Never seen before are these early misfires in the development of the typewriter. The ‘printing telegraphs’ shown as images 1 and 3 are by Wm. Tunnicliffe & Sons of Birmingham, the others by Schuchert & Lieberenz of Stuttgart.

Their varied input methods not only predate the emergence of ‘qwerty’-style layouts that would emerge as a standard in the 1870s, but failed to anticipate that the precipitous drop in price of sheet-fed paper would fortify its position as the enduring medium of correspondence: Tunnicliffe’s Model P of 1869 (fig. 1), and S&L’s Kleiner-Rotator of 1871 (fig. 2) imprint upon a continuous paper or cloth ribbon, while the Patent Great Northern (fig. 3) and the 552 ‘Liebchen’ (fig. 4) use a folding codex of linen. The bright colors, which mark these as domestic possessions rather than commercial equipment, were all achieved using a then-new technique for depositing cobalt oxide during the firing of the enamel, whose toxicity would lead to the almost total disappearance of these fascinating contraptions. My thanks to Valentýnka Nesmysl and Matthias Dumheter for opening the archives at the Nordrhein-Westfalen Industriemuseum for a visit.

Published December 3, 2022. Copyright © 2022 Jonathan Hoefler.