The Remington Brothers and Sons built the first successful typewriter in 1868. Up to this time, Glidden typewriters only typed capital letters. Also, the only way you could see what you were typing was to lift up the typewriter cover to see the tiny letters. To get the letters on the piece of paper, you pressed a key. A stamper with the letter on it was sitting in ink and it would then fly up and hit the paper, making that letter on the paper. Glidden typewriters also had the letters in ABC order and when people got used to this they started to type fast. This was a problem because when people were typing too fast, two letters often came up at the same time. When this happened, it was called jamming. Glidden fixed this problem by putting letters in a different order. The letters were scattered, causing people to type slower which then avoided jamming. After this change was made, there were fewer jamming problems and this is the way that computer keyboards look today. The Remington No. 2 typewriter was the first typewriter to have a shift key so that you could type both lower case and capital letters.

Others like Thomas Underwood and Henry Drefuss continued to try to improve the typewriter. IBM moved away from individual stampers to a ball with letters and symbols on it, making typing faster and quicker.

Then, Blikcers Defer introduced electric typewriters in 1902. Electric typewriter keys look just like the keys on a computer’s keyboard today except that the groups of keys were moved to the far right. To make changes on a typewriter you would have to first press backspace and then type the letter that you want to erase again in order to white it out. Then you would have to backspace again and type the correct letter over the white out. This was very time consuming and didn’t always leave a neat looking page.

Typewriters have been around 131 years, while computer keyboards have been around for almost 65 years. Computers have an advantage over typewriters because it’s easier to make changes to your typing and you can save things on a disk so you can work on the same thing you were typing later.