but rather each column slants diagonally. This is because of the mechanical linkages – each key
3924-627: The Netherlands below. The keyboard layout used in Estonia is virtually the same as the Swedish layout . The main difference is that the Å and ¨ keys (to the right of P ) are replaced with Ü and Õ respectively (the latter letter being the most distinguishing feature of the Estonian alphabet ). Some special symbols and dead keys are also moved around. The same as
4033-470: The Norwegian layout. (The Finnish–Swedish keyboard is also largely similar to the Norwegian layout, but the Ø and Æ are replaced with Ö and Ä . On some systems, the Danish keyboard may allow typing Ö/ö and Ä/ä by holding the AltGr or ⌥ Option key while striking Ø and Æ , respectively.) Computers with Windows are commonly sold with ÖØÆ and ÄÆØ printed on
4142-517: The QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, but rather to speed up typing. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands. (On the other hand, in the German keyboard the Z has been moved between the T and the U to help type the frequent digraphs TZ and ZU in that language.) Almost every word in
4251-423: The QWERTY layout, since at the time there were ways to make a typewriter without the "up-stroke" typebar mechanism that had required it to be devised. Not only were there rival machines with "down-stroke" and "front stroke" positions that gave a visible printing point, the problem of typebar clashes could be circumvented completely: examples include Thomas Edison 's 1872 electric print-wheel device which later became
4360-422: The QWERTY layouts and added keys such as escape Esc which had special meanings to computers. Later keyboards added function keys and arrow keys . Since the standardization of personal computers and Windows after the 1980s, most full-sized computer keyboards have followed this standard (see drawing at right). This layout has a separate numeric keypad for data entry at the right, 12 function keys across
4469-551: The Simplex Typewriter Company made index typewriters for 1/40 the price of a Remington typewriter. The index typewriter's niche appeal however soon disappeared as, on the one hand new keyboard typewriters became lighter and more portable, and on the other refurbished second-hand machines began to become available. The last widely available western index machine was the Mignon typewriter produced by AEG which
Remington Rand - Misplaced Pages Continue
4578-646: The U.S. military, including the Air Force and the Army, were among the first to use the computers. When companies started to buy the computers, they would leave the computers at the Remington Rand facility since they were so big and bulky. The UNIVAC I was about the size of a one-car garage, and 46 of them were built and sold for $ 1 million each. Remington Rand was acquired by Sperry Corporation in 1955 to form Sperry Rand (later shortened to Sperry). However,
4687-515: The US and Canada (accustomed to using US standard QWERTY keyboards) for easy access to the accented letters found in some French loanwords . It can be used to type all accented French characters, as well as some from other languages, and serves all English functions as well. It is popular mainly because of its close similarity to the basic US keyboard commonly used by English-speaking Canadians and Americans and historical use of US-made typewriters by French-Canadians. It can also easily 'map' to or from
4796-654: The United States, but also in many other English-speaking places (except UK and Ireland), including India, Australia, Anglophone Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia that uses the same 26-letter alphabets as English. In many other English-speaking jurisdictions (e.g., Canada , Australia , the Caribbean nations, Hong Kong , Malaysia , India , Pakistan , Bangladesh , Singapore , New Zealand , and South Africa ), local spelling sometimes conforms more closely to British English usage, although these nations decided to use
4905-461: The United States—but before the advent of daisywheel and electronic machines—the typewriter market faced strong competition from less expensive typewriters from Asia, including Brother Industries and Silver Seiko Ltd. of Japan. In most of the early typewriters, the typebars struck upward against the paper, pressed against the bottom of the platen , so the typist could not see the text as it
5014-466: The area of the traditional location of the \ key. In these cases the backslash is located in alternative places. It can be situated one line above the default location, on the right of the = key. Sometimes it is placed one line below its traditional situation, on the right of the ' (in these cases the ↵ Enter key is narrower than usual on the line of its default location). It may also be two lines below its default situation on
5123-436: The array of letters, although this contribution has been called into question. Others suggest instead that the letter groupings evolved from telegraph operators' feedback. In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, N to Z, right-to-left. In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to
