You probably think there’s a simple name and a single date attached to this. Most history books love a clean narrative. They want to tell you that one guy sat in a dusty workshop, had a "Eureka!" moment, and suddenly, the world was clacking away on QWERTY keys.
Honestly? It didn’t happen like that at all.
When you ask who was the first inventor of the typewriter, you aren't looking for one person. You’re looking for a century of failures, weird prototypes, and forgotten patents. We’re talking about a timeline that stretches from 1714 all the way to the 1860s. It involves Italian aristocrats trying to help blind friends, British engineers, and eventually, a printer from Wisconsin who finally made the thing stick.
The "first" depends entirely on how you define "typewriter." Is it a machine that works? A machine that was patented? Or the first one people actually bought?
The 1714 Ghost: Henry Mill’s "Artificial Machine"
The paper trail starts in London. Queen Anne granted a patent to an engineer named Henry Mill in 1714. His goal was to create a machine for "transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, whereby all writings whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so royal or exact as not to be distinguished from print."
That sounds like a typewriter. It smells like a typewriter. But here is the kicker: nobody knows what it looked like.
There are no surviving drawings. No descriptions of the inner workings. Mill never actually built a production model, or if he did, it vanished into the fog of the 18th century. He had the idea, but in the world of invention, ideas are cheap. Execution is everything. Because Mill didn’t leave us a physical machine, he usually gets a footnote rather than the crown.
The Romantic Origins: Pellegrino Turri
Fast forward to 1808. We move from the cold offices of London to the rolling hills of Italy.
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Pellegrino Turri is a name you should know. He wasn't trying to disrupt the publishing industry or speed up office memos. He was trying to help his friend (and some say, his lover), the Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano. She was blind and frustrated that she couldn't write letters without a scribe. Turri built her a machine.
While the machine itself is gone, we actually have the letters she wrote on it. They still exist today in Italy. They are the first physical proof of typed text. Turri is also credited with inventing carbon paper to provide the "ink" for his machine. Talk about a double-threat.
But again, this was a one-off. It wasn't a product. It was a gift.
The "Typographer" of 1829
William Austin Burt, an American inventor, entered the fray next. He patented something he called the "Typographer." It looked less like a modern keyboard and more like a wooden box with a swinging lever. You had to turn a dial to select the letter and then press down.
It was slow. Really slow.
In fact, it was slower than writing by hand with a quill. Burt’s machine perished in the Great Patent Office Fire of 1836, though a replica was later built from his original drawings. It proved that Americans were getting close, but the user interface was a nightmare.
Why the 1860s Changed Everything
If you’re looking for the person who actually gave us the device we recognize today, you have to talk about Christopher Latham Sholes.
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Sholes was a Wisconsin printer and politician. He wasn't alone, though. He worked with Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. In 1867, they saw a piece in Scientific American describing a "Pterotype" (another failed invention) and thought, "We can do better than that."
Their first model looked like a sewing machine. It had a foot pedal for carriage returns.
The QWERTY Legacy
Ever wonder why your keyboard starts with Q-W-E-R-T-Y? You can thank Sholes. On his early machines, the typebars—the metal arms with the letters on the end—would frequently clash and jam if someone typed too fast. To solve this, he looked at common letter pairings in the English language (like 'th' or 'st') and physically separated them on the keyboard.
The goal wasn't to make you type faster. It was to slow you down just enough to keep the machine from breaking.
By 1873, Sholes realized he was a great inventor but a terrible businessman. He sold his rights to E. Remington & Sons (the gun makers). They had the precision machinery needed to mass-produce the device. This became the Remington No. 1.
The Competing Claims: A Global Scramble
It is unfair to say Sholes was the "first" without acknowledging the guys who got there at the same time but lacked the marketing.
- Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1865): In Denmark, this pastor invented the "Writing Ball." It looked like a pincushion covered in keys. It was incredibly fast and ergonomic. Friedrich Nietzsche actually owned one. But it was expensive and looked "weird," so it never took off globally.
- Giuseppe Ravizza (1855): He called his machine the "Cembalo scrivano" or "scribbling piano." It used keys just like a piano. He is a major contender for the title of who was the first inventor of the typewriter because his design featured many of the mechanical linkages Sholes would later use.
Why Did It Take So Long?
Think about the technical hurdles. You need a way to move the paper (the carriage), a way to strike the paper with uniform force, a way to ink the letters, and a way to make sure the letters don't overlap.
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Early inventors struggled with the "escapement"—the mechanism that moves the carriage forward exactly one space every time you hit a key. Without a precise escapement, you just have a pile of ink in one spot.
Then there was the social hurdle. People liked handwriting. They thought typed letters were "impersonal" or looked too much like printed circulars. It took Mark Twain—who was an early adopter and the first author to submit a typed manuscript (Life on the Mississippi)—to make it cool.
Sorting Fact from Fiction
You’ll often see names like Xavier Progin (1833) or Charles Thurber (1843) popped into lists. They all had valid patents. Progin was actually the first to use "type bars" that hit a common center point.
The reality of history is that invention is an iterative process. Sholes stands at the top of the mountain not because he was the first to have the idea, but because he was the first to combine all the previous "failed" ideas into a package that actually worked for a secretary in a 19th-century office.
If we are being strictly technical:
- Henry Mill (1714) had the first patent.
- Pellegrino Turri (1808) built the first documented working machine.
- Christopher Latham Sholes (1867) invented the first commercially successful typewriter.
Identifying Your Own Historical Research
If you’re digging into this for a project or just out of pure curiosity, don’t just take a single Wikipedia entry at face value.
Check the patent records. The U.S. Patent Office and the British Library hold the literal blueprints of these machines. Look for the "Writing Ball" society if you want to see how different the tech could have been if the Danish design had won.
The typewriter wasn't just a tool; it was the precursor to the computer. Every time you tap a key on your laptop or thumb a message on your smartphone, you're using a layout designed in the 1860s to prevent metal arms from hitting each other. That’s a wild bit of "ghost tech" that still lives in our pockets today.
Your Next Steps in Exploring Typewriter History
- Visit a Museum: If you are in the U.S., the Milwaukee Public Museum has a massive collection because that's where Sholes did his work.
- Check Serial Numbers: If you find an old machine in an attic, don't clean it with harsh chemicals. Look for the serial number on the frame to identify the year; anything pre-1900 is a significant historical find.
- Try a Ribbon: You can still buy universal typewriter ribbons online for about $10. Most machines from the 1920s onwards are "tanks" and will still work with a bit of fresh ink.
- Read the Manuscripts: Search digital archives for Mark Twain’s letters regarding his Remington. His frustration with the early tech is hilarious and very relatable to anyone who has ever dealt with a printer error.