Quick and efficient written communication became essential in the mid-nineteenth century as the pace of business activity increased. Many attempts to mechanize writing are recorded in the patents of that period, although few went into production. Pinpointing one single inventor is, therefore, difficult but the "chirographer" or printing machine, patented in 1843 by Charles Thurber (1803-1886), was the first to be produced and sold commercially.
A wide variety of writing machines were designed in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, including Pellegrino Turri's 1808 machine to enable blind people to write, William Austin Burt's "typographer" of 1829, and the Hansen writing ball of 1864, which was probably the first typewriter that made it possible to write faster than by hand. The first commercially successful typewriter was developed by newspaper editor Christopher Scholes and others in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1867. The patent was later taken up by Remingtons, a well-established sewing-machine company, which launched the Scholes and Glidden typewriter in 1873. This enabled operators to see the page as they worked. The keyboard incorporated the inventors' QWERTY layout for the keys, designed to prevent the letters from jamming, which became the universally accepted standard.
Electric typewriters were developed in the early twentieth century, but proved too expensive until International Business Machines (IBM) launched their first electric typewriter in 1935. Manufacturers progressively added further features, including proportional spacing, memory, and "automatic" correction until the typewriter became known as a "word processor," whose functions were taken over by the desktop computer during the 1980s.