5232-577: The basis for Teletype machines; Lucien Stephen Crandall 's typewriter (the second to come onto the American market in 1883) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve; the Hammond typewriter of 1885 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of hardened rubber (later light metal); and the Blickensderfer typewriter of 1893 which used a type wheel. The early Blickensderfer's "Ideal" keyboard
5341-417: The basket of typebars, in which case the typewriter is described as "basket shift", or the paper-holding carriage, in which case the typewriter is described as "carriage shift". Either mechanism caused a different portion of the typebar to come in contact with the ribbon/platen. The result is that each typebar could type two different characters, cutting the number of keys and typebars in half (and simplifying
5450-632: The brand "Remington Rand" continued as a subdivision for many years. Sperry merged in 1986 with Burroughs to form Unisys . Remington Rand was a regular co-sponsor of the CBS panel show What's My Line? throughout much of the show's run. Remington Rand had a major worker strike between 1936 and 1937 when the company bought the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1924, and the Noiseless Typewriter Company kept their company name and their workers were getting paid by Remington Rand. Also in
5559-405: The carriage was designed to advance only after releasing the space bar. In the era of mechanical typewriters, combined characters such as é and õ were created by the use of dead keys for the diacritics ( ′, ~ ), which did not move the paper forward. Thus the ′ and e would be printed at the same location on the paper, creating é . There were no particular technological requirements for
SECTION 50
#17327911314195668-429: The carriage would advance when the tab key was pressed. This facilitated the typing of columns of numbers, freeing the operator from the need to manually position the carriage. The first models had one tab stop and one tab key; later ones allowed as many stops as desired, and sometimes had multiple tab keys, each of which moved the carriage a different number of spaces ahead of the decimal point (the tab stop), to facilitate
5777-535: The company had been acquired by Remington Rand. (In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as "the UNIVAC".) The first UNIVAC was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31, 1951, and was dedicated on June 14 that year. The fifth machine (built for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission ) was used by CBS to predict the result of
5886-483: The company" became one of the more memorable advertising slogans of the early 1980s. Remington Products was sold in 2003 to the battery manufacturer Rayovac . Rayovac is now Spectrum Brands . Typewriter A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical machine for typing characters. Typically, a typewriter has an array of keys , and each one causes a different single character to be produced on paper by striking an inked ribbon selectively against
5995-409: The concept that each key was attached to a typebar that had the corresponding letter molded, in reverse, into its striking head. When a key was struck briskly and firmly, the typebar hit a ribbon (usually made of inked fabric ), making a printed mark on the paper wrapped around a cylindrical platen . The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing
6104-406: The design and reduce the manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter I (or lowercase letter L ) for the digit one, and the uppercase O for the zero. The 0 key was added and standardized in its modern position early in
6213-475: The diacritic will be applied to the next vowel typed.) In some variants, the key names are translated to French: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Luxembourg use QWERTZ layouts, where the letter Z is to the right of T . The Icelandic keyboard layout is different from the standard QWERTY keyboard because the Icelandic alphabet has some special letters, most of which it shares with
6322-467: The diacritics needed for Scots Gaelic and Welsh was added to Windows and ChromeOS using a "UK-extended" setting (see below ); Linux and X11 systems have an explicit or reassigned Compose key for this purpose. The British version of the Apple Keyboard does not use the standard UK layout. Instead, some older versions have the US layout (see below) with a few differences: the £ sign
6431-414: The diacritics needed for students of other European languages. Some QWERTY keyboards have alt codes , in which holding Alt while inputting a sequence of numbers on a numeric keypad allows the entry of special characters. For example, Alt + 1 6 3 results in ú (a Latin lowercase letter u with an acute accent). Minor changes to the arrangement are made for other languages. There are
6540-516: The electric typewriter came in 1910, when Charles and Howard Krum filed a patent for the first practical teletypewriter . The Krums' machine, named the Morkrum Printing Telegraph, used a typewheel rather than individual typebars. This machine was used for the first commercial teletypewriter system on Postal Telegraph Company lines between Boston and New York City in 1910. James Fields Smathers of Kansas City invented what
