The Victorian Era

What Did the Typewriter Do for Victorian Offices

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The typewriter transformed the Victorian office, doing for written communication what the spinning jenny had done for the textile industry: it brought the productivity of a single worker to a level that had previously required several. The first commercial typewriter was the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, manufactured by the arms maker E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, from 1873, and the machine reached Britain within a few years. By 1900, the typewriter was an established feature of the British commercial office, the post office, the newspaper office, and the law office, and the figure of the female typewriter had begun to appear on the streets of London and Manchester. The typewriter belongs to the wider history of Victorian Inventions and to the larger transformation of Victorian Science, Invention, and Technology.

The First Commercial Typewriters

The idea of a machine that could produce printed letters by striking them sequentially against an inked ribbon had been worked on by many inventors in the early nineteenth century. The first patent for a typewriter-like machine was taken out in 1714 by Henry Mill in England, although no machine was ever produced. Throughout the nineteenth century, inventors in Europe and America produced a succession of designs: the typographer of William Austin Burt of 1829, the writing machine of Charles Thurber of 1843, the mechanical typographer of John Jones of 1856, and the “mechanical typographer” of Peter Mitterhofer of 1864, but none achieved commercial success. The breakthrough came in 1867, when Christopher Latham Sholes, the editor of a newspaper in Milwaukee, and his collaborators Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule produced a working machine. Sholes’s first model wrote only capital letters, the shift key was added in 1878, and the QWERTY keyboard layout, designed to prevent the mechanical typebars from jamming when the operator typed too quickly, became the standard.

The Remington company, then best known for its sewing machines and its firearms, agreed to manufacture the Sholes and Glidden typewriter in 1873. The first Remington model looked like a small sewing machine mounted on a stand, with a paper carriage at the back and a circular array of keys at the front. It was sold for $125, and the first customers were newspaper offices, law offices, and the post office. The typewriter reached Britain within a few years of its American launch, and the first British-made machines were produced by the Liverpool firm of Caligraph in the 1880s. By 1900 the leading British makers were the Oliver Typewriter Company, which had a factory in Croydon, the Yost Typewriter Company, and the Bar-Lock Typewriter Company, and the machine had become a fixture of the office. The rise of the typewriter is part of the wider history of the Victorian Engineering Marvels that transformed the British economy in the late nineteenth century.

The Typewriter and the Office

Before the typewriter, the production of written documents in the office, the counting house, the law office, the newspaper office, and the post office had been the work of clerks, copying clerks, and letterpress printers. A senior clerk might dictate letters to a junior clerk, who would write them in copperplate script in an inkwell. A copy of the letter would be made in a letterpress copybook, a thick book of tissue pages that was dampened and pressed in a screw press to take a faint copy of the original. The work was slow, the clerks were many, and the system was prone to error.

The typewriter changed all of this. A single typist could produce letters, reports, contracts, and forms at a speed that had previously required several clerks, and the typed page was legible, durable, and easy to file. The typewriter was a clerical labour-saving device of the first order, and it was rapidly adopted by the larger Victorian offices. The Bank of England, the great merchant houses of the City, the British Empire in the Victorian Era’s colonial offices, and the great Victorian newspapers, The Times, the Manchester Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph, all took up the typewriter in the 1880s and 1890s. The typewriter was, in essence, the office equivalent of the railway, and the transformation of the British office between 1880 and 1900 was as dramatic as the transformation of the British landscape had been in the 1840s.

The Typewriter and the Female Worker

The typewriter created a new occupation, the female typist, and it opened the office to women in ways that had previously been impossible. The first wave of typists in Britain, in the 1880s and 1890s, were young women from the How did the middle class grow in the Victorian era?, often the daughters of the new lower-middle class, who saw office work as a respectable alternative to domestic service or to the shop floor. The first British typing schools opened in London in the 1880s, the London School of Economics, founded in 1895, taught shorthand and typing, and the Pitman’s and other commercial schools offered a year’s training to the aspiring typist. By 1901, the British census recorded over 166,000 women employed as clerks, of whom a substantial proportion were typists, and the female typist had become a recognised figure in the London street. The touch-typing method, developed by the American court reporter Frank McGurrin in the 1880s, was the foundation of the modern typing school.

The typewriter was a mixed blessing for the women who used it. It offered a respectable occupation and a path into the new white-collar economy, but it also created a new low-paid, low-status job, the office drudge, and the women who did it were often paid less than the men they replaced. The typewriter did not, by itself, bring equality in the workplace, and the story of the female typist is a part of the longer history of women in the Victorian Workforce. The typewriter was, however, an important new tool in the working life of the Victorian Society, Class, and Daily Life, and the figure of the typist, plying her trade in the office, was one of the new images of late Victorian commercial life.

The Typewriter and Print Culture

The typewriter also transformed print culture. The Victorian newspaper, the Victorian law office, and the Victorian publishing house all relied on the typewriter for the production of text, and the typed manuscript became the standard form in which the Victorian Novel was submitted to the publisher. The Victorian author, working at home or in a writers’ club, would dictate to a shorthand typist, who would then type the manuscript for submission. The How did serial publication shape Victorian fiction? of the period relied on the typed page for the copy sent to the printer, and the typed page is the immediate ancestor of the modern manuscript.

The typewriter also transformed the post office. The What was the impact of penny postage? had created a flood of letters, and the typewriter was the natural complement of the new postal system, allowing the office to produce letters at the rate that the post office could carry them. The typewriter and the Who invented the telephone? were the two great late Victorian office technologies, and they transformed the speed at which the British could communicate. The typewriter was one of the great Victorian office technologies. It transformed the speed, accuracy, and legibility of written communication, it created a new occupation for the Victorian middle-class woman, and it changed the way the Victorian office looked, sounded, and felt. The typewriter belongs to the wider history of Victorian Inventions, and it is one of the foundations of the modern commercial office.