Well, I said I was going to write about disability history once a month, aiming for the first Saturday of the month, and then absolutely failed to do so. For like, two solid months in a row. But I’m tired and working hard, and no one is paying me for this (though if you enjoy my work, tips are always appreciated!), so I guess it’s all okay. We’re back on track, at least for now.
Last time, we talked about a fun, spicy item that is used by damn near every person with a vagina, and many without one! Today we are going to look at another tool that we have all come to know, appreciate, and perhaps even take for granted. That is, the typewriter. Yes, it seems a bit old fashioned, as I write (and in your case, read) this on a laptop computer. And will surely read it over on my cell phone before I hit the “publish” button. But the typewriter is the grandaddy of all our amazing computing technology, and people have been playing around with this since at least the early 1800’s. And that’s what I want to talk to you about today.
There’s no irrefutable record of who absolutely invented the first typewriter, but most records indicate that the honor goes to an Italian man named Pellegrino Turri. He is credited with creating a “mechanical typing machine,” the first typewriter, somewhere between 1801-1808. As far as we know, Turri was not himself disabled, but he invented this typing machine so that he and his blind lover, Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, who was unable to write with pen and ink, cold communicate by post. While there are no images that remain of Turri’s wonderful accessibility tool, there are several letters preserved in the state records of Reggio Emilia in Italy written by Countess da Fivizzano to Turri documenting her journey of learning to use and master the device designed for her.
But Turri didn’t stop with the typewriter. Oh no! See, there weren’t ink ribbons back in the early 1800’s. So Turri had to figure out how to get the letters from the keys onto the paper. So, he casually invented carbon paper to work as the ink! No big deal.
The typewriter was a gamechanger, obviously. It became commercially available in 1865 and was patented in 1870 by Rasmus Malling-Hansen. The journey has been a long, winding, clickity-clacking one, but eventually typewriters have brought us to where we are today, with 1955 being a major jump with the Whirlwind computer, which was the first computer that allowed a user to input data into a computer via keyboard commands.
Today, in the good (?) year 2022, computers with their keyboards are not only devices that nearly every human relies on, but are still vital accessibility tools. Companies like Microsoft and Apple continue to develop more accessibility features for computers, as well they should. I personally appreciate the ability to change my fonts, increase the size of my text, utilize a screen reader, turn on subtitles, and more! But it’s even more wonderful to me to know that these innovations in accessibility are being added to a technology that was built on an accessibility tool in the first place. How beautiful is that?