6649-568: The electric typewriter was laid by the Universal Stock Ticker , invented by Thomas Edison in 1870. This device remotely printed letters and numbers on a stream of paper tape from input generated by a specially designed typewriter at the other end of a telegraph line. Some electric typewriters were patented in the 19th century, but the first machine known to be produced in series is the Cahill of 1900. Another electric typewriter
SECTION 60
#17327911314196758-508: The far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. By about 1910, the "manual" or "mechanical" typewriter had reached a somewhat standardized design. There were minor variations from one manufacturer to another, but most typewriters followed
6867-718: The former Herschell–Spillman Motor Company Complex , was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Within the first year, Remington Rand acquired the Dalton Adding Machine Company, the Powers Accounting Machine Company , the Baker-Vawter Company, and the Kalamazoo Loose Leaf Binder Company. From 1936 to 1937 Remington Rand workers went on strike, which resulted in violence and
6976-602: The front side of the platen, became standard. One of the first was the Daugherty Visible, introduced in 1893, which also introduced the four-bank keyboard that became standard, although the Underwood which came out two years later was the first major typewriter with these features. A significant innovation was the shift key , introduced with the Remington No. 2 in 1878. This key physically "shifted" either
7085-418: The goal to be usable for multiple languages (see Multilingual variants ). The following sections give general descriptions of QWERTY keyboard variants along with details specific to certain operating systems. The emphasis is on Microsoft Windows. English-speaking Canadians have traditionally used the same keyboard layout as in the United States, unless they are in a position where they have to write French on
7194-416: The history of the typewriter, but the 1 and exclamation point were left off some typewriter keyboards into the 1970s. In early designs, some characters were produced by printing two symbols with the carriage in the same position. For instance, the exclamation point , which shares a key with the numeral 1 on post-mechanical keyboards, could be reproduced by using a three-stroke combination of an apostrophe,
7303-500: The idea of the Mohawk Valley Formula to try to break up the strike. The Mohawk Valley Formula was used to spread propaganda about the union strikes. The propaganda was carried out by spreading rumors and lambasting the union strikers for hurting their families, by having no income for their households since they were out of work. The propaganda was also often used to call the union strikers communist or anarchist, to make
7412-420: The index type--albeit with a very much larger index and number of type elements. Embossing tape label makers are the most common index typewriters today, and perhaps the most common typewriters of any kind still being manufactured. The platen was mounted on a carriage that moved horizontally to the left, automatically advancing the typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at
7521-411: The internal mechanisms considerably). The obvious use for this was to allow letter keys to type both upper and lower case , but normally the number keys were also duplexed, allowing access to special symbols such as percent, % , and ampersand, & . Before the shift key, typewriters had to have a separate key and typebar for upper-case letters; in essence, the typewriter had two keyboards, one above
7630-457: The keyboard is also the same. | could also be produced by shifting the key on the left side of the keyboard. " ? are produced by shifting the same keys, but ? is mirrored to ؟ . In Arabic (102) it's true also for {} which are again mirrored. Finally, , instead of being the normal output of their keys, are produced by shifting the same keys. The typewriter came to the Czech -speaking area in
7739-413: The keyboard. In the early part of the 20th century, a typewriter was marketed under the name Noiseless and advertised as "silent". It was developed by Wellington Parker Kidder and the first model was marketed by the Noiseless Typewriter Company in 1917. Noiseless portables sold well in the 1930s and 1940s, and noiseless standards continued to be manufactured until the 1960s. In a conventional typewriter
7848-503: The late 19th century, when it was part of Austria-Hungary where German was the dominant language of administration. Therefore, Czech typewriters have the QWERTZ layout . However, with the introduction of imported computers, especially since the 1990s, the QWERTY keyboard layout is frequently used for computer keyboards. The Czech QWERTY layout differs from QWERTZ in that the characters (e.g. @ $ & and others) missing from
7957-494: The left hand than the right hand. Thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand (the three most frequent letters in the English language, E T A , are all typed with the left hand). In addition, more typing strokes are done with the left hand in the QWERTY layout. This is helpful for left- handed people but disadvantageous for right-handed people. Contrary to popular belief,
