Tuesday, March 24, 2020
Remington or Hemington?
Earlier I animated the first Sholes and Glidden 'proof of concept', which didn't really prove much.
The Sholes team sold their patent to Remington, who turned it into a practical machine.
Remington has always made guns, but in the 1870s the company had expanded into all sorts of industrial and household products using the same skills as guns. Precision casting, precision machining, precision assembly. Sewing machines were the profit center, and the sewing department was assigned to produce the Type Writer.
Unsurprisingly, it looked just like a sewing machine.
Complete with cabinet and treadle and side-wheel. It was immediately familiar to women, not to men.
The case was decorated with floral designs, which probably helped to turn the job of typewriting into a female specialty.
The treadle activated the carriage return:
Smart idea. The hand carriage return lever on manual typewriters was always clumsy. You had to take your hands out of position and then relocate them. For some reason the treadle didn't catch on, and the hand lever quickly became standard.
The hammer action continued from the original Sholes idea, with a slight improvement. All hammers were still arranged radially around a circle, and each hammer swung up into the center hole to hit the bottom of the paper.
The only improvement was a larger circle with longer hammers, for more angular momentum. Again I've skipped the internal mechanism. In this version the internal wires actually worked, unlike the original where they couldn't have worked.
Later, of course, the circle was narrowed into a crescent and laid sideways so that the hammers struck the front of the paper vertically.
Complete with cabinet and treadle and side-wheel. It was immediately familiar to women, not to men.
The case was decorated with floral designs, which probably helped to turn the job of typewriting into a female specialty.
The treadle activated the carriage return:
Smart idea. The hand carriage return lever on manual typewriters was always clumsy. You had to take your hands out of position and then relocate them. For some reason the treadle didn't catch on, and the hand lever quickly became standard.
The hammer action continued from the original Sholes idea, with a slight improvement. All hammers were still arranged radially around a circle, and each hammer swung up into the center hole to hit the bottom of the paper.
The only improvement was a larger circle with longer hammers, for more angular momentum. Again I've skipped the internal mechanism. In this version the internal wires actually worked, unlike the original where they couldn't have worked.
Later, of course, the circle was narrowed into a crescent and laid sideways so that the hammers struck the front of the paper vertically.Labels: Entertainment, skill-estate
¶ 12:02 AM