8066-483: The loss of jobs. From 1942 to 1945, Remington Rand was a contract manufacturer of the M1911A1 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol used by the United States Armed Forces during World War II. Remington Rand produced more M1911A1 pistols than any other wartime manufacturer. Remington Rand ranked 66th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts. In 1950, Remington Rand acquired
8175-470: The modern QWERTY layout. These adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. Apocryphal claims that this change was made to let salesmen impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER QUOTE" from one keyboard row is not formally substantiated. Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the " home row " sequence DFGHJKL. The modern ANSI layout is: The QWERTY layout became popular with
8284-635: The most common diacritics used in the territory where sold. For example, default keyboard mapping for the UK/Ireland keyboard has the diacritics used in Irish but these are rarely printed on the keys; but to type the accents used in Welsh and Scots Gaelic requires the use of a " UK Extended " keyboard mapping and the dead key or compose key method. This arrangement applies to Windows, ChromeOS and Linux ; macOS computers have different techniques. The US International and UK Extended mappings provide many of
8393-414: The number of whose characters (sorts) was constrained by the physical limits of the machine, the number of keys required was reduced by the use of dead keys . Diacritics such as ´ ( acute accent ) would be assigned to a dead key , which did not move the platen forward, permitting another character to be imprinted at the same location; thus a single dead key such as the acute accent could be combined with
8502-410: The opposite direction. By 1900, notable typewriter manufacturers included E. Remington and Sons , IBM , Godrej , Imperial Typewriter Company , Oliver Typewriter Company , Olivetti , Royal Typewriter Company , Smith Corona , Underwood Typewriter Company , Facit , Adler , and Olympia-Werke . After the market had matured under the market dominance of large companies from Britain, Europe and
8611-425: The other elite , for twelve. This differed from the use of these terms in printing, where pica is a linear unit (approximately 1 ⁄ 6 of an inch) used for any measurement, the most common one being the height of a typeface. Some ribbons were inked in black and red stripes, each being half the width and running the entire length of the ribbon. A lever on most machines allowed switching between colors, which
8720-593: The other Nordic countries: Þ/þ, Ð/ð, Æ/æ, and Ö/ö. (Æ/æ also occurs in Norwegian, Danish and Faroese, Ð/ð in Faroese, and Ö/ö in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian. In Norwegian Ö/ö could be substituted for Ø/Ø which is the same sound/letter and is widely understood). The letters Á/á, Ý/ý, Ú/ú, Í/í, and É/é are produced by first pressing the ´ dead key and then the corresponding letter. The Nordic letters Å/å and Ä/ä can be produced by first pressing ° , located below
8829-684: The other. With the shift key, manufacturing costs (and therefore purchase price) were greatly reduced, and typist operation was simplified; both factors contributed greatly to mass adoption of the technology. Certain models further reduced the number of keys and typebars by making each key perform three functions – each typebar could type three different characters. These little three-row machines were portable and could be used by journalists. Such three-row machines were popular with WWI journalists because they were lighter and more compact than four-bank typewriters, while they could type just as fast and use just as many symbols. Such three-row machines, such as
8938-473: The page. QWERTY QWERTY ( / ˈ k w ɜːr t i / KWUR -tee ) is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets . The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top letter row of the keyboard: Q W E R T Y . The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold via E. Remington and Sons from 1874. QWERTY became popular with
9047-569: The paper with a type element . Thereby, the machine produces a legible written document composed of ink and paper. By the end of the 19th century, a person who used such a device was also referred to as a type writer . The first commercial typewriters were introduced in 1874, but did not become common in offices in the United States until after the mid-1880s. The typewriter quickly became an indispensable tool for practically all writing other than personal handwritten correspondence. It
9156-559: The plant was closing. The Middletown plant was run by strikebreakers until the closing of the plant in 1940. Today the building is the home of Stubborn Beauty Brewery. Initially produced by E. Remington and Sons , Remington typewriters were the first to use the QWERTY keyboard layout. Remington had bought the design from its inventor, Christopher Sholes . The Remington No.1 was the first model released. All keys were uppercase. Remington spun off Remington Typewriter Company in 1886, and after
9265-515: The public hate the union strikers. In 1937, the NLRB decided in favor of the workers, and the board ordered Rand to stop interfering with employees' unions and their right to organize. After the strike ended in the summer 1940, the Middletown plant had closed permanently, leaving 1,200 employees without jobs. There were still legal battles being fought for the employees that were in the strike while
9374-424: The ribbon being struck at all. This enabled the keys to hit the paper unobstructed, and was used for cutting stencils for stencil duplicators (aka mimeograph machines). The first typewriter to have the sliding type bars (laid out horizontally like a fan) that enable a typewriter to be "noiseless" was the American made Rapid which appeared briefly on the market in 1890. The Rapid also had the remarkable ability for
9483-455: The right of a narrower than traditionally right ⇧ Shift key. Two keyboard layouts that are based on Qwerty are used in Arabic -speaking countries. Microsoft designate them as Arabic (101) and Arabic (102). In both the number line is identical to the American layout, beside ( ) being mirrored, and not including the key to the left of 1 . The \ key on the right side of
9592-568: The success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878 and remains in ubiquitous use. The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes , a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Kenosha , Wisconsin . In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé . The first model constructed by Sholes used
9701-500: The success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a ⇧ Shift key. One popular but possibly apocryphal explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine. The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent
9810-571: The summer of 1936, James Rand Jr. tried to break up the strike by firing union workers and hiring new workers to take their places. Rand Jr. also threatened to close the plant. The strike got so severe that state and local police helped keep the strikers from throwing stones at workers and vehicles. The strike was started by the Federal Union, which was affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). James Rand Jr. used
9919-406: The top, and a cursor section to the right and center with keys for Insert , Delete , Home , End , Page Up , and Page Down with cursor arrows in an inverted-T shape. QWERTY was designed for English , a language with accents (' diacritics ') appearing only in a few words of foreign origin. The standard US keyboard has no provision for these at all; the need
10028-464: The two keys, allowing same computer hardware to be sold in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, with different operating system settings. Though it is seldom used (most Dutch keyboards use US International layout), the Dutch layout uses QWERTY but has additions for the € sign, the diaresis (¨) , and the braces ({ }) as well as different locations for other symbols. An older version contained
10137-403: The type bar reaches the end of its travel simply by striking the ribbon and paper. The Noiseless, developed by Kidder, has a complex lever mechanism that decelerates the type bar mechanically before pressing it against the ribbon and paper in an attempt to dampen the noise. Although electric typewriters would not achieve widespread popularity until nearly a century later, the basic groundwork for
10246-762: The typebars strike upwards, the typist could not see the characters as they were typed. The index typewriter came into the market in the early 1880s. The index typewriter uses a pointer or stylus to choose a letter from an index. The pointer is mechanically linked so that the letter chosen could then be printed, most often by the activation of a lever. The index typewriter was briefly popular in niche markets. Although they were slower than keyboard type machines, they were mechanically simpler and lighter. They were therefore marketed as being suitable for travellers and, because they could be produced more cheaply than keyboard machines, as budget machines for users who needed to produce small quantities of typed correspondence. For example,
10355-632: The typewriter business was spun off as Electromatic Typewriters, Inc. In 1933, Electromatic was acquired by IBM , which then spent $ 1 million on a redesign of the Electromatic Typewriter, launching the IBM Electric Typewriter Model 01. In 1931, an electric typewriter was introduced by Varityper Corporation. It was called the Varityper , because a narrow cylinder-like wheel could be replaced to change
10464-444: The typing of columns with numbers of different length ($ 1.00, $ 10.00, $ 100.00, etc.) Languages such as French, Spanish, and German required diacritics , special signs attached to or on top of the base letter: for example, a combination of the acute accent ´ plus e produced é ; ~ plus n produced ñ . In metal typesetting , ⟨é⟩ , ⟨ñ⟩ , and others were separate sorts . With mechanical typewriters,
10573-455: The typing position, after each character was typed. The carriage-return lever at the far left was then pressed to the right to return the carriage to its starting position and rotating the platen to advance the paper vertically. A small bell was struck a few characters before the right hand margin was reached to warn the operator to complete the word and then use the carriage-return lever. Typewriters for languages written right-to-left operate in
10682-457: The typist to have entire control of the carriage by manipulation of the keyboard alone. The two keys that achieve this are positioned at the top of the keyboard (seen in the detail image below). They are a "Lift" key that advances the paper, on the platen, to the next line and a "Return" key that causes the carriage to automatically swing back to the right, ready for one to type the new line. So an entire page could be typed without one's hands leaving
10791-401: The upper row as follows: In 1873 Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rights for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer to E. Remington and Sons . The keyboard layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics and was ultimately presented: After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially
10900-435: Was also non-QWERTY, instead having the sequence "DHIATENSOR" in the home row , these 10 letters being capable of composing 70% of the words in the English language. Alternating hands while typing is a desirable trait in a keyboard design. While one hand types a letter, the other hand can prepare to type the next letter, making the process faster and more efficient. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only
11009-443: Was incremental, developed by numerous inventors working independently or in competition with each other over a series of decades. As with the automobile , the telephone, and telegraph , several people contributed insights and inventions that eventually resulted in ever more commercially successful instruments. Historians have estimated that some form of the typewriter was invented 52 times as thinkers and tinkerers tried to come up with
11118-414: Was later met by the so-called " US-International " keyboard mapping , which uses " dead keys " to type accents without having to add more physical keys. (The same principle is used in the standard US keyboard layout for macOS , but in a different way). Most European (including UK) keyboards for PCs have an AltGr key ('Alternative Graphics' key, replaces the right Alt key) that enables easy access to
11227-531: Was patented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes , Frank Haven Hall , Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin , although Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use or even recommend it. The working prototype was made by clock-maker and machinist Matthias Schwalbach. Hall, Glidden and Soule sold their shares in the patent (US 79,265) to Densmore and Sholes, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons (then famous as
11336-500: Was produced by the Blickensderfer Manufacturing Company , of Stamford, Connecticut , in 1902. Like the manual Blickensderfer typewriters, it used a cylindrical typewheel rather than individual typebars. The machine was produced in several variants but apparently not a commercial success, having come to market ahead of its time, before ubiquitous electrification . The next step in the development of
11445-465: Was produced until 1934. Considered one of the very best of the index typewriters, part of the Mignon's popularity was that it featured interchangeable indexes as well as type , fonts and character sets . This is something very few keyboard machines were capable of--and only at considerable added cost. Although they were pushed out of the market in most of the world by keyboard machines, successful Japanese and Chinese typewriters typewriters are of
11554-410: Was produced with only upper-case characters. The Writing Ball was a template for inventor Frank Haven Hall to create a derivative that would produce letter prints cheaper and faster. Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the paper was attached to
11663-402: Was typed. What was typed was not visible until a carriage return caused it to scroll into view. The difficulty with any other arrangement was ensuring the typebars fell back into place reliably when the key was released. This was eventually achieved with various ingenious mechanical designs and so-called "visible typewriters" which used frontstriking, in which the typebars struck forward against
11772-404: Was useful for bookkeeping entries where negative amounts were highlighted in red. The red color was also used on some selected characters in running text, for emphasis. When a typewriter had this facility, it could still be fitted with a solid black ribbon; the lever was then used to switch to fresh ribbon when the first stripe ran out of ink. Some typewriters also had a third position which stopped
11881-513: Was widely used by professional writers, in offices, in business correspondence in private homes, and by students preparing written assignments. Typewriters were a standard fixture in most offices up to the 1980s. After that, they began to be largely supplanted by personal computers running word processing software. Nevertheless, typewriters remain common in some parts of the world. For example, typewriters are still used in many Indian cities and towns, especially in roadside and legal offices, due to
#418581